17th November 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Something we often experience is incredibly enthusiastic new tutors. Obviously that’s great, and we love it when a tutor is looking forward to beginning their lessons, and sees every available student as someone they could potentially help towards good grades. However, sometimes the enthusiasm swamps good reason, and this can become a problem.
We’ve had a situation before where a tutor has been accepted by us, and immediately said that they can teach almost every available student in London, and not just within zones 1 and 2, but students close to the M25. Generally this isn’t malicious; the tutor just sees students, thinks that they could help, and jumps to accept the offer to begin tutoring them.
The first problem comes because some tutors simply accept too many students, and doesn’t have time to tutor all of them. Lots of our tutors are studying graduate degrees, and they think ‘I’ll do university work in the morning, and tutor for 3-4 hours in the evening before seeing my friends. This sounds ok in theory but if someone’s doing this for 5, 6 or even 7 days a week, it quickly becomes too much and often ends with the tutor reluctantly telling us and their students that they can’t continue.
Another issue is that new tutors don’t always think about travelling time to get to their students. We have tutors who have accepted students miles apart, before properly planning how to travel between them. Again, the result tends to be that tutors quickly realise that a £30 an hour student ends up being more like £10 an hour when factoring in travel, and they quickly, regrettably, have to discontinue the lessons.
Experienced tutors, often because they don’t want to repeat past mistakes, don’t stretch themselves as much. One quickly becomes aware that a great skill for a tutor to have is to be an expert at logistics. Some tutors will restrict their student search to those within walking distance, or begin tutoring a group of students who all live close to each other, so the day consists of a half hour tube journey, followed by walking 5-10 minutes between 3-4 student’s homes.
It’s difficult for us, because we want to treat our tutors as the adults they are, and avoid telling someone that they can’t do what they have committed to. What we try to do is give as much as advice as possible, and if someone is a relatively new tutor then we just check that they’re sure about travelling to a student. Ultimately though, we’ll always find new, enthusiastic, and slightly over-ambitious tutors. Something we probably wouldn’t change if even we could.