Once while I was tutoring a student, he received a call from his friend. He picked up the phone and said, “I’m busy right now; I can’t talk.” I could hear his friend on the other end of the line, asking what he was doing. “I’m just busy, is all,” he’d said, before cutting the call.

“Why didn’t you just say you were in tutoring?” I’d asked. He shrugged.

“I didn’t want him to think I was dumb.”

For the record, the aforementioned kid is extremely smart. It’s not that he necessarily ‘needs’ tutoring in the sense that people would think, but it’s a decision his parents made for him to help with his learning.

There was a long time when I also thought in the same way — that tutoring was inherently inextricable with ‘struggle’ in school. Needing help meant you were behind, and being ‘smart’ meant being able to figure things out on your own.

But after my personal experience with both providing and receiving tutoring, that logic has completely shattered.

For one, we don’t tend to apply that logic to anything other than academics — no one looks at an athlete working one-on-one with a coach and thinks that they are bad at their sport. If anything, we assume the opposite — that they care enough about their performance that they put in the extra effort to improve and refine their skill.

But what’s the difference between a student looking for extra help and an athlete looking for extra training?

The answer lies in the way that classrooms are structured. In an ideal world, every student would receive consistent one-on-one instruction, tailored explanations, and time to work through ideas at their own pace. But unfortunately, that’s simply not possible. Each class has 30-35 students, and each teacher has to deal with five to six classes total. When there’s one teacher and close to 200 kids, it’s unrealistic to demand that they give daily attention to every individual student.

Even the best teachers who try to reach every single student are working within constraints. They have a curriculum to get through, limited time, and a wide range of learning styles and levels to balance all at once. Inevitably, this leads to instruction having to be generalized. It can’t be stalled for the comfort of one particular student. 

And for the many students who feel they are in an in-between space — not failing, per se,  but not succeeding to the level they want to, it may be difficult to get the attention they want from their teacher, who may have to focus individual efforts on the students who are struggling a little bit more.

Research has consistently shown that individualized attention makes a measurable difference. A well-known study by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that the average student tutored one-on-one performed two standard deviations better than those educated in a typical classroom setting — a phenomenon known as the ‘2 sigma problem.’ A 2024 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that students who received structured, one-on-one tutoring were more than twice as likely to reach target reading levels compared to students who didn’t receive tutoring. A 2025 study published in “Education Sciences” found that students who received small-group tutoring showed greater growth than non-tutored peers in multiple subjects, including math and reading.

This isn’t to say classroom learning is ineffective — but it is limited in what it can provide to each individual student, which is where outside resources like tutoring come into play.

When a student who is doing “fine” in a class seeks out tutoring, it’s not a reflection of their intelligence level — it’s a way of gaining a further understanding of a subject and performing at a higher capacity. Often, as students, we conflate learning with grades — but having an ‘A’ doesn’t mean that a student has a thorough understanding of a concept, and the same can be true in reverse; a student who has a poor grade may still truly understand the material. Tutoring is an accessible means of bridging that gap in either direction.

Questions are always encouraged in a classroom setting, but there’s only so much time to get those answered, because instruction has to continue. When tutoring, asking questions is the entire point — it’s not about learning the general concepts, but getting down to the specifics in a way that’s difficult to tap into during a two-hour block period.

There’s also something to be said about the stark difference between tutoring and classroom environments. In school, there’s pressure to keep up, to not fall behind, to not ask ‘too many’ questions so that class can move along. But tutoring is a space where confusion is the expectation and the norm, where you can spend as much time as needed rehashing the same concept until you reach a level of understanding you’re comfortable with.

Being in that environment doesn’t at all make someone ‘less smart.’ If anything, it allows them to engage more honestly with topics they don’t know, which is a much more useful skill than pretending to understand something they don’t.

There’s nothing remotely unintelligent about recognizing when you want or need support and actively seeking it out. There’s nothing embarrassing about wanting to improve. More often than not, it’s the refusal to seek help, thanks to unnecessary concern over image, that tends to hold people back.

The student I was tutoring that day didn’t want his friend to think he was dumb. But the reality is, he was doing something pretty admirable — investing time and effort into his own growth, which is a choice many people choose not to make.

Tutoring isn’t a Hail Mary or a signal that something is wrong. Rather, it’s a respectable decision to take learning more seriously.