24th August 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The recently released GCSE results mean lots of our students are currently celebrating their success and looking forward to beginning A Levels in September. A small amount of that euphoria is shared by tutors, though, because you can’t spend so much time helping someone and getting to know them without caring about the end result.
Many tutors begin tutoring because they need to earn some money, and they would much rather do that via a job which is genuinely fun and interesting. We often hear at interview that the reason for wanting to be a tutor is because of that satisfaction of helping someone to understand a topic and seeing that ‘eureka moment’ when it finally clicks. However, these new tutors tend to underestimate how invested they will become in their students’ results.
Of course the short term feeling is great. Education is important, and having a small part to play in helping someone to understand a subject is a genuinely noble thing to do; from a tutor’s point of view, it feels great. You can’t spend so much time one-on-one with person, though, and not begin to care about them. The tutoring relationship is professional yet also quite personal, and while tutors never want to detract from a student’s achievement, we all feel a personal success when we hear that our students got the grades they wanted.
Some jobs are a real slog, but there is success at the end which gets the worker through the tough parts. Some jobs are very enjoyable day to day, but there is no tangible long term goal and the worker can feel a certain futility as time goes on. Tutoring is brilliant for job satisfaction; every tutor loves the lessons; helping young enthusiastic intelligent students is so much fun, but there’s also that long term exam goal at the end of year which can really make a difference to other peoples’ lives.