TUITION

While there are many opportunities for group discussion within Learningguild, the main emphasis of our teaching is, as traditionally at Oxford and Cambridge, on one-with-one guidance aimed at the development of each studentˈs own powers. Students are very different in their needs, levels, present abilities, aims, interests and personal situations, and class teaching often fails to give sufficient help to a particular student because it can take too little account of those factors.

A person who desires tuition joins Learningguild by paying the annual subscription of $11 ($16.50 for a couple). We find out what the personˈs particular needs are, and recommend appropriate books, booklets and CDs or cassettes, and lines and methods of work. For many students at the elementary or intermediate stage of learning English as a further language, it is very helpful to practise pronunciation and reading aloud with the booklet-and-CD (or cassette) Sounds, Words, Sentences, to become thoroughly acquainted with Learningguild Notes on English I, and to use the method we call SSC (Sentences to Study and Change), taking as models many sentences from such a source as the Oxford Basic English Dictionary. Students at the upper intermediate or advanced levels, and native speakers of English who want to master grammatical and other principles of good writing, should begin to work through the book Making up Sentences, doing its exercises, using its CDs or cassettes, and frequently revising (see Publications). Those students are also advised to become familiar with recent exam papers for the Learningguild Certificate in Reasoning and Expression (see Certificate), and to plan to take this repeatable six-monthly exam.

Individual tuition is normally arranged on a monthly basis, with an emphasis on written work, usually including SSC, sent or given weekly to the tutor. That written work can often be closely related to what a student would want to say in conversation or a speaking test. It should reach the tutor at least a day before what is normally a weekly tutorial, at which it is returned with annotation (detailed written comments), including requests for correction at specified points. The student gives careful attention to the comments, asks any questions about them, and revises them. Tutorials will normally include practice in speaking English. Wherever possible, appointments are made for half an hour, or an hour, on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday afternoons or Saturday mornings. Some appointments will be made at other times or for more than one person.

The tutor and the student will agree on the scope of work for the month, which will be set out in writing, and the student will normally pay in advance for that month. Dr Howesˈs normal fee for private students will be $100 (for a couple, $150). If a student cannot afford to pay at that rate, or at the rate set by another tutor, he or she may arrange to pay a lesser amount and to undertake to give some assistance, specified in writing, to the tutor and/or to Learningguild, for example in collating and stapling printed pages or distributing slips or leaflets.

As an important supplement to their individual tuition, and with a view to making friends and receiving wider support, our students are warmly invited to come to the Saturday program of lunch followed by a talk and discussion.  See Meetings. 

Most of our students are seeking to increase their ability to write and/or speak English well and to compose good essays, reports or thesis-chapters. (Some students wish for help in other areas: see below.) Teaching is a very different thing from editing, and our aim is normally to teach, and so to help students to develop skills and sensitivities of their own. Our students include both native speakers of English (especially those who learned little about English grammar and sentence-construction at school, as has been common in the last forty years) and many people whose first language is not English.

Dr Howes is happy to assist students in a wide range of humanities subjects. He was a Victorian Rhodes Scholar, and has been a schoolteacher in England, Lecturer in Classics at the University of Queensland, Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Melbourne, and Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department at Cape Town, where he lectured on Millˈs Liberty and wrote against apartheid and in favour of an open society. After he and Margaret and their four children returned to Melbourne, he taught in colleges of the University of Melbourne, and for fifteen years maintained a cycle of three courses in philosophy for the Council of Adult Education, producing a book on logic related to a course of the same name, Wonder and Reason. He then began the Learningguild philosophy seminar, for which 2011 is the seventeenth year. He helped Sir Desmond Lee to revise the Penguin edition of Platoˈs Republic, and continues to study and write about Greek philosophy, in which he earned his doctorate. As well as in the writing and speaking of English, and in many branches of philosophy, he will gladly tutor people in Latin, classical Greek or New Testament Greek.