I love tutors.
I love the way they help. The pressure they relieve. The confidence they instill.
I loved my tutor Mrs Fisher, with her floral dress and pinned up white hair, a teacher from by-gone days. She would pull a page of yellowing lined paper from her bureau. It seemed wonderful to me that there were no exercise books, not even a text book. Those tutoring sessions were a meeting of the minds. And she made it look so easy.
Flash forward to my own tutoring days. I didn’t find it so easy.
As a newly qualified teacher, I was able to charge a certain fee for my services and parents dropped their children off each day after school without hesitation.
What did I do in those sessions? A bit of this, a bit of that. I felt uncomfortable taking the money because I was never sure I’d earned it. Learning tends to be invisible (unless we learn to make it visible, which is another conversation for another time). So how can we be sure we’re tutoring right?
One thing I know for sure – I wish Qualified Tutor had existed then.