Online Courses

I hate online courses.  Especially poorly designed ones.  I am in the middle of helping my client’s husband on an online psychology course, with layout designed for the web-surfer of 1999  The text is all in different colors, and the locations of everything are scattered all over.  This is a good sample of really bad web design, and a really bad UI.

The trouble with online courses is that they only work when they are really well designed.  This course is not well designed, and the student is ~50 years old, who has never done this before.  A good UI is essential for learning, much less navigation.  I am here, sitting and looking at him, hopelessly trying to figure this out.  It really looks and feels a bit pathetic.  He’s not learning psychology, and is having trouble with all the weird directions that they gave.

But hey, it’s work, and it’s $.

Angry Clients

Angry and abusive parents really result in really angry tutors who refuse to provide a good service.  I hope she realizes how far I bend over for her, and that she needs to show some appreciation.  That much said, I still made some money off of all that.

High Strung Parents

One of the worst things about tutoring is dealing with parents with unrealistic expectations.  Sometimes they’re just overwhelmed and too stressed out about their child’s academic performance, and I ended up getting the brunt of it.

Tonight was one of these nights, when I get a message from my kid, essentially from the mom accusing me of leaving without the work completed and how irresponsible I was.

So I ended up doing the kid’s assignment.  Hopefully it’s good enough.  If not, well that’s too fuckin bad.

Tutoring is a joy when you see the kid doing well, but it’s horrid when you have to deal with parents like that

Losing the joy.

I really don’t know when I started to lose the joy in tutoring kids.  I used to have so much fun doing it.  Then slowly but surely it became a necessary evil.  But now, it’s just torture.  Half (or is it all?) of my kids don’t care, and the other half (or is it all?) of them dislike me.  For the most part, these are pretty bright kids.  Some are even exceptionally bright.  But I think for the most part they do have some form of learning disability (heh), and are on some form of medication.  The medication no doubt affects them.  However, I think kids are really using it as an excuse to not do work – or worse yet – to have me do work for them.

Sometimes the kid just want some help to drag their grade up – by their own effort or otherwise.  Some just ended up using me as a crutch.

To be honest, sometimes I rather it worked out that way – doing the work for them and having the kids shut up is often the easy way out.  It’s unethical, but it is pretty decent money, and it’s pretty easy money.  I can do most of this stuff in my sleep, and I get my kids’ grades to rise, which ultimately pleases the parents.  But sometimes it pisses me off how little they care.  Maybe I should charge more money.

I just need a different gig – or maybe just different kids.

Tutoring Nonsense

I think everyday, when I have something interesting to write about regarding this tutoring nonsense that I do from time to time, I will actually write about it and document it here.  Some of it is downright frustrating, but some of it is pretty hilarious as well.  Maybe I can do some kinda NaNoWriMo thing about it….