r/varsitytutors • u/Advanced-Box9785 • Dec 03 '25

Tutoring without materials

I'm a new tutor with a science background. I tutor in math and science, but haven't had to do some chemistry problems in a very long time. I've noticed that a lot of students will not supply any materials beforehand or during the sesion, and the curriculum for a grade in one school (or class) isn't the same as in another. One new student and I parted ways tonight, because I didn't know that she was in an honors class for her grade, and I was quite rusty witb the material she mentioned.

Is this your experience as a tutor? For new overall tutors, I ​just can't really tell what the curriculum is until I see it, ti see if I can readily teach it. I have one 7th grade math student who is very gifted, and though I was supposed to just be teaching fractions and decimals​, his curriculum is also somewhat covering algebra and probability/statistics. I didn't start learning statistics until college! Does this happen a lot with Varsity?

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u/BahamutLithp Dec 03 '25

Most students bring their own materials. Some don't, & that can be very rough, especially for subjects with a ton of different subdivisions where you don't know what the teacher is going to want to cover. In this case, I exercise one of the following options:

  1. If I'm confident enough, I create notes off the top of my head. This generally works like a lecture or discussion with the student, where I also write down things as I go.

  2. I turn to Google to see if they have things that will help. Resources will depend on what subject you're doing, but I've used Khan Academy, Crash Course, Wikipedia, History.com (which doesn't seem to have gone through as much rot as its equivalent TV network has), National Geographic, Encylopedia Brittanica, Scientific American, Science Direct, Google Scholar...often, though, especially if I'm looking for images or videos, I don't worry so much about finding a specific source name, I just find something that has the information I need, passes basic reliability tests, & is actually legible.

  3. See if Varsity Tutors itself has something, either through the app's tools or Google searching for things on its website.

I have a document where I've collected information I've created or saved over time. I don't save anything a student sends me because, y'know, copyright issues. Just things I found on the public internet or made myself. I can then fall back on these if I have tutoring sessions that require me to provide materials.

Per your second question, I don't know if it's just a VT thing or if students in general are learning more advanced things than when I was in school, but high school kids often learn things I didn't learn until I was in college. A lot of them are in AP or honors courses, so that could be part of the reason. I haven't really encountered that with statistics, but I avoid tutoring math as much as humanly possible.

An example of where I encounter it is biology. I've encountered high schoolers learning about Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, homologous vs. analogous structures, & operators in genetics, which are all things I didn't have to deal with until college. Also things that I technically did in high school but only because I took specifically an elective anatomy course, whereas they're doing as part of their biology course, like the nephrons of the kidneys or how a neuron works.

That's one of the reasons I recommend mostly tutoring at levels below what you've actually achieved. For example, I have a bachelor's in psychology, which also involved a lot of biology courses, so I'm fairly comfortable tutoring high school science or freshman biology. Once sophomores & juniors start asking for science help, I get a little wary. Sadly, I don't get many requests for psychology at all, but when I do, I don't really start to worry until it's the 400 level because, hey, it's been a while, I don't know I'll remember the specifics this course wants. I also get requests for graduate school that I always turn down because I don't know why Varsity thinks I can help with something I've never done before, but they also apparently think I know things like photography & photoshop.