How to Tutor

by Samuel L. Blumenfeld

Provides parents and teachers with a complete instructional program to teach reading with phonics, cursive handwriting, and arithmetic, with step-by-step lesson plans. A program that works at all ages.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction

298 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

Reviews

[Matt McCullough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book, some of the tactics may seem a bit old but very applicable.

[A Jolly · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good overall manual of what you can use in a homeschool setting if you don't know where to start.

[Sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

How to Tutor is an instruction manual for parents (or teachers, apparently) on how to teach young children basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. He breaks down each section in a lengthy list of lessons with examples, encouraging the tutor/teacher to be patient and spend enough time on each before continuing on.

I thought Blumenfield offered some useful strategies / suggestions. Certainly if a child were struggling in school, I could see how this would be helpful to a parent trying to rectify the situation.

However, this book is out of date. Originally published in the 1970s, the 1986 edition isn't any more up to date. It was kind of funny how he talked about the role of house wives, and his rant against print (as opposed to cursive) handwriting was interesting. Overall I'd say I did learn something, but I wouldn't recommend this book to its intended audience or to anyone who thought How to Tutor would do that. There must be a more contemporary / relevant guidebook out there.

[Betty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book my mother used to teach me how to read. Well actually its the 1973 edition but I couldn't find that on here. I was reading it to see if when my child is old enough if it would be useful, and I believe it would be. Hes fairly old fashioned. Not too surprising. He was old when he wrote it in the 70's.

Some of what he has to say needs to be taken with a grain of salt, such as the statement he blithely makes about how children won't balk at inconsistency in the language, the exact problem I had with learning to read.

But much of the basic premise works. And even now I found that going through his exercises and reading his explanations for spelling and how words are constructed really improved my understanding of the language. Its funny how after reading copiously for years my basics sort of fell out of my head.

Over all I believe that a person using this book would have to be careful to tailor the lessons to the child they were teaching, but you would not require any other books to teach a child.

[Michael Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the title is misleading. There is some preliminary material on tutoring in general, but the bulk of this book deals with how to teach the basics: elementary level reading, cursive writing, and arithmetic. The 1973 edition I read was not outdated at all in what it advocated teaching. The absence of any mention of computers, for instance, is irrelevant and references to a "blackboard" ought to be readily translatable to whatever the current tool may be. If anything, this book is prescient in identifying the disturbing trends in mass education that have only gotten worse over the decades. This book could certainly be used by anyone teaching those three vital subjects today, including the growing population of homeschoolers. Blumenfeld is clear in his approach and the choices are well thought-out and not capricious.

[Hope · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not what I had hoped it would be. Wanted info on tutoring, not a program for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic.