“Steve, I have a tutoring emergency.”
My client’s daughter, Emily, was “on strike”, refusing to do her summer reading, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.
Emily told her mom, “I don’t understand the book. I hate it. I won’t read it.”
When I met with Emily, the first thing I did was to tell her the whole story, from beginning to end.
Then I walked through one chapter with her, line by line, encouraging her to take her time and look up the words she did not know. And then read the chapter again for the flow.
That was all the help she needed.
Knowing the whole story made working through each chapter much less burdensome; she was completing a picture she already had in her mind.
If you want to play your best game, it's always a good idea to GET THE WHOLE STORY UP FRONT.
So often, I’ve found that talking about or hearing about the big picture can make a big difference in how quickly and easily someone can grasp a subject.
In history, students often get lost in the details, but if they start with a story, they have a frame to hang the details on.
Same thing in biology. I’ve seen students struggling to memorize lists of facts when, if they get an explanation of the ‘story’ of the biological process—a clear, simply worded depiction from beginning to end—they grasp the details and facts much more confidently.
Get the whole story of the game up front, and fit the details into it later.
