Professional Detachment vs. Enlightened Intimacy

Tutoring can be a challenging enterprise, but it should never be an unpleasant one, either for the tutor or her student. When I first started working with younger clients (I worked more with college and grad students when I was starting out as a tutor in Austin), I tried to maintain professional distance, both in terms of how I acted during the actual sessions and also in terms of how much it mattered to me whether the tutoring was helping and generally enriching a student's academic life. I am reluctant to call myself a failure in either sense, but I will happily acknowledge that these early goals almost invariably fell away as I realized the value of cultivating a productive rapport with each student, and that once this rapport developed, it was impossible to maintain a truly objective stance about a student's achievements and feelings about school and everything else.  I have been lucky; I have been hired to work with some truly spectacular human beings (less of a rarity among high-schoolers than I once thought), and I have usually ended up learning as much from them (about what I am doing right or wrong; how to communicate with students and parents without alienating either; and about how to offer up my enthusiasm for a subject without clubbing a student over the head with it) as they have--hopefully--learned from me. I always warn parents during that first phone call (before a preliminary session) that I will probably end up falling in love with their kid, so if they are looking for someone who will be able to keep that professional distance, they may be disappointed in my approach.  But high school students (and middle schoolers, typically) respond more dramatically to teachers and tutors who seem to care about them--not just care about them as human beings, but care about what they think, about what they find interesting/compelling, about whether they are anxious about a particular assignment or bored to tears. The less my students see me as an immoveable robot, who will follow a lesson plan, without regard for what they say they can do on a given day, or need in a given week, the more I get to see what they are really capable of accomplishing.  And I often find that such students will scale astonishing heights when they believe I actually care if they reach their goals, and when they are assured I will applaud them along the way.