I work as an online English tutor these days; I enjoy tutoring and the extra income is also useful. I started doing this back in my college days when I worked at the campus Writing Center; a lovely, comfortable round room where me and my colleagues sat and worked with students of all kinds on writing projects of all kind… face to face.
I only mention that obvious part because education has moved far away from face to face thanks to the pandemic of 2020, and may never go back to it.
And that’s a shame.
There is so much about face to face tutoring that just cannot be accomplished online. I can’t easily and quickly expand on examples and ideas online as I can sitting at a table across from a student, stubby pencil in hand, crafting quick rough diagrams and connecting relatable points by drawing arrows between them.
I cannot impart the importance of a passage, the feeling and context of a theme, by simply typing into a chat box on my laptop, who knows how many miles between me and the student I’m trying to help.
Worst of all, I cannot get up from the table and walk over to the reference shelf and grab a book and show students what I exactly mean by showing them examples from other articles, short stories, or novels, as the case may be.
No, I cannot. I must simply try my damnedest to keep students’ attention from diverting toward some whatever in their home around them, without the use of my gaze and body language like I can do during in-person sessions, hoping and praying students are actually learning how to write a thesis statement, organize an essay, or cite their sources properly.
And try as I may, I cannot stop the students from simply ending the session if they’re bored or just don’t like my ‘tone’, etc.
Yes, I am paid regardless of the outcome, but that’s not the tutor I want to be. I enjoy seeing the light of recognition and understanding of a concept in students’ eyes, the relieved smile where, only few minutes ago, existed the grimace of confusion and fear. I want to see that I have helped, and that help has improved students’ academic chances of progress.
I want to sense students’ brain cells growing and their synapses crackling. I want to see them learn.
Alas, that is no longer the goal of the American education system. The already troubling trend of simply making the numbers look good by just giving students ‘the answers’ and securing school funding has been boosted by the Covid-19 pandemic; it has given schools and universities an excuse to crank up the student production lines, passing them from one grade to the next without ensuring proper learning and implementing appropriate education frameworks.
And as if that wasn’t horrible enough, the pandemic has also given rise to online schools, wherein students attend exclusively online classes without the support of any professors, teachers, counselors, and the material they need to learn properly.
Worse yet, these schools admit any and all students regardless of their academic ability or knowledge. So many times have I read upper level college papers written at elementary school level, without the slightest idea of how to assemble a sentence, never mind a paragraph!
But the check has cleared, so on you go students, stumbling in the dark without any proper assistance, desperately asking tutors like me for help, which I just told you I can’t really provide with the quality I prefer.
And that, dear readers, is how people like Trump become president.