Okay, what's it like being a tutor?
Fun, mostly. But it ruins the evenings.
Do you have students you hate and how do you cope with that?
I can't think of any, to be honest. Students only annoy me when they don't do their work. Obviously some irritate me slightly, or bore me slightly, but often I find it gets better once they know me more or as they get older.
Do you have students that make it all worthwhile?
Again, all of them do so simply by learning what I teach. I notice that after a few weeks, they can do things they could not do before. It's all quite fun. Obviously a few students I get to know better than others. For example, at the moment, one group of three lads are always having a some kind of fight just before I arrive or after I leave, either with plastic crossbows or pellet guns. Some are more lively in lesson than others. (One girl tries to write on my hand when I make fun of her in class or on the messageboard.) But mostly the lesson is about learning, so I guess it's finding ways of teaching subjects that I enjoy. Subjects that took me a while to teach several years ago I can now teach in ten minutes. And I have written a computer program that automatically creates worksheets with maths questions, so that makes things more easy.
How much do you let the flow go? How much is pre-planned?
Having done this for more than ten years now, I have worksheets and past papers ready, so mostly I can simply pick up a lesson plan and make a lesson out of it. If necessary, I can ad-lib a lesson on the spot, but I very rarely need to do that.
Do you find it rewarding (I don't mean financially)?
I enjoy being my own boss. I enjoy learning how to teach. I enjoy the creative side of it. I also enjoy being able to make some lessons great fun as well as educational. I very much enjoy telling parents that their kid is at least a year ahead and might as well stop tuition for a while.
What's been your best experience?
I have taken several sets of students to see Les Miserables, and taken others bowling. I also organised a horror film night and even had a four-day roleplaying game with four of them.
Your worst?
This one is easy. When I first started tutoring, I taught students one-to-one at their home. One girl was twelve when she started with me, and eventually went on to get an A* in English and English Literature four years later. Her nickname was "Go get your mum.", because she kept saying things in lesson that led to me saying that to her. In one lesson, her mother asked me to help her with a poem she was writing for school based on a newspaper extract of her choice. The mother left me alone with the girl and the poem, which I read. "What's this poem based on?" I asked, puzzled. She pulled out the newspaper extract from her folder, which was about a man who had taken a fourteen-year-old girl home in his car and touched her leg. She seemed quite unfazed by the subject. "Go get your mum." In another lesson, the girl told me that the man in the film "The hand that rocks the cradle" should have got revenge on the evil woman by raping her. I told her that revenge was wrong, and even justice could not condone raping a woman. (Obviously I stupidly assumed she knew what rape was since she was using the word.) After a few more odd comments from her that "raping" would "teach her a lesson", I twigged and asked her to explain what rape was. She said it was "grabbing a woman by the front of the dress, ripping it slightly, and then throwing her to the ground". Obviously she had watched too many Indian movies. I was worried that I had said something that her mother would not want her to know. "Go get your mum." There were other occasions as well. When she was fifteen, as part of a group of four girls, analysing the language in an advert about Triton showers, she not only picked out the alliteration in the three-line title "TIME TO / TURN ON / THE TRITON", but also "noticed" that there was a play on words in the phrase "TURN ON". The other girls were in hysterics, but I didn't know whether to laugh, move on, or ask her to explain further. I told her to be careful not to overanalyse, which was a mistake because she then started to pick out phrases and the "pleasurable tone" of the main text to support her point. The fact that the only pictures were of the shower system and a man covered in grease from fixing a car did not stop her.
I also once had a thirteen-year-old girl let me into her home on the first lesson without her mum there and ask me to follow her to what turned out to be her downstairs bedroom (where her study table and books were): I stopped at the door to her bedroom and asked where her mother was, and promptly left when she said she was alone in the house. I had a word with her mother about that.
This was one of the reasons I started teaching in small groups.
And recently, I had an eleven-year-old posting jokes about orgasms and gay midgets on my messageboard. (Ask Tarquin.)
Only three times have I made a student cry. I felt awful each time.
