Avoiding Common Issues

Putting Off Bad News

Very often parents have expectations on their children that we’re not able to help them meet.  Whenever you sense ‘trouble’, that is, whenever you sense that whatever expectations parents have are not going to be met (i.e. the student is going to fail the math class, the student is not going to get the score they want in SHSAT, etc.), make sure to communicate and set reasonable expectations with parents as quickly as possible.

• If students are not making any progress, let the parents know.
• If students are not showing up to your sessions, let the parents know.
• If students are not working at their sessions, or making it hard for you to teach them, let the parents know.
• If students are not doing their homework, let the parents know.

Basically, if there are any kind of issues at all, let the parents know as quickly as possible. Many tutors feel reluctant to communicate about their student’s short-comings, misdeeds, or their bad behavior, but, ultimately, the parents will be extremely unhappy at their tutor when they have invested 100s and 1000s of $$ into their child’s education and things don’t work out and you didn’t tell them that it was going to work out. Some parents don’t want to hear this feedback, but it is still better to tell them sooner and avoid trouble for yourself and us later.

Working with Difficult Clients

Although most of our clients are reasonable, every now and then, you end up working with students or families that you just don’t mesh well with. This is a normal part of tutoring and we will not ask you to suffer with families that make you miserable.

If you find yourself in a situation that you don’t like working with someone, please let us know, and we’ll find some ways to extricate you from the situation.

It’s very important that you enjoy your work, and your limited energy goes to the families that you like and they like working with you.

You may be tempted to ‘tough it out’ or ‘push through’, but this rarely works out and tends to create resentment and bitterness towards your work, your students, and families you work with and takes away energy from students you do like working with. (This is also a free tip for life. You’re welcome.)

There are always more clients, so focus your energy on the clients you work well with because those are the people you’re most likely to be able to help well.

Relying on Students for Session Scheduling

Although you spend most of the time with students, please don’t forget that the actual clients and ones that are paying the bills are the parents. Sometimes students don’t understand that your time costs their parents money and they’ll schedule or cancel sessions without letting the parents know.

Scheduling tutoring sessions directly with students might seem convenient at the beginning, but can blow up once the parents realize that their kids are cancelling sessions that they have to pay for.

Whenever you’re scheduling sessions especially if the parents left it for the student to cancel sessions, make sure you communicate with parents about scheduled sessions, and make extra sure you communicate about any cancellations especially last minute cancellations with parents. Sometimes students simply don’t know that it’s not okay to cancel a session at the last minute and that their parents are going to be billed for it.

Supplying Study Materials

It is not your responsibility to buy supplies for students. You may choose to do so if you want (especially if you are planning on using the material later for different students), but as an independent contractor, BMT cannot reimburse you for supplies you buy.

If you need students to buy a certain book or other supplies, one of the easiest ways to do this is to send parents a link to where they can buy said supplies.