The kid you’re tutoring notices when you check your phone. Full attention is the lesson under the lesson.

Being half present is obvious from the outside, and children read it fastest. A kid can tell the difference between someone explaining fractions and someone explaining fractions while partly elsewhere, and what they take from the second is that they are not worth much. Everything you meant to teach sits underneath that. The same holds with friends, customers and family.

For your next session, put the phone out of reach before you begin rather than resisting it mid-sentence. Thirty attentive minutes beat an hour of divided ones. Let the person see you choose it.