Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Assholes

Let me tell you about Jack. Jack is the center of the universe. I know he's the absolute center of the universe because he says he is, and Jack wouldn't lie. He is also a seventeen-year-old boy who comes to me for help in a difficult subject.
I do most of the tutoring at this small facility in which I am an administrator, a manager, if you will, and it is my great pleasure to tutor Jack in the esoterica that he must learn in order to pass this particular class, graduate, and go off to his college at which I am certain he will do great and wonderful things. Jack knows--for Jack knows all--that the school teacher from whence he learns Esoterica is an evil woman, and must be punished. Jack has decided that the appropriate punishment for his evil school teacher is to treat her with contempt and disrespect, explaining to her in a myriad of ways why she is unworthy to kiss his feet, much less teach him anything.
Jack's evil teacher, for she is truly evil, does not recognize Jack's status as the center of the universe and refuses to give him extra time to complete his assignments when his social life interferes with his schoolwork. She also does not give him half-credit when the only reason he got a particular question wrong is that he could not carve out time for this insignificant woman to correctly read the material she so rudely demands he understand.
Jack also refuses to show respect to people who have not earned it, most certainly not to the woman from whose womb he sprang, who has fed and clothed him for all of his seventeen years, because she has recently fallen from grace and now refuses to recognize him as the ruler of all creation as well. Jack does not respect me, for I am obviously incompetent, else I would not be tutoring him. I would certainly not be so bold as to pretend I know more than him were I a proper woman.

Seriously folks, he's an asshole. This boy came into the facility a few days ago, nearly an hour late for his appointment. I expressed surprise as I was no longer expecting him to be there, and he said "I've got to call that woman." At which point he stormed out into the lobby, called his mother on his cellphone and proceeded to hurl epithets and obscenities at her. He also lied to his mother and told her I had canceled his appointment without telling anyone. He came back into the center and muttered something, the only word of which I understood was "moron."
I said, "excuse me?!"
Jack's reply: "I'm sorry, but she IS a moron."
"Are you talking about your mother?"
"Yeah. She's a mooooorrrooon!"
At this point, Cranky did indeed lose her temper. I spoke quite sharply to him, saying that he was never to insult his mother in my presence. He shrugged, laughing it off.
"No," I said, "I'm quite serious. You DO NOT ever say that in my hearing again. Do we have an understanding?"
"Yeah," Jack said, somewhat cowed.
Jack and I worked past his appointment time, as I did not want to punish his mother, but rather him. I wanted him to understand that coming in late did not excuse him. I am rather close to telling Jack that he will not be welcome back, and advising his mother to let him fail, and force him to pay for summer school himself, or else repeat this grade.
I blame his mother for this, in part, because she obviously allowed this narcissus to take root and bloom in her child young. It's easier to let them have their way when they are younger, because they are still cute. However, this boy seems to believe that the entire world should change for him. I see this a lot, but I have never met a child so blatant about it. He has no charm, no sophistication, about it. He, wielding his unpleasant disposition and nasally voice as a club, requires sycophants. When one is unwilling to give him what he desires, he responds by telling one that one is stupid, or rude, or something equally untrue and unpleasant.
I wish I could be there the first time he tries his arrogance on a college professor. I would enjoy watching the professor tear him to pieces (metaphorically speaking, of course) and his learning that perhaps the universe does not exist only for his amusement.
The seeds of such behavior are planted young. The little child who pats his mother's leg repeatedly while chanting "mom-mom-mom-mom-mom-mom!" is not going to suddenly grow out of it. He will find different way to express his self-absorption, but it will not diminish. To reward this behavior is to allow it to grow. Giving into bullying never helped anyone stop the bully. It only encourages the activity. I wish I could feel sorry for him, knowing that he will never be successful or happy as long as he is so unpleasant and whining, but I don't. I feel no pity or sympathy, because this is a horrible young man. He is rude, selfish, self-centered, self-important, and treats me as a chamber maid. I don't respond well to such treatment, and I dread seeing him. I truly dread it.
Have I mentioned that Jack will be here tonight? He will. And I dread his appearance.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Are You A Tutoring Center?

I had a bit of a surreal moment just now. A man of indeterminable age called me. I answered with "XXXX Learning Center, how can I help you?" To which he responded "Are you a tutoring center?"
No, but I work in one, I thought as I responded in the affirmative.
"Ok, how much is it?" the disembodied voice asks.
Well, the tutoring center costs about $20,000 a month to run. "That depends on the program," I say. "Our prices can range from $30 to $100 an hour. Can you tell me what the student needs help with?"
"Math."
Well, that narrows it down. "Ok, can you be more speci--"
"Multiplication." Now the voice sounds angry....
"Right," I can't help it. I chuckle a little. "Well, that covers a pretty wide area. Can you tell me anything else? What grade level are we looking at? Are we talking about multiplication tables or binomials or what? Can you be any more specific?"
"No." Now the voice sounds disappointed.
"You don't know how old the student is?"
"18," barks the impatient voice. I now know that this is the voice of a young man who needs help for himself. Understanding achieved.
"Well, if you're just looking for the really basic stuff, like multiplication tables, then you're probably going to want to look online for flashcards and the like. If you just googled 'multiplication help' you'd probably find what you needed for free, as opposed to $50+ here."
"Ok." Click.

This happens way more often than you can imagine.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

A Day In The Life

Somewhere in the fevered recesses of my caffeine-addled brain, there are mythical readers of my blog just dying to know what a day at the Tutoring Center is like. This post is for them.

My contract, for I am salaried employee and not an hourly-wage earner, requires that my hours are from 10:30 in the morning until 7:00 in the evening. As long as I have worked here, these have never been my hours. The Big Boss requests, nay demands, that I am here no later than 9:30. He would prefer 9:00, but he is a lenient man. Occasionally, I do not arrive until 9:45, and if the Big Boss is at this location today, he will mention my tardiness then magnanimously state that it shall be overlooked. So, in the interests of not having someone angry at me every day, I arrive between 9:00 and 9:30 nearly every morning.
I disarm the security system, turn on the lights, sit at my desk, and boot up the computer. If BB is around, he and I will have a discussion in which he asks my opinions about a subject in which I am an expert, and then he will tell me why my opinions and relevant training and/or life experiences are inconsequential, because he has already decided on a course of action that will be sure to cause money to rain down from the sky. His plans are very often flawed, and depend on human nature changing suddenly overnight. His most recent plan involved attempting to get companies to do away with their own training systems to hire us, unproven and unknown, for just slightly less than they are currently paying for their training systems. Oh, what a brave and noble leader I have.
If BB is not around, I am able to immediately check messages and emails. If he is around, this process is delayed for approximately two hours. Regardless, once I am able to process all of my messages, I return phone calls, respond to emails, and make the appropriate changes to my daily schedule. Sometimes, these changes involve sick children, or children who want to sneak in an extra session due to an upcoming test or project. We are always as accommodating as possible. On the rare occasions I have had to tell a parent "no" because of an absolute impossibility, they always treat me with respect and dignity. These parents would never complain because their own planning failures meant that all of my time slots are booked for the day, and they would certainly not expect me to reschedule other students whose families were selfish enough to plan in advance. (I do hope you have detected the sarcasm in which this paragraph was marinated. My sarcasm marinade is the envy of all who taste it.) Typically, these schedule adjustments and message responses take an hour or two of my time. I type very quickly and I do not waste time chatting on the phone if I can possibly avoid it.
After all of the "brush fires" as they are amusingly called are put out, I begin to check over my students' lesson plans and materials for the day. I make sure that all of my facility's clients are taken care of as best I can. The industry calls this a "Binder Check" as the student lesson plans and records are kept in--drum roll, please--binders. Once I have completed the Binder Checks, at an average of 15 minutes per binder times the number of students for the day, it usually lunch time. If I have a particularly slow day, I have about an hour to kill before lunch.
During this time, I like to have some "me time." You may think this terrible of me, but I feel that I have earned it by arriving at work an hour early and being very, very good at what I do. (I am an incredibly modest educator. Aren't we all?) Plus, what else am I going to do? Stare at the phone and wait for it to ring? I can multi-task. I am perfectly capable of looking at pictures of domesticated animals with poorly-spelled captions AND waiting for the phone to ring concurrently.
At this point, it is approximately 1:00 and I take my lunch. I do not eat in peace if I stay in the center.
Someone always calls, wanders into the facility to look at my marketing materials, tell me about their child's life, and then act quite horrified when I tell them we do actually charge money for our services, and we charge a lot of money. That's another thing! Do not be surprised if a tutoring facility (or "Learning Center" as they are so often called these days) charges $40 or more per hour. We have to pay qualified tutors enough that they actually want to work for us, we must pay for the facility, its heat, light, water, internet access, phones, learning materials, etc. We must do all of this and turn enough of a profit that our owners do not despair and turn to some other endeavor. We are not free. If you cannot accept that, then you must at least learn to quietly fume. I am not in charge of this facility, I just run it. And I do not set our prices. If I did, I would not make them cheaper. I would make them MORE expensive and I would post those figures in 3-foot-high letters on our windows, just to make sure you know how much we charge before you walk in, because I am sick to death of being accused of price gouging by middle-aged harridans with professionally coiffed hair and nail salon claws, tailored designer-label clothing, and a $5 cup of foul-smelling coffee. I do not begrudge you those things if you have them. By all means, keep it up! You are stimulating the economy when it needs to be stimulated most, but do not pay for all of that frippery and then tell me that my services are not good enough to justify the cost. If you feel that way, then by all means leave. But do not lecture me on my "greed." I make less here than I would teaching public school, but that's all right because the hours are fantastic.
Where was I? Oh yes, lunch. After lunch I have nothing to do. Occasionally there is a project to work on, but for the most part, there is absolutely nothing to do until the students arrive. Nothing at all. I could do some of the instructors' jobs for them, but then if something happened to me, my instructors would have long forgotten how to complete the portions of their jobs that I had been attending to. So we authority figures in the facilities are banned by company policy from helping our subordinates unless there is a dire need.
I have taken it upon myself to do projects simply because I felt they needed doing, and I do not like sitting idle. I do want to feel as though I am earning my paycheck. I do not enjoy feeling like an indolent employee. Yet I often do. I feel rather shiftless as I sit here and write, despite the fact that I have completed every task assigned to me for the week and, even after asking for more things to do, am left to my own devices, which are apparently limited to surfing the internet and reviewing my Pre-Calculus skills. I am rather rusty, but there are only so many hours one can stare at those long-hand problems before one considers a swan dive off the nearest office building. If only my employer would let me write new material for us, that would be pure heaven, but alas, here I sit, underutilized.
Once the students begin to trickle in, close on the heels of their tutors, things get better. I do all of the advanced math tutoring here, because it saves us money, I enjoy it, and it gives me some time to interact with human beings. Also, because it's very difficult to hire advanced math tutors at our rates. They can charge $60/hr on their own getting children to come to their houses. Why someone would come work here instead of hanging out a shingle for the hours they would get is beyond me. Plus, there is the very tangible bonus that if I am tutoring students, the Helicopters can't get me. [insert Renfieldian laughter here]
The evening passes quickly from 3:00 to 7:00. Those four hours are pleasant, most of the time. The children, really, are the least frustrating part of this job. I do like children and I enjoy watching them learn. Working with children is never boring, and that is a relief from my very dull morning.
When I am not actively working with children, I deal with other possible conflicts, behavior issues with the students, questions from the instructors about a lesson that looked like a good idea at the time, but isn't quite working. I also play the role of Prize Fairy, in which I give students little trinkets for being good. I enjoy that part of my job the most, I think. I spend a good portion of my interaction with the younger students playing the hard-ass, and I do like to remind them I can be fun. When I am actively tutoring students, I still have to answer questions, but my instructors are careful to not interrupt me as I am explaining a concept. The instructors know how to keep these little issues from disrupting the students' work much, and we keep things running smoothly. I don't work with people I can't get along with, which is nice.
At the end of the day, the tutors and I clean up after our students, disinfect everything, and try to make sure our students records are in good order. We tell each other stories, and I learn about what's going on in their lives. I tell them amusing anecdotes and advise them on our students' home lives and special circumstances as needed. That doesn't happen often. Usually, the students tell their tutors before I have a chance to. My subordinates are good people, and I enjoy working with them.
I am the last to leave. I make sure things are ready for tomorrow, I turn out the lights, and reactivate the security. And then, around 7:30, sometimes 8:00, I see my husband, my pets, my home, for the first time in 11 hours. Teddy asks me how my day was, and I tell him that it was just another day, because how do you explain the tiny joys and sorrows to someone who wasn't there?
How can I explain, even now, with unlimited time to sort it out, and unlimited words to write it with, the tiny joys and sorrows, the aggravations and frustrations that turn a good day into a horrible one in the space of just one or two minutes? We all live that way, so perhaps no explanation is necessary, but I work in an industry that pre-supposes monkey wrenches thrown into our carefully built machines. I'm not sure if there is anything, short of emergency medicine, that is less reliable. At least in an ER, you don't expect calm or quiet. We are teachers first, and business people a distant second. We teachers are accustomed to order in our classrooms, to bells and schedules and routine. The move from that to the barely-controlled chaos of the tutoring facility is why your local tutor shop management changes so much. The part-timers can deal with an occasional "your student's not going to be here" or "can you fill in for Joe today?" but those of us who are here day in and day out, it starts to wear.
We all go back to the classroom eventually, or we get out of the front-of-house part of the job and retreat to our company's corporate centers, where we can interact with adults who we understand. We bounce from one tutoring place to another for a while, settling someplace "forever." Until, of course, the burn out starts. Then we toy with the idea of opening our own facility and not putting up with any of this nonsense! But it's just a toy. Like opening a restaurant in Albuquerque, taking up organic farming, or opening a Bed & Breakfast in some small, historic town that the tourists flock to.
We don't mean these things when we say them, but they're our anchors when we start to feel overwhelmed. They push the burnout back just a few more days, or weeks, or even months. We can tell ourselves that these jobs are temporary, and someday we'll be able to go live that dream. But the joy of the dream is in the imagining, not the doing. We choose to ignore all the frustrations we know come with any job and focus on that nebulous, distant, near-unattainable goal, much like we focused on our dreams of teaching rooms filled with bright, eager, fresh-scrubbed young faces which stood before equally bright and eager young minds waiting to drink in knowledge. We told ourselves that our classrooms wouldn't be filled with the kind of foolishness we'd seen in our tenure as smug overachieving hall monitors and teachers' pets.

This is a day in my life. It's filled with the complex dance of elation and exasperation, like anyone else's, over things that I should probably not worry about at all, let alone base my feelings of my own worth on. But there it is, as clear as I can make it, which in the re-reading, doesn't seem clear at all.