The story so far...

Well, I'm now almost halfway through my second week and starting to find my feet a little, so I thought I'd write something about my new job and first impressions of the same...

For starters, what I'm actually doing is working as a tutor for a small group of 17-19 year olds who are studying business administration and customer service. They're part of a programme that will, if they provide the relevant evidence of meeting the criteria, give them recognised qualifications in those subjects, as well as functional skills (basically, maths, English and ICT). In an ideal world, these folks would be leaving this 6-month course with some work experience under their belts and qualifications equivalent to GCSE, though it's already clear that we are not living in an ideal world!

First issue is that the course started in March and so I am taking over from another tutor, who has at least been promoted within the company rather than being booted out, so hopefully that's a good sign! However, we're currently in the middle of 'this course used to be fun!' with associated teenage temper tantrums and whining, because I am Making Them Work and this is not OK.

The previous tutor has also been focussing on the business admin stuff rather than the functional skills (since that's his background), so there's been lots of testing of maths and English but nothing to really deal with the gaps in their knowledge which mean there are questions they continue to keep getting wrong. An easy example: homophones like there/their/they're. Subject-verb agreement also seems to be a bone of contention, along with all sorts of issues around various aspects of maths.

So, to recap, I am Bad and Mean and the previous tutor should come back. ;)

There's also an issue about the speed (or significant lack of) at which they work the majority of the time, but this is actually helpful since it means that the stuff I prepped for the coming week is probably going to last me way longer than that!