Practice for tutors, not theory

In an online lesson the whiteboard is not “one more app” — it is the only place the student can watch you think. Here are four ways to write and draw in a lesson, an honest look at where each one stops, and what changes when the board belongs to a lesson, a student and a piece of homework.

What parents usually want from a tutor is not a report but reassurance: proof that the money is going somewhere. Writing that out in a message thread every month is work nobody pays for. Here is how to hand the answer to “how is it going?” to a portal — and what a family should see, and what it never should.

A student who forgets is almost never a student who does not care. They had a test, a shift change, a week that got away from them — and your Tuesday six o’clock quietly stopped existing. The fix is not a better memory on their side. It is a message that arrives without either of you thinking about it.

Most software notifies you and considers its job done. That is fine for a social feed and useless for a business, where a notification is usually a piece of unfinished work: someone owes money, someone cancelled, someone asked for a different time. The point is not to be told. It is to be told, act, and have it gone.

Ask a tutor with fifteen students who owes them money right now, and most will need twenty minutes and a bank statement to answer. Not because they are disorganised — because the information is spread across a calendar, a chat thread and a memory of what someone said in September.

Most tutoring analytics get looked at once, admired, and never used. That is usually a sign the numbers answer questions nobody asked. The useful ones are the four or five that, when they move, mean you should do something differently this week.

Every tutor keeps a record of some kind, and for most it is a notebook that answers exactly one question — what did we do last time. That is the least valuable of the three questions worth answering, and the only one a notebook is any good at.

The expensive students are not the ones you never reached. They are the ones who messaged you on a Tuesday, got an answer on Friday, and had booked someone else by then. That gap is the cheapest thing in your whole business to fix.

After a few years every tutor has a couple of hundred worksheets, reading packs and past papers. The question is not really where they are stored. It is whether you can find the right one in ten seconds before a lesson — and whether it reaches the student without getting lost in a chat.

A classroom teacher already knows how to teach, which is the hard part. What catches people out is everything the school used to do around it: the timetable, the register, the money, and the parent who now messages you directly at nine in the evening.

Finding students feels like luck when you have none and like a system once you have twelve. It was always a system; the difference is that with twelve you can see which parts of it are working.

Search for tutoring software and you get five categories of product wearing one label. They solve different problems, and picking the wrong category is a more expensive mistake than picking the wrong product within the right one.

Everyone keeps records of their students. The disagreement is only about where, and the answer changes as the roster grows — usually about two months after it should have.

Most tutors set their first rate by asking one other tutor what they charge, then going slightly under. Every problem with pricing for the next three years follows from that one afternoon.

A schedule does not break because of how many students are in it. It breaks because the truth about Tuesday lives in four places, and two of them disagree.