19th July 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Had a very productive week this week. I’ve really made a start on categorising all of our tutors’ and students’ qualifications into something I’m calling ‘base disciplines. I have about 6,400 to get through, but am already down to 5,600. I’m guessing within 2 weeks I’ll have finished it, and then comes the exciting part – deciding how all the base disciplines are related, and writing an algorithm to quickly find the relatedness between any two disciplines. That last part probably sounds a bit geeky, but it’s properly mathematical, something I rarely get to do nowadays.
The only downside this week was an applicant who complained after their assessment. Now, I treat every complaint very seriously; it’s not good for us if someone is disappointed or upset after their assessment with us. However, I quickly discovered that the applicant disagreed with our teaching guidelines, and not what happened during the assessment. The first obvious question was: why did they apply to be a Blue Tutor if they disagreed with our teaching guidelines? But that’s nothing. The applicant actually claimed that setting lesson goals, and praising students when they’ve done well is wrong. While I’m usually keen to discuss teaching ideas, I was really in shock. I think the person was simply trying to pick holes in our assessment to make them self feel better about the outcome (I actually doubt whether they read our teaching guidelines beforehand). Disappointing, because I know they will continue tutoring students by simply lecturing, and I did my best to ask them to think a little about what we suggest, but I think it was to no avail.