12th July 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Seasoned private tutors have been in and out of people’s lives and homes for years and have often have very different experiences with each family they work with. Some tutors who work for a long time for a particular student become part of the family, sometimes counselling on issues that extend beyond their academic remit. Tutors can become as invested as parents in a student’s happiness and success, and become family friends after the tuition has stopped. Other times, tutors are brought in on a short term basis to help with exam preparation, do their job and get out with thanks and a handshake. This is more common, and tutors are used to passing through a student’s life, helping them with a specific problem and moving on.
The problem comes when tutors find themselves working for a family who treat them poorly, and do not respect what they do or the fact that they have lives beyond the world of tutoring. This kind of attitude usually manifests itself with a blasé approach to the tutor’s schedule; perhaps parents will cancel a lesson at the last minute without making apologies or offering compensation. Tutors are often teaching in order to supplement their income, and it can be very demoralising to be told on the day of a planned lesson that they cannot expect the income for this week without an apology or explanation. No tutor should expect parents to give them special treatment, but they do ask to be treated with the same level of respect and professional courtesy that parents would extend to their colleagues.
In an extreme case, I once heard of a family who required their tutor to enter the house through the back door, and another wouldn’t allow the tutor to use the bathroom. This is not an acceptable way to treat any employee. Given the opportunity, tutors can lay the groundwork for completely changing the way a student approaches a subject, and instil a genuine love of learning. In order to facilitate that, parents should treat tutors with respect.