If you’re a parent who’s noticed your child struggling at school, your natural reaction is going to be to see how you can help. Oftentimes, especially in the lower grades, you can personally sit down with your child and help guide them through the material they find difficult. However, as your child advances through school and begins taking more challenging courses (especially APs), you may have found that your ability to sit down with your child and offer the one-on-one help they need has diminished.
Fortunately, you can still help your child succeed - just in a different way. You can hire a professional tutor who specializes in the areas your child is struggling in! Here in bustling Orange County, there’s almost an endless number of private high school tutoring companies to choose from. Areas with substantial numbers of young families like Aliso Viejo, Irvine, Mission Viejo, Lake Forest, Laguna Niguel, and Trabuco Hills are especially concentrated with private high school tutoring services.
With so many to choose from, how can you tell which one is best equipped to guide your student toward success in high school? Asking the right questions is essential to making this important decision. Check out the 3 questions you should ask any private high school tutoring company below.
1. How many tutors do you employ?
Many companies that offer private high school tutoring, especially ones that offer primarily virtual services, employ upwards of 50 tutors. Some companies even have hundreds of tutors on their roster!
This is one of those unique situations where less is actually more. When a private high school tutoring company employs more than 15 tutors, quality control becomes more difficult. It’s also likely that each of these tutors actually works with students only a couple of hours per week. This means that helping students is not most of their tutors’ first priority, and they may spend most of their time working at other, non-educational jobs. This doesn’t make them bad people, but wouldn’t you rather hire a private tutor who’s made education their life?
Here at Thinque Prep, our team is made up of only 6 tutors, each with unique specialties. These educators either tutor students full-time or tutor part-time alongside teaching high school and college-level classes at local campuses. At Thinque Prep, each of our tutors devotes significant time to helping students succeed, and their passion shows through in the quality of their work.
2. What degrees/credentials do your tutors have?
Believe it or not, many private high school tutoring companies who purport to have the expertise your child needs employ tutors who haven’t even finished college yet! This isn’t to say that tutors still in high school or college can’t excel in certain academic areas, but I wouldn’t yet consider them “experts.” You’ll want to know what level of education the company’s tutors have completed and what areas they majored in. We would advise you to only seriously consider companies who employ tutors who have completed college.
Each and every one of Thinque Prep’s tutors are college graduates; three of them have graduate degrees, and one has her teaching credential. When we say we have experts, we really mean it!
3. How many years of experience do your tutors have?
Finally, we recommend that you verify with any private high school tutoring company that none of their tutors are new to working with students. Believe it or not, even the most intelligent and educated person doesn’t always make a good tutor! Tutoring is as much about being friendly, kind, and communicative as it is about having academic knowledge. The best tutors are those who have experience working successfully with many different kinds of students over the course of years, not months!
The tutors here at Thinque Prep each have at least 5 years of experience tutoring students. Some of our experts have even been doing it for well over a decade. As I explained above, our tutors also spend the majority of their time educating, so if they’re not tutoring, they’re teaching college and/or high school classes as the primary instructor.
Asking any private high school tutoring company you’re considering these 3 questions is so important to ensuring your child gets the professional help they need. If you’re interested in in-person tutoring services, the students Thinque Prep works with in their Lake Forest office tend to be from local areas like Aliso Viejo, Irvine, Mission Viejo, Laguna Niguel, Laguna Beach, San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, and Trabuco Hills. However, if you’re located farther away (or even out of state), we’re happy to work with your child virtually via Zoom as well - whatever’s most convenient for you! Give us a call, email, or text today to learn more about what sets Thinque Prep apart from other private high school tutoring companies.