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My main job at this moment is as a Tutor/Academic Mentor at the local college. I’ve been there almost 5 years now or so. Long enough for a pay bump to come into effect which only occurs after 3 years there. I do actually love my job there, I have a good time helping the students and if I were able to actually do this 40 hours a week, I’d be rather happy. Unfortunately the amount of time I’m allowed to actually work is limited, along with the number of students that I can actually tutor.
Now as some background as to how I came to be there and how this is all set up.
When I started tutoring, I was sent there by my Business and Accounting Professors. As I tell everyone, I’m there as a punishment for sleeping through a few terms. Just not sure who’s getting punished.
Now for the job(s). Technically, while this is all the same job and responsibilities that I perform, I am actually employed by two different programs, the first comes from the title of Tutor. This is the title I use when I help the “standard students”. I say this to differentiate them from those I work with as an Academic Mentor.
The Academic Mentor title is one of those superfluous titles that are given out every once in a while. In this case it was given to me, along with a pay bump, by a program that I tutor for called the Trio Program. Nice program in and of itself, it’s there to help disabled students, first generation college students, and those with financial difficulties. If I weren’t lazy, I would have been able to join it myself. Alas, the curse of all college students struck me and procrastination won the day in that battle but I eventually won the war.
Anyhow, along with the change in title and pay raise, the requirements to be an Academic Mentor were also raised up to having had to have a degree in the program that you’re tutoring in.
Now I explain that these two programs are important to know for two reasons. First being that I need to have the correct information about the student to know where to put them on my paperwork. The second is that TRIO students are to only be tutored by the Academic Mentors. Meaning that while there might be a Tutor that could cover the subject, they aren’t allowed to take on the TRIO Student. What this meant for them is that I am currently the sole Accounting/Business/Office Programs Academic Mentor in the college.
Nice position to have if you can get it.
Onto the stories, listed from least to most annoying troubles I've run into!
Maybe I Should Get a Recording of This
Oh really? That’s interesting to know. You’ll want to click there.
No worries. Okay, we’re going to do this just like last time.
Ey, no worries. Right. Your password goes there.
No worries, we can fix that.
No worries. Just hit CTRL+Z. Lovely little thing, ain’t it?
No worries, just show me how you’ve done.
No worries. . .
No worries. . .
Love that phrase, along with “Don’t Panic”. Comforts the students and keeps me from getting too frustrated with a few of them. I understand that you’re uncomfortable with computers and some modern technology. That’s what I’m here for, no worries. You’re not bothering me by asking questions about how things work, what I get bothered by is the fact that you don’t seem to be absorbing this information consistently.
You seem to be able to instantly assimilate something complicated like how to enter a long complicated formula in that Excel Worksheet consisting of a nested IF statement doing an index array lookup to figure out which location had the highest net income for the third quarter. Wonderful. Now you want to save it.
Yes, you go to the File tab now, yes, you want to click on Save As since you haven’t done it yet. Yes, we want to go to your little USB/Flash/Thumb Drive, whatever you want to call it. Yes, yes, we can now rename your file. Well does the book give you a name? Then it’s rather subjective so you can just choose one.
Some days I could repeat myself like that for hours. In fact it’s not so much could but that I have repeated myself like that for hours. It gets a bit annoying when someone has done something repeatedly but still gets a bit of stage fright when they’re informed that it’s time to do it once again.
Perhaps not very sucky since I know that some of the folks I tutor are of the older generation just getting used to things and having mistaken the class as an actual introduction to computers. But still a light annoyance nonetheless.
Just Wait a Second There. . .
I now have a rule. It’s a nice rule that I tell all my students. You can e-mail me if you have questions, or if you need a quick hand with the homework. I won’t do it for you, of course, but I’ll steer you back the right way or tell you where you’ve gone wrong and if it’s too horrible then I’ll tell you how to fix it.
But the rule. The rule is that I accept no more than 35 e-mails from a single person per day. Like any other strange or unusual rule there’s a story behind it. In this case it comes from an accounting class with a long complicated bit of spreadsheet that needed to be filled out and all the students had some trouble actually getting started and figuring out how to fill in things.
Then there was this lass. She would get concerned that things weren’t balancing right and ask me why. I would take a look over it and compare it with the several versions I’ve done myself (No sense tutoring someone in something you don’t understand and haven’t actually done yourself). Then I would send an e-mail back to her explaining what had gone wrong and what she would need to look for to correct the errors.
Job done, for about 5 minutes. Another e-mail pops back up with the attachment of the latest copy of their spreadsheet. Once again, go over it, look for problems and return the e-mail within ten minutes. Fairly good turnaround when you consider the teacher can take a week to reply to an e-mail.
But rinse and repeat until I finally get tired and it’s running on 1am, both of us getting frustrated and I’m getting ready to send step by step instructions on how to shut down the computer and go to bed.
Then the next e-mail from her nails the problem that we’ve been having right on the head.
Apparently between the time it takes for me to look over what they’ve done and compose an e-mail, they have changed things around so much that my advice is no longer applicable to their work. Well dear goodness, would it have actually killed you to wait the ten minutes that have been shown it takes for me to compose an e-mail and then taken the advice in that? Would it?!
Eventually I just told her to stop, e-mailed her an old copy of the file that she had sent me, and then gave her instructions on how to proceed from there as well as told her to stop fiddling around with things before she could get a response from me.
On the plus side, the revelation that I had actually spent that many e-mails helping a person on my own, unpaid time led to the creation of the “Admin Hour” for Academic Mentors where if they work with Trio students for a specific amount of time per term then they’re allowed to claim an additional hour to cover any work that is done from home. That’s always nice.
Could’ve Let Someone Know
For all that I love my job, there are times that I absolutely hate the students I’m supposed to deal with.
This is one of them.
Sitting alone in a room, the temperature raising up as I sit inside the greenhouse of a room. Just waiting there. Waiting for someone that I’m scheduled to tutor for two hours that day, that means you have two classes you need help with and that’ll be four hours a week total at the Academic Mentor rate. Nice bit of money there after all.
Close the curtains, walk to the door in the off chance they may have not gotten the right meeting room. Unlikely since the Coordinator always sends off directions for the first meeting.
Half hour in, finally accept that the person is a no show. Go home and I can send off an e-mail to the coordinator to find out what’s happening there. Get the response from her that apparently between the coordinator leaving for the day and our session time the student had called and left a message canceling for the day.
Ok, the expectations paperwork state that you need to give 24 hour notice before canceling and that missing the first session is grounds for taking away tutoring privileges. And at least you had actually called. . . just not during the stated office hours for the coordinator. . .But hey, I’m lenient and I’ve been told that you’re promising that you’re going to show for the next session.
Come the next session. So there I am. Sitting alone in a room, the temperature raising up as I sit inside the greenhouse of a room. Just waiting there. Waiting for someone that I’m scheduled to tutor for two hours that day, that means you have two classes you need help with and that’ll be four hours a week total at the Academic Mentor rate. Nice bit of money there after all.
Half hour past again, no show.
Could’ve let someone know.
Go home, e-mail the coordinator again saying that this is now their first strike and asking if they could find out why they missed this session after promising they’d be there. Get a reply the next time the coordinator is there that there’s been no response from the student and I let the coordinator know that I’ll wait for them again that afternoon just in case they show up.
So there I am
And there you can see where this is going.
Three times I’ve been stood up by the same student. But that’s alright, I was able to fill some of the time by helping a student that had stayed beyond their session time because they actually wanted to learn. Sure I don’t get paid for it, but at least it’s better than sitting there waiting for someone that wasn’t going to show.
Come the fourth day and here I find out that apparently they had dropped the two classes.
Could’ve let someone know.
So, I sat quietly staring at the e-mail from the coordinator informing me of what happened and I tallied up the opportunity costs of waiting for this piece of. . . humanity. Figure out how much they actually cost me for near about 12 hours that I won’t get back since those slots weren’t filled and that I won’t get the standard No Show/No Call reimbursement either since the person never even filled out the agreement form with me. Would have only been barely even 1/10th of the amount I would have gotten otherwise, but it would have still been something.
I started to seethe and review the e-mails.
Then I started to laugh. Sweet revenge could be had in a fashion. I thanked the coordinator for letting me know about the situation, expressed my displeasure at the student and their behaviour. And then I explained what I had learned.
This student was from the TRIO Program. This student was a business program student. This student had let us know their full name. This student was now on my black list. Remember earlier when I said that I was the sole Business/Accounting/Office Program Academic Mentor? This means that she’s right up that proverbial creek without a paddle and there I am laughing like a loon and trying to tip her canoe over with an 11 foot pole.
She signs up for tutoring again for any of those classes and if her privileges haven’t been revoked by the coordinator for this fiasco, well she won’t be getting any help in any case.
Even their teacher agreed with me on that point.
Bet they’re gonna wish they let someone know.
Now as some background as to how I came to be there and how this is all set up.
When I started tutoring, I was sent there by my Business and Accounting Professors. As I tell everyone, I’m there as a punishment for sleeping through a few terms. Just not sure who’s getting punished.
Now for the job(s). Technically, while this is all the same job and responsibilities that I perform, I am actually employed by two different programs, the first comes from the title of Tutor. This is the title I use when I help the “standard students”. I say this to differentiate them from those I work with as an Academic Mentor.
The Academic Mentor title is one of those superfluous titles that are given out every once in a while. In this case it was given to me, along with a pay bump, by a program that I tutor for called the Trio Program. Nice program in and of itself, it’s there to help disabled students, first generation college students, and those with financial difficulties. If I weren’t lazy, I would have been able to join it myself. Alas, the curse of all college students struck me and procrastination won the day in that battle but I eventually won the war.
Anyhow, along with the change in title and pay raise, the requirements to be an Academic Mentor were also raised up to having had to have a degree in the program that you’re tutoring in.
Now I explain that these two programs are important to know for two reasons. First being that I need to have the correct information about the student to know where to put them on my paperwork. The second is that TRIO students are to only be tutored by the Academic Mentors. Meaning that while there might be a Tutor that could cover the subject, they aren’t allowed to take on the TRIO Student. What this meant for them is that I am currently the sole Accounting/Business/Office Programs Academic Mentor in the college.
Nice position to have if you can get it.
Onto the stories, listed from least to most annoying troubles I've run into!
Maybe I Should Get a Recording of This
Oh really? That’s interesting to know. You’ll want to click there.
No worries. Okay, we’re going to do this just like last time.
Ey, no worries. Right. Your password goes there.
No worries, we can fix that.
No worries. Just hit CTRL+Z. Lovely little thing, ain’t it?
No worries, just show me how you’ve done.
No worries. . .
No worries. . .
Love that phrase, along with “Don’t Panic”. Comforts the students and keeps me from getting too frustrated with a few of them. I understand that you’re uncomfortable with computers and some modern technology. That’s what I’m here for, no worries. You’re not bothering me by asking questions about how things work, what I get bothered by is the fact that you don’t seem to be absorbing this information consistently.
You seem to be able to instantly assimilate something complicated like how to enter a long complicated formula in that Excel Worksheet consisting of a nested IF statement doing an index array lookup to figure out which location had the highest net income for the third quarter. Wonderful. Now you want to save it.
Yes, you go to the File tab now, yes, you want to click on Save As since you haven’t done it yet. Yes, we want to go to your little USB/Flash/Thumb Drive, whatever you want to call it. Yes, yes, we can now rename your file. Well does the book give you a name? Then it’s rather subjective so you can just choose one.
Some days I could repeat myself like that for hours. In fact it’s not so much could but that I have repeated myself like that for hours. It gets a bit annoying when someone has done something repeatedly but still gets a bit of stage fright when they’re informed that it’s time to do it once again.
Perhaps not very sucky since I know that some of the folks I tutor are of the older generation just getting used to things and having mistaken the class as an actual introduction to computers. But still a light annoyance nonetheless.
Just Wait a Second There. . .
I now have a rule. It’s a nice rule that I tell all my students. You can e-mail me if you have questions, or if you need a quick hand with the homework. I won’t do it for you, of course, but I’ll steer you back the right way or tell you where you’ve gone wrong and if it’s too horrible then I’ll tell you how to fix it.
But the rule. The rule is that I accept no more than 35 e-mails from a single person per day. Like any other strange or unusual rule there’s a story behind it. In this case it comes from an accounting class with a long complicated bit of spreadsheet that needed to be filled out and all the students had some trouble actually getting started and figuring out how to fill in things.
Then there was this lass. She would get concerned that things weren’t balancing right and ask me why. I would take a look over it and compare it with the several versions I’ve done myself (No sense tutoring someone in something you don’t understand and haven’t actually done yourself). Then I would send an e-mail back to her explaining what had gone wrong and what she would need to look for to correct the errors.
Job done, for about 5 minutes. Another e-mail pops back up with the attachment of the latest copy of their spreadsheet. Once again, go over it, look for problems and return the e-mail within ten minutes. Fairly good turnaround when you consider the teacher can take a week to reply to an e-mail.
But rinse and repeat until I finally get tired and it’s running on 1am, both of us getting frustrated and I’m getting ready to send step by step instructions on how to shut down the computer and go to bed.
Then the next e-mail from her nails the problem that we’ve been having right on the head.
Apparently between the time it takes for me to look over what they’ve done and compose an e-mail, they have changed things around so much that my advice is no longer applicable to their work. Well dear goodness, would it have actually killed you to wait the ten minutes that have been shown it takes for me to compose an e-mail and then taken the advice in that? Would it?!
Eventually I just told her to stop, e-mailed her an old copy of the file that she had sent me, and then gave her instructions on how to proceed from there as well as told her to stop fiddling around with things before she could get a response from me.
On the plus side, the revelation that I had actually spent that many e-mails helping a person on my own, unpaid time led to the creation of the “Admin Hour” for Academic Mentors where if they work with Trio students for a specific amount of time per term then they’re allowed to claim an additional hour to cover any work that is done from home. That’s always nice.
Could’ve Let Someone Know
For all that I love my job, there are times that I absolutely hate the students I’m supposed to deal with.
This is one of them.
Sitting alone in a room, the temperature raising up as I sit inside the greenhouse of a room. Just waiting there. Waiting for someone that I’m scheduled to tutor for two hours that day, that means you have two classes you need help with and that’ll be four hours a week total at the Academic Mentor rate. Nice bit of money there after all.
Close the curtains, walk to the door in the off chance they may have not gotten the right meeting room. Unlikely since the Coordinator always sends off directions for the first meeting.
Half hour in, finally accept that the person is a no show. Go home and I can send off an e-mail to the coordinator to find out what’s happening there. Get the response from her that apparently between the coordinator leaving for the day and our session time the student had called and left a message canceling for the day.
Ok, the expectations paperwork state that you need to give 24 hour notice before canceling and that missing the first session is grounds for taking away tutoring privileges. And at least you had actually called. . . just not during the stated office hours for the coordinator. . .But hey, I’m lenient and I’ve been told that you’re promising that you’re going to show for the next session.
Come the next session. So there I am. Sitting alone in a room, the temperature raising up as I sit inside the greenhouse of a room. Just waiting there. Waiting for someone that I’m scheduled to tutor for two hours that day, that means you have two classes you need help with and that’ll be four hours a week total at the Academic Mentor rate. Nice bit of money there after all.
Half hour past again, no show.
Could’ve let someone know.
Go home, e-mail the coordinator again saying that this is now their first strike and asking if they could find out why they missed this session after promising they’d be there. Get a reply the next time the coordinator is there that there’s been no response from the student and I let the coordinator know that I’ll wait for them again that afternoon just in case they show up.
So there I am
And there you can see where this is going.
Three times I’ve been stood up by the same student. But that’s alright, I was able to fill some of the time by helping a student that had stayed beyond their session time because they actually wanted to learn. Sure I don’t get paid for it, but at least it’s better than sitting there waiting for someone that wasn’t going to show.
Come the fourth day and here I find out that apparently they had dropped the two classes.
Could’ve let someone know.
So, I sat quietly staring at the e-mail from the coordinator informing me of what happened and I tallied up the opportunity costs of waiting for this piece of. . . humanity. Figure out how much they actually cost me for near about 12 hours that I won’t get back since those slots weren’t filled and that I won’t get the standard No Show/No Call reimbursement either since the person never even filled out the agreement form with me. Would have only been barely even 1/10th of the amount I would have gotten otherwise, but it would have still been something.
I started to seethe and review the e-mails.
Then I started to laugh. Sweet revenge could be had in a fashion. I thanked the coordinator for letting me know about the situation, expressed my displeasure at the student and their behaviour. And then I explained what I had learned.
This student was from the TRIO Program. This student was a business program student. This student had let us know their full name. This student was now on my black list. Remember earlier when I said that I was the sole Business/Accounting/Office Program Academic Mentor? This means that she’s right up that proverbial creek without a paddle and there I am laughing like a loon and trying to tip her canoe over with an 11 foot pole.
She signs up for tutoring again for any of those classes and if her privileges haven’t been revoked by the coordinator for this fiasco, well she won’t be getting any help in any case.
Even their teacher agreed with me on that point.
Bet they’re gonna wish they let someone know.
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