Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Tutoring Rant

I recently got my weekly tutoring assessment. I have a mentor tutor that goes through all my sessions to make sure I'm doing my job and not teaching the kids bad things like taking their parents' cars out for a spin. In my assessment, my mentor tutor told me I was doing a very good job, but there was one thing I really needed to work on for the next assessment. She told me some my sessions were taking too long. There are two types of students that I tutor online: ones whose parents buy them minutes to use on the website and there are students who access free tutoring through libraries and schools. For the students who buy minutes, I'm told to take as long as I need to help them with the questions and with as many questions as they have. For students using library and school subscriptions, I'm instructed to spend around 20 minutes and no more than an hour. I really don't understand this because they also instruct me to bring all sessions to an "educationally sound" close. It's such BS that they have this official statement that they want to properly tutor all its customers and then turn around and tell me I'm spending too much time tutoring students that access the website for free. Isn't that ridiculous? Am I taking crazy pills?

Anyway, I did some tutoring today for my family friend. It's such a relief to tutor in person. I enjoy tutoring online, but it's so much more stressful and there are apparently time limits for some students. I was thinking of sending out some emails or something to get the word out there that I want some more tutoring business, live tutoring. If I get enough business that way, I can go ahead and stop tutoring online. The whole time limit for certain students policy really bothers me.

No comments: