16th January 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
If you’re a new tutor then you’re probably incredibly excited about taking on your first few students, and rightly so! Even the most cynical of tutors, who tell themselves that they’re only doing it to make a bit of money before starting a ‘proper’ job will find it hard to hold back a grin when they first find their student improving. However, this exuberance shouldn’t spill over into the more mundane task of building a client base.
Really a tutor’s first role is to be an organiser. Before any lessons take place, the tutor has to make some decisions about when and where to tutor, and the big mistake is to be too ambitious about how sparsely a tutor can spread him/herself and still be able to cope. This usually happens because the tutor is so keen that whenever an offer of a new student comes in, the tutor jumps at the opportunity without thinking things through.
One problem can be when a tutor takes on a student from whom they live or work quite far. This can actually work very well if the tutor is able to find a number of students in the same area who are all happy to have lessons on the same day, but if not, having one student far away can begin to feel quite onerous; while a journey to an unknown area might feel exciting on a balmy September evening, a two hour round trip on a dark wet January night is less appealing.
Even if a tutor doesn’t make the mistake above, there’s a second problem encountered by many new tutors, and that’s not realising how the demands on their time will increase as exams draw near. Close to exams the majority of students request more or longer lessons, or both, and many tutors just try to squeeze more tutoring hours into an already overflowing week. We once had a situation where a tutor had a nervous breakdown because combined with the extra demands from her students, she was also studying for exams herself.
It’s become clear that the best tutoring relationships are when a tutor is teaching only 1-2 students. It just leads to a more dedicated and happy tutor, and consequently the student is happier too, and hopefully learns more.