15th July 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
We had the weirdest email conversation with a tutor last week. What had happened is that he had been put in touch with two students, not updated us on the situation, and when we got through to the students, one said that the tutor had said he was too busy, and the other student just hadn’t been contacted. That wasn’t weird in itself; we’ve learnt to deal with the rare occasions when a tutor is a little thoughtless, but the tutor was adamant that he shouldn’t have to pay the resulting charges, despite admitting everything. To top it off, we later noticed that he had continued teaching a student after telling us they had stopped, so that he didn’t have to pay commission, and yet, when confronted with this, he remained self-righteous. I realise that money’s tight for a lot of people, and it can massively influence someone’s actions, but there comes a point when I think you just have to hold your hands up and apologise. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the way that some people justify their actions, particularly in an email when you have time to control your emotions and be a little rational.
I did a lot of work on our new qualifications system last week, and I think we’ll be able to put it into practice before the influx of new tuition requests in September. The interesting thing with subjects is that I’m trying to categorise everything like a venn diagram, and that creates a problem when we have ‘missing’ subjects. For example with interdisciplinary subjects like renaissance studies, we can’t say that’s contained within history, or contained within art, but we can say that renaissance studies contains renaissance art and renaissance history, and that those two subjects are contained in art and history respectively. The trouble is that if we were missing the subject ‘renaissance history’ then it would appear as though renaissance studies was only related to art and not at all to history. For this reason, I think it might take a while for the system to be as perfect as I would like, but I think it’s already the best system I’ve ever seen for matching tutors and students.