20th April 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
An important part of the last week has been training two new assessors. One is going to assess in Scotland, which is a really important part of what I’m trying to do at the moment; set up assessors in other part of the country, so that we can find lots of tutors and students there. The training went well, and hopefully within a month we’ll start to build the tutor database in and around Edinburgh. I’m training people in Nottingham and Birmingham in a couple of weeks too, and over the summer we’ll see if we can recruit the number of tutors I’m hoping for.
There is a website update coming soon as well. It’s not a massive thing, and most tutors and students won’t notice it, but part of the last week has been testing that, and making sure that there aren’t any bugs.
I suppose that this blog shouldn’t always be about what I’ve been doing, but also my chance to comment on what’s been going on in the world (aren’t most blogs just people on their soapbox?). Anyway, something which is on my mind at the moment is the Louis Theroux documentary which was aired on Sunday night. I think it was called ‘America’s Medicated Kids’. We often have tuition requests from parents who tell us that their child has a behavioural disorder, so I was particularly interested in the program. Now, I know that to an extent the idea was to mundanely state something which appeared to be quite bizarre (“isn’t six a little young to be an anti-depressants?”), but it was quite shocking to see parents and psychologists using drugs to control children, long before they were a last resort. Especially when the psychologists admitted that their diagnoses were not an exact science. It makes me wonder how many of the children we tutor who are said to have ADHD, or any behavioural condition, actually have a problem at all. In my experience, anyone under the age of 10 who can sit still, and concentrate for longer than 10 minutes, is in the minority.