9th May 2014 9:00
By Blue Tutors
As exam season approaches, much has been written about how students should manage their time revising for exams. The Easter holidays have ended, and students are now in the final weeks of preparation for GCSEs, A’ Levels and university exams. Whilst this is a busy time of year for them, it is also busy for tutors, who must juggle the demands of increasingly anxious students. Seasoned tutors are usually excellent at managing their time – they have to be, especially when they have to manage several different students at once. Tutors who also have ‘day jobs’ may find the challenge of managing student demands more challenging, having to fit students’ needs around the demands of their regular work. So how do they manage it?
The first thing to say is that with all the time tutors spend making sure that their students are organised and have reasonable timetables, they must do the same thing for themselves. It is not unusual for tutors to take on too much work and get over extended, especially at this time of year when students require more sessions than usual. It is difficult for private tutors to judge the amount of work that they should take on because it is often hard to tell which students will require their services regularly and which will only be on an ad hoc basis. Tutors must balance ensuring that they have enough work to keep them supported financially, with ensuring that they are available to students when they promised they would be. It is not acceptable to let students down during exam season because tutors are suddenly over extended, and, unfortunately, tutors can compel no such scruple on the part of the student other than relinquishing them as a client.
Tutors need to keep a clear, flexible, timetable which accommodates regular students and leaves room for extra commitments. The temptation may be to fill free days with extra students, but tutors need to consider whether their system will fall apart if they have a one-off commitment, or if a student can’t make one day and needs to reschedule. Of course, no one should expect that tutors should out their lives on hold and be at the beck and call of their students. But they also need to realise that sometimes life gets in the way, and make a timetable which makes reasonable efforts to accommodate the unexpected.