Connection. I talk to students not just about the subject at hand but also their background in it, hobbies, and goals, so I can understand both the origins of their current troubles and how to connect the subject with their goals in life. This also allows me to help them make connections between subjects.

Introduce myself and ask them about their current situation (current school, major interests, what they like to do, etc.), goals (where they want to go to college or work), and their favorite academic subjects (why they think they do well on or poorly on certain subjects, and so on). This is all to help me plan how to make a lesson more meaningful and motivate learning the subject at hand. This is in addition, of course, to working on whatever problems the student brings to the session.

First, I try to work out what deeper background information they might be missing and try to get them to work on that; for example, if it is actually fraction skills that are messing up algebra work, I will try to get them to back up and work on that skill. Second, I try to teach strategies for figuring stuff out, for example, how to search the Internet for definitions and procedures.

Explain why the subject matters and why we are working the way we are, so they don't just feel like they are being put upon, listen to what their complaints are and answer them, and use lots of emotional encouragement.

Listen to them explain what they know about it, so I can understand what their difficulties really are, figure out which prior skills are missing that might help, and teach them; and divide up the concept into easier, smaller pieces so we can do it a step at a time.

The trick is to find out where it is coming from. If you ask people whether they know a word or a phrase, they will usually tell you. I tutored a kid who I found out didn't know what a pod was. She was stumbling on "peas in a pod" and the explanation wasn't working, so I went after the words. People live inside too much. It's often background dependent like that. You have to pay attention to what students are doing, when they seem to get off, and ask questions often in order to find out if they really get what they are reading.

The most important thing is to ask open-ended questions about what is really going on. For example, don't ask, "do you know how to add fractions?" Ask "what don't you like about math?" What they go after will not always be the root cause, but it will be part of the trunk. Also, pay particular attention to what they are saying at the beginning. They might stumble on vocabulary, bring up a related problem, etc. All of these are clues. On top of all of that, be friendly and listen to what they have to say in general.

Well, I'm tutoring it, so I must be relatively good at it. That means I must have studied it awhile, and to do that, I had to have liked it. Passing on why I like it is really important. "This is how you do this cool thing" or "I really liked this because. . ." is much more likely to help than "this will help you in your job" or "you need to pass the test." Also, be honest. Some parts of school really are just push-ups. But kids know why you sometimes need to do push-ups. You can explain how it is connected. The big secret is that society as a whole decided that they needed to take certain classes because (this is the trick) the kids would them have more freedom as adults. It's all about freedom. They might not want to take math now, but they might be willing to accept that the reason someone is making them do it is so that they have more freedom later, even if they don't believe that it will affect them personally.