Tutoring on the dark side...

Push for A’s at Private Schools Is Keeping Costly Tutors Busy

"Private SAT tutors have been de rigueur at elite New York private schools for a generation, but the proliferation of subject-matter tutors for students angling for A’s is a newer phenomenon that is beginning to incite a backlash. Interviews with parents, students, teachers, administrators, tutors and consultants suggest that more than half of the students at the city’s top-tier schools hire tutors, an open secret that the schools seem unable to stop." (Anderson, Jenny. June 7, 2011.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/education/08tutors.html?src=me&ref=general (accessed June 8, 2011).

I can barely keep my head on.  

Unable to write coherent sentence.

Just read the article.  There are tutors in NYC charging $195-$795 per hour...nay...per 50 minutes. 

One the one hand, we get a sense of sweet freedom...a beckoning, a reminder of a distant bright possible future....of buying a gorgeous condo from the tutoring fees for one class alone....

On the other hand, it feels skeevy and wrong.

But to be fair, these companies also provide pro bono services, so the rich offset tutoring for poor kids.

There is so much to discuss here.  Why does Riverside high school discourage tutoring--that alone is enough for a Phd thesis.  Why is there a need to evaluate kids based only on the information disseminated to them whilst in your presence?  If we want to test or grade them only on what they could have possibly learned in your classroom, then forbid them from reading the newspaper, from trolling the internet, from visiting the library.


Why is a mother paying SIX FIGURES to tutor her child through high school?  What high school is that hard?  For six figures, those tutors had better be cloning themselves, getting face transplants to look like the student, and taking the tests themselves.


Also...does it make you as a student feel dumb when it takes $100,000 for you to get "A's"?


One sentence pops out at me:


"Michael Michelson, director of academic studies at Riverdale, said the school’s policy was to discourage tutors, and to make teachers accessible for extra help."


Um...at first this seems innocuous...but the word "make" clangs in my brain.  I'm sure they do "make"--as in "force"--the teachers to be available for extra help.  


I sincerely hope these teachers leave work promptly at 3 pm or whenever their work day officially ends...and make their way speedily to a tutoring center not terribly close to their own primary place of employment...and charges 500 bucks an hour for their services (oh, had I read the entire article FIRST..I would have seen that they are doing this!  SCORE!  NYC private school teachers... you make me proud...)


One almost feels tempted to barter a solution.  All the parents band together and pay the teacher(s) to make the class(es) less difficult.  If you were going to spend $10,000 on tutoring for ONE CLASS...wow...that teacher could stand to make millions!  I feel a dystopian novella coming on...


But to me, the saddest part of the story is how people feel unable to exercise their free speech rights: more than one parent in the story seems to feel squeamish about speaking to the press because the schools which their children attend discourage open communication.






(Thanks to L for this head-up.)  

Deductions and Time

Can you deduct for extra, uncompensated, volunteer hours?

No.

Apparently, neither can lawyers.

But, they deduct for their expenses, such as travel, and out-of-pocket expenditures.

Translation: the cake you bought the pizza you bought, the supplies, the pencils, the stickers, the clothes for the child who had no gym clothes, the books, the posters, the chalk, the paper.

You're about to go out right now and buy something for your classroom, aren't you! Gotcha!

More to the point--a lawyer accounts for every moment they work. Every minute. One time I asked a friend who works at the world's largest law firm how exactly they do that. He showed me his written log. Now, they may have fancier, zingier ways of keeping track. And, he showed me that they log time in chunks, say, every ten minutes, or 15 mins. So I asked, and it's just the honor system? The clients just believe you, believe that's how much you worked?

"Yes. We're professionals." And then they are paid for that time. They must bill. Forgive me if I am describing it bumblingly, like an anthropologist visiting some exotic tribe. But being paid for one's labor is so foreign to me, so confusing, so unfamiliar, it seems like the culture of some alien, undiscovered world. And yes, lawyers work very hard. And cry all the way to the bank.

***

Start logging your overtime. If it's too hassle-y, "use the honor system." Guesstimate. You will probably underestimate. It's easy. You keep a calendar. Jot down when you leave. Every day. And start setting a timer for all that grading you do at night. Set it for one hour. When you've reset it twice, three times, four times, it might be time to consider what else you could be doing with YOUR TIME.


Looking for Tax Deductions? Don't Forget Pro Bono Expenditures, from "National Law Journal:

http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202428764771&slreturn=1&hbxlogin=1