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.