27th December 2019 9:00
By Blue Tutors
We hate Christmas. That’s not really true, there are no Grinches at Blue Tutors, but Christmas really affects tuition with fewer than half the usual lessons taking place in the last half of December.
The break in lessons for some students makes sense. It’s no longer true that we all live very close to all of our family and Christmas is the perfect time to visit relatives who don’t live so close. Obviously since it takes both a student and a tutor to have a lesson, the chance of both of them being available over the Christmas period is much lower than normal.
A real issue here is that January is a very important exam period, whether it’s for assessed A Level exams or mock GCSEs, and students can’t treat their school Christmas holiday as a chance to stop studying. Hopefully they can still relax more than if they were at school, but spending two weeks doing no work at all can leave students behind when they get back to school in January.
It’s not reasonable to ask every tutor, student and their families to rearrange their lives around tuition, but there are a couple of good solution to the problem. The first is simply for the tutor to stay in touch with the student and essentially manage the student’s study/revision during that period. Having someone checking in like this ensures that students continue to do a little bit each day and avoid distractions.
Another option is online tuition. Lots of people are sceptical of how well tutoring online can work, but when it’s the only option it’s definitely worth a try. Not everyone will find it helpful, and we still think it’s not as effective as tutoring face to face, but it can work very well indeed and is worth trialling, particularly when tutor and student are hundreds of miles apart.