Every Tutor’s Worst Nightmare
I used to be a tutor at an after school program. We would go over the homework from the previous week. Then we’d take a short quiz on those topics.
Then move onto the next topic. This was all in preparation for a citywide exam in NYC (I taught math). These exams are pretty important, they determine what class the kid would be in next year.
If a child does extremely poorly on both the math and reading exams, they could even be left back. So of course, the parents want their kids to do well.
One of the kids was super lazy. He would never have his homework completed, half the time not even bringing in the sheet I gave him.
He would also score really poorly on the exams. He would misbehave during tutoring, complain the entire quiz about how unfair and hard it was (it was the homework questions with different numbers).
I warned the mother that he was not doing his work and not really grasping the topics. I was just met with excuses. “Oh he left the sheet in school.” “It was too hard.” “He was very busy this week.” I’m pretty sure she was just using us as a babysitter service.
Then came exam time and of course he scored in the lower 10 percentile. The mother comes to my workplace, complaining to my manager about how I didn’t do my job and she wanted a refund of all the sessions; twice a week at $25 a session from September to May.
My manager was already aware of the kids’ poor performance. But the real satisfaction came when I pulled out his exams, homework and logs of his scores and performance.
I told her she was aware of the issues, the contract we had signed did not guarantee scores of any kind and that she would not be getting any refund.
Man was she man. She said that he son would not be coming back next year.
Of course, next school year rolls around and she shows up trying to sign her son up for after school tutoring again. I let her know that she said she would not be coming back so we booked other students and had no more room for additional students.