Get SEATed

I am an online tutor.  I’ve been doing this for about four and a half years now.  In that time, I’ve helped literally thousands of students to complete questions ranging from drawing an atomic model to geologic time scales and everything in between. 

Today’s students are natural multitaskers.  They have grown up in the computer age and are so used to using chat programs and surfing the web that they don’t have to give it a second thought.  It all comes very easy to them.  Why not take advantage of their interest in the online environment to provide a method of completing homework? 

For me, there are so many advantages to this type of work.  I can work from home, any day of the week.  I don’t have to use gas to get to a student’s house (neither do their parents).  I get to help students who really want to learn and are interested in trying.  The extra income is wonderful (and sometimes vital in these economic times).  So many times, I get into a session with a student who doesn’t understand a topic, but through questioning, we reach a “light bulb” moment when you can tell things start to click.  That is an excellent feeling.

Of course, there are some disadvantages, although they are far outweighed by the advantages.  It’s hard to get tone across a written chat, so you have to pick your wording carefully at times.  Also, you aren’t able to carry out hands on experiments as you would in a classroom, but most of the time, that is not really a problem since the students have the data already and just need to answer questions about it.

I plan on doing this for the foreseeable future.  Even after a long day at work, I enjoy coming home and helping out students online.  In an odd way, it actually helps me to relax because I know I’m helping out students from around the country to get their work done. 

Anybody else out there do online tutoring?  Share your thoughts and experiences please.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Education, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.