Last week I informed the mother of my 9-year-old students that I would no longer be tutoring her after the mid-year examinations. She was understanding and did not appear to hold it against me. I have to admit that I had great anxiety about how to broach the subject in the days before I let her know I wanted out. I would say my anxiety was not completely unfounded given the But first, I thought I should tell you why I think every teenager needs to get a job.



These are the things I have learnt in the past eight months as a part-time tutor:

1) If you are young, inexperienced, and kinder than necessary there WILL be people who try to take advanatge of you.

2) Nobody is going to take you seriously if you don't have a good education and there's no reason why you should expect them to unless you are prodigously talented in something and willing to work extremely hard to cultivate said talent. (i.e.Drop out of Harvard and invent Facebook.

3) What people value in an educated person is not your grades but skills such as creativity and adapatability, social skills and above all else a willingness to work hard.

4)Perhaps, this a realisation based on my own naivety and limited social interactions, but for the first time I understood that academic work doesn't come so easily to some people and this is neither a product of laziness nor does it make them any lesser than others.

I think I will start at the beginning I taught a 14-year-old girl English andd General Science. When she first entered secondary school, she was put in the Normal Technical Stream but she was "promoted" to the Normal Academic stream based on outstanding academic results in Secondary 1. She quickly warmed up to me (perhaps because of the narrow age gap between us) and told me about how the students in her school were extremely uninterested in their studies. Homework and test papers were shared all the time. Now this was not something that suprised me because I had seen this happen in the schools I went to before. The difference was that my peers participated in such "caring is sharing" behaviour with the knowledge that they were not putting in sufficient effort to do well in major tests on their own. My tutee and her peers however did not seem to understand this and they seemed to think that such effort was enough. The thing is, she is actually rather bright and when she did apply herself she excelled. However, she was so distracted by her co-curricular activities that she frequently cancelled lessons. One day after a one-and-a -half month long hiatus from tuition lessons, she called me up sounding flustered because she had exams the next week and wanted me to give her a crash course on all the topics covered that year. I said no because I didn't see how anything I might teach her in two 1.5 hour-sessions was going to help her. The girl's mother thus responded by refusing to pay me the pending $300 in tuition fees. I was livid because $300 is a lot of money to a 19-year-old student. The mother was a terror though, she threatened to lodge a complaint about me to the tuition agency through which I had been first assigned to teach her daughter. In a moment of anger I shouted back at her that I should be the one complaining about HER. She hung up the phone at that point. I was in a panic because I realised I had lost control of my emotions and who knows if she had recorded the conversation??? A few days later the fee was transfered to my bank account though, so I guess she realised I wasn't going to stop bothering her until I got paid.



I had another student who I taught Secondary three English to briefly. The mother was incredibly overbearing and made the child work for hours on end each day. The girl was studying 8 subjects at school and for each subject there were approximately 10 asessement books that the mother had bought for her to complete. Yes , that's about 80 books. The entire room was filled with just those books. When the girl's English grade did not go up in her common test the mother fired me and refused to pay me the fee(again, $300) for the lessons I had taught. She simply ignored all my calls and text messages. The thing is I had only taught her for 6 lessons before her test so I thought it was unreasonable to expect a vast improvement so quickly. Also I thought the motehr was being extremely ungrateful because I had taught her daughter even when I had a fever because she had INSISTED I help her as aher exams were approaching. Eventually, I was paid after texting the daughter herself and asking her to remind her mother about the payment.



I know so far I've talked about horrible parents but I've met my fair share of horrible kids too. In the middle of last year, I taught a boy was taking his "O" level exams as a private candidate. Perhaps this stint was doomed to fail because my student was only two years younger than me and I found it hard to assert authority over him because let's face it, I'm not the most intimidating figure and to some extent I felt it was ridiculous to try to pretend to be one. The boy's parents were always working and were seldom home when the lessons took place on weekday afternoons. He would only reach home 25 min after the lesson was scheduled to start, leaving me waiting outside his apartment like an idiot for the duration. The second and third time this happened I cancelled the lesson and went home but I wa furious because the ( long) trip to his home a wasted one. The thing is I felt that the boy's apparent lack of interest was not entirely due to laziness. His command of the language was really very poor which I thought was suprising since his mother spoke English very fluently. But I empthaised with his frustration at understanding the complex comprehension passages and struggling to think of the right word to use when writing a composition essay. It was then that I understood that it his grasp of the language was actually impeding his ability to express ideas he already understood-but only in his mother tongue-. It was frustrating to teach him because he was frustrated with himself and the lessons went nowhere. In the end the mother suggested I stop tutoring him because it didn't look like it was working out and I certainly agreed.

The most recent teaching assignment that I have decided to give up the one with the 9-year-old girl was one that I actually thought was very promising. The girl was adorable at first and teaching Primary school English and Maths was easy work for me. But as she became more comfortable with me she started talking back and making sarcastic comments about the things I said. Perhaps worst of all was her dependency on me when doing her school homework. She wanted me to check every question so she could redo it until she got every question right. I thought this was ridiculous but I have to admit I gave in a couple of times because she looked so anxious. The things is she started bothering me during the weekend and demanding I help her with homework due the next day when it was already late at night. Then it occured to me that I was letting a 9-year-old take advantage of me and I needed to get away from this situation. It was helping neither of us.



So that's how my tutoring career has panned out so far. I am mostlty feeling jaded and hope to take a break from it for a while. I just need to find some other way to make money. My experiences with bad parents and bratty kids shocked me at first because I didn't realise people could be so mean. While I know I can only expect more of such bad experiences when I'm out of school, I'm relieved I had a taster now so I won't be too distraught when the working world sucks me in.

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