Reply #12: This reminds me of an incident that happened to me..

[girl gone mad]

back when I was tutoring high school math students. I was in college at the time. One of my HS students showed me a problem that she had gotten wrong on a test. It was a statistics problem that appeared simple enough at first glance, but I quickly realized that I couldn't solve it. I took it to a friend of mine in the math department, who was a genius on scholarship from Russia, working on a graduate degree in Combinatorics. It turned out that he couldn't come up with a solution, either. The problem got passed around the math department until one of the big wig professors spent a weekend working on it. I got it back with a 4 page solution and a note that said the problem was much too hard for a high school student and the answer the teacher had given was obviously completely wrong.

I gave the solution to my student, but I think she was too afraid to confront her teacher about it. What's the point of trying to teach kids higher level math when you're only confusing them? So many of my students were very bright but lacked any confidence because they didn't feel they understood the material at a fundamental level. They were only able to solve specific problems if they had worked through a similar problem in class. I often felt like I had to retrain them from the ground up, which is not the role of a tutor.