20th January 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
One of the peculiar things about private tuition is the way that people feel about the distance between tutor and student. It would be fair to say that when a tutor doesn’t have to travel very far, the relationship is more likely to run smoothly, and at Blue Tutors it’s one of the matching criteria we use. However, different people react very differently to that distance.
When a tutor first joins us they often underestimate the travel time to some students, and accept the offer to teach in places to which they ideally wouldn’t like to travel. Once new tutors realise this though, they start to be more thoughtful about the areas they will travel to. Many tutors choose to only tutor a student who is very convenient for them; within 1 km. These tutors generally won’t accept students very often, and only want to tutor a handful of students at any given time.
There are some tutors who are far more willing to travel quite far. This can depend on the duration of lessons that the student wants; the tutor will tend to be happier to travel far if the lessons are longer. What sometimes happens though is that a tutor will find a number of students in an area, and although the area may be quite far from where the tutor lives, they are happy to teach them all if it’s possible to do so in one visit.
You would think that if a tutor is happy to travel to a student then the student doesn’t mind where the tutor is coming from. Provided that the tutor is punctual and willing to teach as frequently as required there would appear to be no reason for a student to want another tutor. In truth though, we often receive feedback from students to say that they would like us to find another tutor who lives more locally. We think that the reason is because students are worried that a less local tutor will be tempted to break the commitment. This rarely happens, but obviously we still try to find the most local tutor we can amongst other considerations.