5th October 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Sometimes we match a tutor and a student together and it doesn’t work out. Students or their parents often have an idea of the tutor they want before they meet, and the person who walks through the door isn’t want they imagined. It’s not that the tutor we match them with is objectively worse, it’s simply that people have their perfect tutor in their mind, and so there’s an initial disappointment. We hope that everyone will actually give a new tutor a chance, because after a few lessons the problem almost always goes away, but sometimes it doesn’t.
Something we’ve learnt from experience is that parents often want the tutor to be a role model, someone they can imagine their son or daughter growing up to be like. Obviously this makes a lot of sense. Our tutors are often only a few years ahead of the students they tutor, and the tutor’s experience can reassure and encourage the student that they can get to Oxford or Cambridge, or just do better in their studies than they feel is possible. The other side of that, however, is that sometimes the tutor isn’t really the role model the parent imagined, but they are a really good tutor.
Parents and students place value on certain characteristics, and they are different for everyone. Experience and age almost polarises our clients; is a 20 year track record better than a young enthusiastic tutor who can relate to their students? There’s no right answer, and ultimately it’s up to students and their parents to decide whether someone who is completely different from who they imagined can still help. We just hope that people do consider the possibility that their expectations might be irrelevant, and that they give everyone an equal chance.