2nd December 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Last week we received a complaint from a student, and it’s such an unusual thing to happen that we don’t really have a standard procedure to follow when it happens. I didn’t spend the week working on creating a procedure, though, because it’s the sort of thing which is always going to be unique, so it’s best that we deal with each incident personally. The one thing I think we always have to do is assume that the tutor has done the right thing before it’s proved otherwise; parents tend to exaggerate when they think the tutor has done something wrong, and it seems only right to trust the tutor initially, especially when the complaint is about the tutor’s teaching (rather than tardiness or politeness etc.)
In this case the student had done poorly on a piece of homework with which the tutor had helped so I don’t think it was ridiculous for the parent to question how well that homework had been taught. To resolve the issue, I asked to look at the homework, and it was actually a big relief. The student clearly understood the concept very well (simultaneous equations), but had made some really silly addition and subtraction errors (it was interesting that the homework had to be done without a calculator, but I’m not going to complain again about our increasing reliance on calculators, it seems like I do that enough). It transpired that the tutor missed one of the errors on the homework, and while it would obviously have been better if the error had been corrected, my assessment was that the concept was very well understood by the student, so the tutor’s job had been done almost immaculately. What’s funny is that, when tutors just lecture at students we rarely get complaints, yet that’s a far more heinous crime that overlooking a calculation error; something I’ve done hundreds of times!