17th June 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I’m conducting some tutor assessments in Cambridge today and tomorrow, and then doing the same thing in Oxford on Thursday and Friday. The goal is to provide an assessment for anyone who wants one before they leave university for the summer, and that usually means 8-9 hours of assessments a day. It seems like quite a long day, and the prospective tutors often gasp when I tell them, thinking that it must be tiring. In fact it’s not tiring at all when a tutor teaches really well; I’m almost always interested, and when someone teaches well I’m engaged and the time really flies by. It’s when someone teaches badly that the long day catches up with me. When a tutor just lectures for ten minutes I find it very difficult to concentrate on what he/she is saying. It’s actually a real endorsement of our teaching ideas because if I find it difficult to focus on a lecture then there’s no way a teenager could.
The other thing that often surprises new tutors is that I’m doing the assessments. Of course, I don’t have to, and we have a lot of very good assessors who I trust, but I do enjoy them. I think there’s a perception that, because of the number of tutors and students we have, we have about 50 full time employees working in our office. Of course we don’t. It’s not necessary because of the way our system has been built. Also, I think I’m way too OCD to manage so many people. With just a few employees it’s easy to make sure that everything’s being done properly, but as the number increases so do the small inefficiencies, and it’s a skill I really struggle with: to accept that some things won’t be done in the way I want, and there’s nothing I can do about it.