Dear Queenie,
I’m a college student with a part-time job tutoring a rich family’s children after school. Their mother wants them to get good grades so they can get into college and gets vexed at me when their grades aren’t as good as she wants.
Queenie, help! I don’t want to lose this job!—Under pressure
Dear Under pressure,
Explain to your students’ mother that your job is to teach her children how to do their schoolwork, not to do it for them or to stand over them and coach them through it step by step. Their job is to listen to and remember what you tell them and to put the information to use in doing their work for themselves.
Remind their mother that you will not be present to coach her children through their quizzes and exams in school or, when the time comes, their college entrance exams, so if she wants her children to go to college she had better find a way to motivate them to learn what they need to know and to do their schoolwork to the best of their ability – and to settle down and do the work instead of playing games and cruising on social media.
