A day in the life of a tutor: Sunday, February 28, 2016

I'm tired. It's been a long day. Sundays have, for whatever reason (and there are good reasons), been the longest tutoring day for a while. But it occurred to me that what seems normal to me might be bizarre to others. So here's a look into a typical atypically busy day for me.

First: Why are Sundays busy? Students have homework due Monday, AND it's a weekend day (meaning I can schedule morning appointments), AND people usually don't go out Sunday nights. Many all-day sports events appear to be scheduled Saturday, and not Sunday, presumably to avoid conflict with religious services. Note: a few of the families I work with do attend regular religious services, and yet find time Sundays for tutoring.

Anyway, here's what happened today:

7:00 AM: Got up before my alarm. Been exercising and consuming lots of caffeine lately, which has translated into slightly shorter sleep cycles. Handling it well so far. Alarm was scheduled for 7:15, and I have a meeting at 7:30, so I grab a quick shower.

7:30 AM: Meeting over Skype with student based in Denmark. How did I end up with a student in Denmark? Had to do with going to Korea, and tutoring a student who then attended a school in Israel, who was friends with this guy, who then moved to Denmark. I'm world famous! Sort of. We work on a Theory of Knowledge paper concerning psuedoscience, in which I help the student break down some of the social/psychological reasons why psuedoscientific beliefs might persist. Meet for about an hour, which generates lots of notes shared in a Google Doc.

8:30 AM: clean dog shit and eat a banana, with handwashing somewhere inbetween. Spend a bit too much time browsing the Internet. Start drinking my day-old coffee.

9:15 AM: leave house

9:45 AM: Arrive in Rosemead, but starting to feel hungry. Rashly bolt into 7-11 and buy a hot dog. Actually two. Gross. Send a quick text to a parent who had wanted to schedule a meeting today. But I'm full up. Tell her that her son can ask me questions via text, and I'll reply when I can (probably not before 11pm).

10:00AM: Meet with 9th grade student. We start with geometric constructions. Although lacking in experience, I figure out how best to help her. We pivot to Othello, which we've been analyzing for the last several weeks. Many discussions about psychology, motivation, etc. Somehow she brings up Ke$ha, and I learn that she has accused her producer of rape. A short discussion about the difficulty of proving rape follows. Ordinarily I wouldn't have touched that topic with a ten-foot pole, especially with such a young female student. But we've gotten to know each other well enough that I thought she deserved honest answers. The second tutoring session I had ever with her, I was ambushed by questions about STDs for her health class. She asked me what oral sex was. So the high-water mark for awkwardness had already been reached. Two hours of analysis and frustrations with a compass, I leave. In months of tutoring, I've never formally met the dad, though he's usually in the other room, like The Wizard of Oz. Weird.

12:00PM: Start driving as quickly as I can to Fullerton. Scheduled to meet a student at 12:45, though he's asked for more time, presumably because matrices aren't going well.

12:55PM: Got there late thanks to horrendous parking near CSUF, but decided to get coffee before sitting down at the Panera. This is a relatively new student -- incredibly polite, but it perhaps feels like I don't know him particularly well. Sometimes that comes with time. Work on systems of equations, Gauss-Jordan elimination, and row-reduced echelon form. Second meeting covering matrices. Needed some clarification from last time about why we use a parameter, t, in cases of infinite solutions. Covered matrix multiplication and calculating determinants. Also covered inverses, but -- lucky guy! -- he apparently doesn't need to calculate the inverse of a 3x3 or larger matrix. Does have trouble setting up some of the word problems -- I did the best I could in our closing minutes to explain how to distinguish between the unknown variables and given quantities, but I suspect some follow-up will be necessary. One hour was all that was needed, so I'm back on schedule.

2:30 PM: Arrive at a student's house in Yorba Linda. Been meeting with this student for about two years. She's awesome -- very well-adjusted, despite the pressures of being in a lot of high-level classes and having successful parents. Definitely think she will go far. Math has been frustrating, and she had failed a test recently. We reviewed some differential equations and parametric/polar calculations of arc length, area, etc. She often is (mostly) mock-angry when I take her teacher's side about anal retentive notation.

 "I've decided to start trying."

"You've been trying. Last meeting went really well."

"Well, I decided to start trying this week."

"Oh." *flashback to the previous week of senioritis*

She is slightly distracted by her mom being on the phone. I provide a rationalization for the multitasking phone work. "You always cut her slack!" She's not the only one, kid.

I love this family. Leave at 3:30 for La Habra.

3:45 PM: Hunger strikes me like a lightning bolt strikes a solitary tree in a vast, forbidding prairie. I find a wrapped cookie in the back seat, originating from a gift from a kindly Australian doctor I drove around LA last week. It is dry and crumbly. But it stems the temptation to stop at another 7-11.

4:00 PM: Meeting with a junior boy, who may or may not play too much League of Legends. (Spoiler: probably too much) We work on a few calculus problems involving u-substitution. Until recently, we had focused only on physics, but I guess integrals have gotten a bit harder. It's still 70/30 physics/calc.

"You didn't need my help with these questions."

"Well... when I looked at them, they looked really hard. But now that we're doing them..."

"So you didn't attempt any of them before I showed up?"

He seemed a bit jokier. It had taken a couple months for him to relax a bit -- he still works like he's in a rush. One problem involving stretching a wire seemed particularly troublesome. He wanted to give up, but I made him stick with it. The appreciation at the end of the problem was palpable. (Not.) "I hate physics." Says the future engineer. After an hour, time to take a short detour for food.

5:15 PM: While ordering my shrimp burrito at Rubio's, I sigh and return the call of a mom that had called me a few hours ago. She wants to schedule an appointment tomorrow morning for her son to work on applications to summer science programs. Against my better judgment, I agree to a 9am meeting tomorrow. She wants to meet for four hours, but I explain that the writing process will probably require a 1-2 hour meeting, then a follow-up. Apps are due Thursday. Communications have been mildly problematic -- maybe it's culture, or the fact that my phone can't receive iMessages.

5:25 PM: Burrito is in my lap. I refrain from eating it while driving, as that's unsafe and extra gross. Experience(!) teaches me that these Ancho Citrus Shrimp Burritos tend to leak a bit. It rolls from lap to the floor at a stoplight, but remains intact (and delicious).

5:30 PM: Tutoring a sophomore who has already committed to University of Maryland: College Park on a softball scholarship. (!) She's that good. We work a bit on arithmetic and geometric sequences for Algebra 2, then pivot to chemistry and enthalpies of formation. I'm pretty bad at these. I have to Google some help, but we muddle through it to calculate the average bond energy of ozone. We close out the session by going over some of the PSAT 10 she's practiced. I notice energy level flagging for both of us, but we both perk up after a brief tangent about softball and how the smaller diamond makes play very, very different from baseball. It's fascinating stuff -- maybe I'll see if we can work some Algebra 2 into that. Problems on PSAT seem to focus on semicolon use (needs to separate independent clauses) and not checking that a sentence added at a particular location is related to the content immediately before and after that sentence. She may pick sentences that seem to match the overall passage, with little regard to context.

I started tutoring her older sister about three years ago. The sister has graduated. I probably should've raised rates a while ago -- they are grandfathered in at about 2/3 my current rate -- but I'm grateful to them for providing a review from a parent with a daughter. I suspect that parents felt more comfortable with me tutoring their daughters after that review posted.

A nice family even if they care way more about sports than I do. Leave at 6:45.

6:45 PM: Reply to some texts. Had to remind a student why an integral involving a ln x and having one limit at x=0 is an improper integral and needs to be handled using limits. Head to La Palma.

7:15 PM: End up in terrible traffic at the Valley View offramp of the 91. See a crane truck leave the scene, and then see the car upside down. At least 3 cars involved, with lots of ambulances and fire trucks. Memento mori. Drive onward, with Muse playing (instead of NPR, today's a sort of day to listen to the limited number of songs I have on my phone -- mostly Muse, Two Steps From Hell, and some scattered songs: "Jar of Hearts", "Confident", "Pruit Igoe", "Prelude to War", "Counting Stars", and "Crazy", to name a few.)

7:30 PM: Arrive and start tutoring separable differential equations. My student owns an adorable dachshund that always smells like piss, but is really cute. Named Snoopy. Love how much noise his ears make when he shakes his head. Anyway, student appears to need some supplemental work on limits, as she is having trouble with end behavior. Make a note to send her a worksheet. I can feel my fatigue based crabiness set in, so I try to lighten the mood a bit by mentioning that I had heard about a group that performs synchronized swimming at high end parties. (My student is really serious about synchronized swimming.) She knows the group, and says that within the synchronized swimming community, they have a bad reputation.

Despite playing water polo and doing competitive synchronized swimming, she's very shy. Hope she gains confidence to speak up a bit more on the academic side. Leave after an hour to Diamond Bar, and send off a text informing them that I'll be about 10 minutes late.

9:10 PM: I show up ten minutes late, but managed to reschedule someone for tomorrow after parking. Evidently someone made use of the Google calendar I had set up.

It's been a few weeks since I had met with this student -- the last meeting ended in tears for the student, as his bottled up fear and anxiety came to the fore. It's kind of an awkward meeting -- how could it not be? But we don't touch the elephant in the room, although I did notice that when I asked the mom "How are you?" she replied, "He's fine."

We work on Ampere's Law and Biot-Savart. It's a shame that the most technically demanding work is coming at the end of the day, but I'm able to help him figure out why we use cosine instead of sine to find the vertical B-component (had to do with the angle labeled), and why we express it as R/r (because we use similar triangles to get a value for the cosine of that angle). Fielded some additional questions regarding current density and when to use straight/circular Amperean loops.

Thankfully, the meeting is an hour, and not the two I had prepared for. I suspect we'll have to talk again, about physics and other stuff. He's smart, but he feels he so far behind. I need to think about how to help him see that it's not a race.

10:30 PM: get home, then start working on a problem texted to me. Evidently the student dropped a 2, again, in a polar integral. Surprise! That's why the numbers are off. I eat leftovers, watch a few minutes of Kimmel (enough to TOTALLY call that Matt Damon was hiding in Ben Affleck's suit), and then head to my room. Early morning tutoring, and I have a blog post to write. Not going to have energy to submit any summaries or billing through WyzAnt tonight.

It was a long, long day. But I laughed a lot. I genuinely enjoyed most of it. I know it's unsustainable -- even if I don't work nearly this hard any other day of the week. But it was a good day.

Astropolitika

I was having a serious life conversation with a student in crisis. We discussed many things, most of which I can't share. Too personal, too raw. But I did relate one story, one thing that, at the time, seemed relevant. It's not very personal, and was probably the most boring thing I had to say to him that meeting. But it's part of me that I want to write down, because it's a small piece of history that may matter to me more as I grow older.

When I was a junior in college, I took a History of the Soviet Empire class, taught by a German with the surname O'Donoghue. Despite the confusion inherent in that, it was a very enjoyable class.

We got to choose our research topics, and for whatever reason I chose the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921. I can't remember much from the paper; I did pull an all-nighter for it, but I definitely put some work into it. The tumultuous years of a Trotskeyite Soviet Empire, the Miracle on the Vistula, the heroic/despotic arc of Pilsudskii -- it was very compelling.

Senior year, I ran into an astronomer from Poland at the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Diego. I happened to mention that I had had the opportunity to study a bit of Polish history.

He would've been within his rights to dismiss me, politely or not, for presumption. But instead, we chatted a bit. Not surprisingly, the "Miracle on the Vistula", the triumphant defeat of Soviet forces at the gates of Warsaw by the Polish army, was suppressed knowledge under Communism. But he had heard stories and whispers growing up. The story was a source of pride and inspiration to those growing up under Communism.

It was a nice moment, one in which, for a moment, we were separated from the bubble of theoretical considerations. But perhaps it's not surprising, or even uncommon. Astronomers, when they look into the sky, are always looking into the past.

I hope my student knows that these scientists are not gods. They are women and men, flesh and blood, with their own histories and dark chapters. Gods are meant to be feared and worshiped. But people, ordinary people doing extraordinary things, they are meant to be held, and loved, and encouraged.

I hope this young man realizes that he belongs in science, if he chooses a home there... not in spite of his vulnerabilities, but because of them.

Happy Holidays Students

To my students,

I hope you are well this holiday season.

If you're receiving this message, it's because you are a current or former student this semester, or the parent of a current or former student.

My initial plan was to mail each of you students a small gift via Amazon. But after some agonizing and vacillation, I have decided to make a donation for each of my students this semester, split between international aid for Syrian refugees and domestic hunger programs.

If any of you feel that this is against your wishes or beliefs, please let me know. While tutoring, we tend to focus on the material at hand, and frequently have less time to understand each other as individuals. I welcome contrasting views, and will accommodate them through an alternative.

When we started tutoring, two choices were made: you chose to work with me, and I chose to work with you.

On the first point, thank you. I thank your families for their trust, and thank you for your hard work. In many cases, you have trusted me not only with subject knowledge and test preparation, but also broader educational questions, college planning, and, most consequential of all, personal stories of crisis, pain, hope, and ambition. It is rare that I have time to really express the gratitude I have for that trust, and I hope that I am working to be worthy of it. I could do better, I know. If you have specific requests for improvement, do let me know.

And, yes, I chose you. In this job, I have been fortunate to work to a place in which I have the luxury of choice. With some families and students, the philosophical, emotional, or ethical fit is just not right, and we go our separate ways.

I chose you because you are willing to work. I chose you because learning isn't just about the drudgery of work -- it's about the difference between living and existing. I chose you because you display intelligence and energy. I chose you because you and your families exhibit qualities of character that I admire. But remember, most of all -- I chose you because of the person you are right now. Who you become is important, but secondary, and will be an ongoing process that will continue long after my time with you has ended. 

Doubts you may have, and goodness knows this has been a tough semester for all of us. But I wouldn't be around if I doubted your potential, your character, or your commitment. 

It might not mean much, but in case it means something: I have the luxury of choice, and I chose you.I am incredibly proud of each of you. 

John Watson (no, not the fictional one) once said, "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." You might not be scrambling for your life off a Greek island. You might not be going hungry. But I know, somewhat, the pressure, the pain, and, in some cases, the mourning you have experienced. It is unproductive and wrongheaded to compare trials -- whatever crucible you find yourself in, please know you have my support and an open offer for a chat.

A special note to the seniors: you will be fine. You are all going to go to college, to a good one. Once there, you will find your people, however you choose to define, and redefine that concept. If you got into your dream school -- great! If you didn't -- great! For each of you will ultimately be judged by things more fundamental, more challenging, and more important -- character, judgment, work ethic, emotional intelligence and health. Without going into too much detail, please learn from my mistakes -- you are as much or as little as you choose to make yourself, and if you reduce yourself to a grade, a score, or a degree, you do grave disservice to your humanity and those who have worked to build you up. Be kind to yourself too -- sometimes this is hard, but it's always necessary.

I hope you get some time to be alone this break -- alone with your thoughts, with your memories, with your feelings. It's easy to crowd these out during school, and easy to do that during break with everything the Internet has to offer. Take a bit of time to check in with who you are, and what you value. 

I'm trying to do that, and that's why you're getting this letter.

Be well this break.

Happy Holidays,

Ryan

SAT Critical Reading Guidelines - in progress

Note: this is a draft, and will be updated. But as I know some people are taking the test in a couple days, this might be a helpful last-minute refresher.


SAT Critical Reading Guidelines
By Ryan Yamada

General Critical Reading test-taking strategies:

1. Take Notes.

You might want to consider taking notes as you read a passage. It might help clarify the main idea, secondary ideas, tone, type of passage, and narrator perspective (omniscient, objective, subjective). In addition to reducing the load on your short-term memory, it may help you think more critically and actively engage with the passage.

2. Use Cross-Consistency (carefully).

Occasionally, you have enough similar questions in a problem that you can check for cross-consistency. As mentioned, this is potentially very dangerous and can backfire. Still, if you're reasonably sure on two questions and struggle with a third, you might be able to help clarify the answer to the third.

3. Use line references.

By identifying the line references before you read, you may improve your focus. Be advised, however, that you should start focusing somewhat before the line reference starts.

4. Depend only upon what is written.

Leave outside knowledge, your emotional response, and your moral judgment at the door. They will not help you with the passage. Everything you need is written, and excessive internal commentary as you read can cloud your judgment and cause you to miss key bits of information/language.

Main Idea Questions:

1. Read the introduction to the passage.

Sometimes this gives a major clue as to the main idea.

2. Read the first paragraph or two carefully.

The main idea will definitely appear in the first 1-2 paragraphs. The first paragraph might be introductory, which can lead to a confusing impression of what the main idea is. It’s better to continue reading carefully through the second, just to be sure.

3. Take notes for each paragraph.

This is a general tool, but it does help with the main idea. As you read the passage, your notes will indicate the content of each paragraph. Find the common thread, and you have the main idea.


Secondary Idea Questions:

1. Use the main idea as a partial guide, but do so carefully.

The secondary idea will be connected with the main idea. But it won’t be the same as the main idea. In fact, the secondary idea might make a point seemingly opposed to the main idea (especially for an informative essay discussing two sides to an issue). Even so, the main idea might give you a clue as to whether or not you’re on the right track.

2. Don’t confuse main idea and secondary idea questions.

Main idea questions cover the entire passage. Secondary ideas cover a specific paragraph or line references (usually a few lines long). The secondary idea has to address the specific reference/paragraph, regardless of what the broader passage is saying.

If this sounds similar to (1), that’s because it is, But it’s doubly important.

3. Pay attention to all the sentences in a paragraph.

Sometimes, you will be given two plausible answers. The better answer will often hinge upon a single sentence or phrase. It helps not to project your own emotion, experiences or motivations into the answer – everything you need will be there, in the paragraph.


Vocabulary or phrase in context:

1. Break apart the sentence.

Pay careful attention to conjunctions and conjunction-like phrases like “…, as is” (which indicates that the information following  is distinct from the material preceding it). This gives you a clue as to the structure of the sentence, and therefore a clue as to whether the word or phrase in context applies to the entire sentence or just a part.

2. The correct answer is usually a secondary definition.

It makes little sense to create a context question for which the correct answer is the obvious definition. Usually, it’s a secondary definition. Occasionally, the word is being used as a metaphor for something else.

3. Read the lines preceding the reference.

Sometimes you will be given the phrase or word in the problem statement, which makes it look like you don’t have to go back and read it in the actual passage. BIG MISTAKE! You need to go back, and read prior to the line reference. Depending on time, start from either the beginning of the paragraph or at least 1-2 sentences before the reference. Sometimes, the definition will be given to you in the preceding lines.

4. Use roots.

Although 1-3 should get you the answer, you can use roots if you have no idea what a word means. As with sentence completion, sometimes roots can help you distill the meaning of a word in context. But this probably won’t help much, as the word is probably being used with a secondary definition in mind.

Inference Questions:

1. Read like a third-grader.

If the inference cites a specific line, then read that line like a third-grader, paying close attention to subtleties of language (usually simple words).

2. Use only what is in the passage.

Make certain that you are not projecting your own feelings/background/knowledge into a passage/inference question. You have everything you need on the page.

3. Distinguish between author’s intent and any characters in the passage.

Similarly, It is particularly important for certain inference problems (and other problem types) to distinguish between what the character is feeling/thinking and what the author is thinking/feeling. Some answers that seem plausible actually confuse the two. 

4. Tone and main idea can help.

If you understand the main idea and tone, then it might help you with an inference question. That’s because main idea and tone give you a sense of the author’s intent, and therefore what devices/points the author might be trying to make, albeit indirectly.


Passage Comparison:

1. Treat this initially as two single passage sections.

Read passage 1, then do passage 1 questions. Do the same for passage 2 and its questions. Then answer the comparison questions. The reasons are obvious: this way, you don’t get the information from one passage confused with the other for questions specific to a single passage.

2. Take notes as you read.

You should be doing this for the longer single passages anyway. But this becomes doubly important for double passage problems. Your notes will help you quickly identify information that you might need, and in the correct passage, that would otherwise take a complete re-reading to discover.

3. Pay careful attention to the degree implied by verbs and adjectives when comparing passages.

Problems that have possible answer choices like “Passage 1… while Passage 2…” are potentially quite challenging. Often, the answer has to do with the degree to which it applies. There’s a difference between “cites” and “focuses”, and so pay careful attention. (In some wrong answers, the threshold is just too high.)

4. The entire answer has to be correct.

This is true for all questions. But it applies in particular to passage comparison. You can eliminate incorrect answers by realizing that they are making an incorrect statement for passage 1. Then eliminate more by eliminating those that incorrectly characterize passage 2. If you’re lucky, you’ll be left with one correct answer. If not, then use what you know about each passage to choose the best answer.

Tone Questions:

1. Tone is generally consistent with passage type and main idea.

Informative = objective, interested, appreciative (neutral to moderately positive/negative)
Argumentative = subjective, passionate, wry (stronger emotions)
Narrative = can be anything, pretty much.

2. Make sure you distinguish between author’s tone and a character’s emotions.

The characters could be undergoing intense emotions. But the author may choose to convey that in a very objective tone. Make certain you don’t conflate the two. Also, obviously, make sure you don’t project your own emotional response into the tone of the article.

Structure Questions:

1. Similarity questions

There are questions that ask for an example that “resembles” or “is most similar to” a cited example. These problems can be tricky, because they require you to (1) understand the reference, (2) understand the key relationships/properties of the reference, and (3) determine the answer choice that possesses all of the key relationships/properties in the original reference. Usually there will be two properties to identify.

Here’s how you solve these.

(a) Break apart the original reference into parts (probably two).

(b) Identify the relationships or key ideas in the parts.

(c) Check each answer choice and see if it conforms to both parts.

In some ways, this is like a double-blank sentence completion problem, except that you’re after the concepts and relationships embedded in the line reference. In some ways, this is the spiritual descendent of the “analogy” questions that plagued SAT students until sometime around 2005.

2. Identifying the purpose of a specific device

You should know about rhetorical devices: comparison, exaggeration, contrast, examples, etc. Each of these can be used to strengthen or develop an argument, analysis, or a narrative.

To solve these, you need to understand the connection between the line reference and the surrounding text (and, sometimes, the overall passage). This means figuring out why the author uses a specific piece of language.

Remember: why, not what. Do not confuse what is literally being said with its purpose.

3. Additional information that would strengthen an argument

To solve these questions, you need to make certain that you understand what the argument is. There should be only one answer choice that works. You can disregard the others because they will not relate to the specific argument being made in a paragraph, or because the form of the evidence is wrong. What do I mean by form? If the article is an informative scientific article, an opinion piece will not effectively support the argument.

How to be a tutor (work in progress - last updated 11/14/2013)

Sorry, J. E. -- this is long overdue. Also sorry, people who yelled at me at the wedding to follow through and post something.

This will be a work in progress. I don't have all the answers -- I'm still struggling to make this close to a full-time position.

I would actually highly discourage this as an option for people looking for more flexibility/pay than their existing jobs. There are many reasons, each of which I could go into at greater length. I'll simply list the ones I can come up with here:

- When factoring in prep time, driving time, correspondence, and billing, per-hour pay isn't great
- Local market may or may not be able to support you
- Cancellations -- lessons will be canceled because just aboute everything else takes priority
- Arguments with clients about rates -- you argue about salary with your boss once a year, but you potentially argue with each client about rates, and possibly multiple times.
- Low status -- this isn't South Korea, and so you might as well say "unemployed" when people ask you what you do for a living.
- Emotionally draining -- especially if you have defiant students, or tutor at homes with family drama
- Prep time ignored -- especially problematic if you're doing test prep, which is a bit more time-intensive with diagnostics
- skill degradation and resume decay -- every year you spend tutoring full-time is a year you're not doing something more closely related with your college training.


Let's say you're not dissuaded. What should you do?

Brian S., a tutor at WyzAnt, wrote a helpful guide about what to do when you get started. He has also penned another excellent guide here, once you're somewhat established and want to maintain or build your client base..

In addition to that, here are some things I've found, many thanks to discussions with David L., a fellow HMC Physics grad. (I use fellow loosely, and perhaps too familiarly -- he's damn good.)

1. Sometimes, the local market for tutoring is simply rough.

One of my undergrad friends is tutoring full time and has tons of students. He charges a pretty high rate (though he is worth every penny). I have a few students, but have struggled a bit more. Granted, he has a PhD in Physics from Princeton, and I "only" have a M.S. in Astrophysics from Cornell. But after some discussion, we concluded that he happens to be in a particularly good area for tutoring. It's a wealthy part of New Jersey with enough population density that he can build a client base.

I'm not as successful for a host of reasons. But one reason is my specific location. I'm in a reasonably well-off portion of Southern California. But it doesn't have quite the level of wealth, nor the high population density, that allows me to pick and choose clients.

2. Consider expanding your driving distance

Despite my friend's advantages, he's willing to commute 40 minutes for a job. This is feasible because he clusters his jobs. One day he might spend around Princeton, meeting three or four clients. Another day, he might head north. 

This only works if you can (1) find sufficient numbers of students in a given area to make it worthwhile to drive out there in the first place, and (2) convince them all to meet in a given place. Otherwise, you'll be eaten alive with fuel and maintenance costs, not to mention the opportunity cost of driving between lessons.

3. Consider picking up subjects that are outside your core, but still within yourcompetence.
In the beginning, I was a bit too cautious about my qualified fields. I thought that, because it had been a couple years since I had a statistics course, I wasn't qualified to tutor statistics. However, I discovered that, with a good textbook and enough clients to make it worthwhile, I was able to retrain myself in beginning statistics. I'm nowhere near my previous level of proficiency, but I'm confident that I can competently tutor any AP Stats or beginning college stats course -- a belief that has been proven correct from experience.

Again, it varies by location, and my experience is limited to math, science, and some of the social sciences. But I would say that physics, chemistry, and calculus are generally in high demand (partly because any out-of-college adult reasonably skilled in this probably could get another job). Econ and stats tend to be sought after, though in raw numbers there may be fewer students taking those courses. Biology has a lot of demand, but also a lot of supply. 

4. Consider tutoring college students.

I don't have a preference one way or another as far as tutoring high school students or college students. (But I generally don't tutor anyone younger.) But if you think about it, tutoring can't come anywhere near to a full-time gig if you're limited to the hours after school gets out (barring crazy hours on weekends). One way to fill that gap is with college students, many of whom have openings in the morning or early afternoon.

Now, not all college students can afford expensive tutoring. So you might opt to charge a reduced rate for starving students. It depends upon your college market, and on whether or not you can tutor an upper-division class. But even for general education classes, there might be some demand. A few students (or their parents) are perceptive enough to realize that a small investment in tutoring might actually be a better deal than paying to take the class again.

Good luck!

Tutoring advice for parents, students, and tutors

How pretentious: I'm claiming to offer advice to all parties in the tutoring process! But if you bear with me, I hope to actually offer some helpful advice.

Some advice for parents:

It’s easy for a parent to feel guilty. “I have to provide the best educational experience possible for my child. If I don’t, I’m a bad parent and a bad person.” Combine that with a lack of clarity about what “best” is, and it’s not wonder that there’s a lot of insecurity about this. Unscrupulous tutors take advantage of that.

Do yourself a favor: take a breath, and breathe. You are not solely responsible for everything regarding your child. You, of course, have many responsibilities. But your first and most important obligation is to raise your child in a loving, safe environment. Nowhere is it written in the contract you signed when you became a parent that you will be held accountable for how well your child does in precalculus. Remind yourself, explicitly, in writing or audible speech, that you are a good parent regardless of how well or poorly your child does in school. I’ve met parents who are terrible who have straight-A students. (The students are secretly, or not-so-secretly miserable.) And I've met outstanding parents who have C-students.

For the sake of your sanity, and for the sake of better results, ease the pressure off yourself. It spills over on the child and on the tutor, and doesn’t translate into good results.

But if your expectations are reasonable and clearly stated, hold your child and tutor to them. If the tutor understands your expectations and can’t deliver, then you need to find someone else.

Some advice to students:

You are approaching adulthood. The hallmark of an adult versus a child is not age, but the level to which a person accepts responsibility for his or her actions or inaction. It’s hard and challenging, and maybe you’ve been conditioned to believe that it’s the teacher’s responsibility to teach you. That’s bull. You have the most responsibility for that, because you are the one who will have to deal with the consequences of not learning. Your teacher will keep on churning out poorly instructed students, and get a fresh crop next year. But you will live with the results for the rest of your life. A bad class might not ruin your life, but it is a missed opportunity. If you miss too many opportunities in life, well, you miss life.

If you need something, ask for it. Your parents and tutors might say no or be unhelpful. But if you really need something, don’t give up on it. Be your own advocate. It may not always seem fair, but it will give you better results than passively accepting what you’re given. “Character may be manifest in the great moments, but it is built in the small ones.” There’s no time like the present to build, piece by piece, your character.

Some advice for tutors:

Manage those expectations! Not only is it ethical, it is good from a self-interest point of view. A parent might not always hear you when you say that you can’t promise a certain grade in a certain time frame, but it’s on you to explicitly say that. Do your best, of course. But don’t overpromise. Although you can get away in the short term with doing that, in the long run your reputation will be ruined. And it’ll be your own fault.

As you manage their expectations, manage your own. Your student has been shaped by a decade or two of outside forces. You, as a tutor and teacher, are a tiny blip on the great narrative of their life. It doesn’t mean you can’t make a difference – perhaps a life-changing one. But you can’t expect to force it. As with other relationships, problems arise when you don’t respect the personhood of the other, and that includes, at some level, respecting their desire to be idiotic, stubborn, or otherwise foolish for as long as they like. To borrow terminology from leadership theory, ou may want to be a transformative tutor, but you might have to settle for being a transactional one.

And please be organized. You’re a professional, not some student who straggled in off the street to regale the audience with your antics and hopefully sprinkle some knowledge. You’ve got a job to do. Do it. This may seem like a relatively easy job, but if you’re doing it well, it shouldn’t be. Send updates, be punctual, and be prepared going into a lesson – not only in terms of subject matter, but in terms of who your student is (in a substantive sense), and how your student learns.

The nightmare of hiring a tutor

In principle, hiring a tutor is an enterprise that is anticipatory and deliberate.

It involves anticipating what potential problems might crop up, using a student’s history and self-evaluation. Tutoring can also be in response to a desire to advance more quickly; it’s not always used to “fix” a “problem”. A parent might consult with friends, or with the student’s teacher, to obtain personal referrals. After interviewing a number of possible tutors, the parent and child, together, choose the tutor that embodies the combination of empathy, subject knowledge, teaching ability, and cost effectiveness.

If this sounds like you, congratulations. No need to read onward, to find out how the rest of us in the real world live. If this doesn’t sound like you, don’t worry; you’re not alone, and I promise this won’t be a “you should feel guilty about this” post.

Here’s how tutoring often works in practice.

A student starts struggling in a subject, but that isn’t noticed by the parents because of some combination of being busy with work and student denial/subterfuge. The first test reveals that a student is in serious trouble. There might be an exchange in which the parent chastises the student for not letting the parent know about the struggle; the student, in exchange, either blames the parent for being inattentive, or claims that it’s possible to salvage the grade.

Perhaps the parent tries to tutor the student directly. But the parent might not know the subject. Even if the parent knows the subject, the general tension that exists between all parents and children makes it such that the student resents the advice, and the parent is tempted to be overly critical. There’s just too much history and baggage, even in the best families, for it to work. (For this reason, I’m perpetually amazed at the relative success some people have with homeschooling.)

Finally, the parent decides that, even though money is never abundant, it’s time to call in an outside tutor.  But it’s too late to go through a lengthy interview process with several tutors. A parent might turn to their friends for a reference; on the other hand, they might not want it to be known that their child is not great at everything. Invariably, they turn to either a local academy or an online website, where they hire someone who is some combination of appearing to be inexpensive and appearing to be qualified.

The student, by the way, might not think he or she needs tutoring. This attitude can persist throughout the actual tutoring, with predictably bad results.

Thus is the tutoring relationship formed. It involves bringing in a stranger that may or may not be qualified, may or may not be a good instructor, and may or may not have a good rapport with the student. And, given that the arrangement is made under duress, the parent is reluctant to break it because it will take time (and stress) to find another one. Also, if we can be honest, the parent might not know whether this tutor is good or not; a bad tutor can fly under the radar for a depressingly long time.

If this sounds like you, don’t feel badly. This is common, more common than anyone wants to admit. And it’s no one’s fault.

Teachers and schools, for a host of reasons, often don’t have the time or resources to develop a framework to support those who are struggling.

Parents, especially parents who are working, don’t have the time or, quite frankly, emotional energy, to help their kids with some of these subjects.

Students might struggle with incompetent or inattentive teachers (who, as mentioned above, just might not have the resources needed to deliver customized help). Given that looking stupid is about the worst possible sin, in school and in life, the student might do his or her best to conceal poor performance, or mentally code the subject as “something that doesn’t matter, anyway”.

Tutors can be tempted to exploit this insecurity to bill more hours. We may, explicitly or implicitly, overpromise, and temper the anger at underdelivery with vague promises of improvement just around the corner.

Sometimes, the tutor doesn’t actually say anything; the parent and student project expectations, and don’t listen to efforts to manage it. Or, maybe a realistic assessment means not getting the job, forcing the tutor to choose between professional integrity and paying bills.

Everyone’s just too busy. Everyone’s anxious. And it’s really hard to measure educational quality – hence the perennial arguments about education in America and elsewhere.

In the next post, I offer some free advice to parents, students, and tutors. Remember as you read: just like in tutoring, you get what you pay for.