A private tutor's week, from the inside

A private tutor’s week is rarely the week a new tutor imagines. The lessons themselves are not the largest part of it, and they are not the part that decides whether the work is sustainable. What decides it is everything that happens around the lessons, repeated for ten years.

This is a composite week, drawn from the rhythms of solo tutors who teach maths, English, music and languages. The details vary by subject. The shape almost never does.

Monday

She does not teach on Mondays. Two years in, she moved them. Mondays were the day every parent emailed about the week ahead, every cancellation arrived, and every Sunday’s good intentions had to become a plan. Teaching on top of that had been quietly impossible.

Monday morning is for replies. Six emails, two WhatsApps, and a voice note from a mother whose son has an exam in three weeks and has now admitted he has not done the practice paper. By eleven, the week is roughed out. The afternoon is two hours of preparation. For each of Tuesday’s lessons she rereads the notes from last week. She prints one worksheet she has been meaning to make for a month. For one student she decides the right thing tomorrow is not the planned topic but the topic he avoided last week. The decision goes in writing before she forgets.

Tuesday

Tuesday is four lessons. The first is the easy one, a long term student who arrives ten minutes early and warms up by chatting. The second is harder. He arrives flat, says school was rubbish, and spends the first fifteen minutes refusing to engage with the topic. She does not push. Sideways instead. She picks up something she had not planned, and the lesson is salvaged in the second half. Afterwards, one line in the note. Not the topic, the temperament. He needs the easier start when he is like this.

The third lesson is a no show. The parent texts forty minutes in to say the child has a temperature. She has a policy for this. Today she does not enforce it, because the family has been with her for three years and the child is genuinely ill. The missed lesson is marked against the package and the week moves on. The fourth lesson is good. A breakthrough on long division that has been weeks in the making. To the child she says nothing. To the parent she sends a short message that evening, because the parent needs to hear it more than the child does.

Wednesday

Wednesday is the heaviest day. Five lessons, back to back, four to nine in the evening. Between lessons she writes the note from the last one on her phone, in the kitchen, while the kettle boils. Three lines. What we did, what I noticed, what to pick up next. Ninety seconds. Two years of doing it this way, and she has stopped questioning whether it is worth the time. It is the difference between walking into the next lesson with a plan and walking in trying to remember.

The last lesson of the night is a new student’s trial. His mother has been polite but anxious on email. He himself is quiet, careful, plainly bright, and a little embarrassed to be sitting in a tutoring session. For the first twenty minutes she talks with him. By the end, he has done one piece of work he is proud of and the mother has booked the next four lessons. Payment for the trial goes through by card while she clears up. Free trials are a thing of the past for her now. That change was harder to announce than to enforce.

Thursday

Thursday is two lessons and a long admin afternoon. Two invoices for blocks that have ended. One careful message to a family whose child has been drifting for a month, suggesting a slightly different shape for the next block. A short call with another tutor she trades referrals with. She sends three monthly summaries, one for each student whose block has finished, built from her own session notes. Each summary takes about ten minutes. Half a Sunday used to disappear into them.

In the evening she does the thing she finds hardest. A short follow up message to a family who had been weekly for two years and stopped without warning, six weeks ago. The message is short and warm and asks nothing. About a third of the families she has written to this way come back. The other two thirds either reply kindly or not at all. None of them have minded. The fear of sending it is always larger than the cost of having sent it.

Friday

Friday is three lessons in the afternoon and the week is almost over. The first is the student who had the bad Tuesday. He is back to himself. They cover what they had planned. The note is written. The second is a long standing pupil who has done a mock exam and wants to talk about it. They do no new material. Slowly, question by question, they work through the paper. He leaves the lesson clearer than he started. That is the lesson.

The last lesson is short, a half hour piano lesson she keeps in her schedule out of fondness for a long term family. By five she has closed her notebook. The week’s payment view is open on her phone while she makes dinner. One invoice is still outstanding. A single calm reminder goes out. It is paid before she goes to bed.

Saturday morning

She does not teach on Saturdays either. She used to. A year after the Monday one, she gave up the Saturday morning slot, when she realised her own children had stopped asking her to come to anything on a weekend because the answer was always no. On Saturday morning she reads back through the week’s notes. Eighteen lessons, eighteen short notes, two no shows, three monthly summaries, four invoices, one trial booked, one quiet follow up sent. The week looks small written down. It does not feel small while it is happening.

Almost nobody describes the work between the lessons when they describe private tutoring. Monday emails, Wednesday notes in the kitchen, Thursday follow ups nobody asked for, Friday invoice chases, Saturday read backs. Lessons are the visible part of the job. Everything around them is the part that decides whether the work lasts a year or a decade.