Were you all raised by wolves?

Warning: I'm going to get a little bitchy here.

I’ve been interviewing new tutors for my company. I can’t say this is my favorite task, but I do meet a lot of… interesting people. I have some feedback for some of them:

1. To the five people who never replied when I asked them for an interview - What’s wrong with you? I don’t see how you could lose interest or take another job since I emailed you back less than a day after you sent your resume. But if you did, wouldn’t it be courteous to decline and thank me? To the two people who started scheduling interviews with me and then just disappeared – Is this how your mothers raised you?

2. I know I work for a non-profit in the Bay Area. I know we work with under-served student communities. But we don’t require our employees to take a vow of poverty! It seems like none of you have a car! Sigh. I know you want to be all eco-fabulous and ride your bikes everywhere, but that makes it harder for us to get you client’s houses on time. Why don’t we compromise and you can get a hybrid. (Which reminds me; one of my students last week told me that she thought a hybrid car was “like ½ Ford and ½ Toyota or something.” Cute.)

3. To all the highly qualified humanities tutors I’ve talked to – Look. I want to hire you. But I can’t. It just… students usually need more help with math and science. When kids aren’t doing well in English or history, they get C’s and their parents assume they can help. When students aren’t doing well in math and science, they get D’s and F’s, their parents freak out and realize that they can’t help them. Then they call us. Don’t get me wrong, we DO tutor students in the humanities. But when we hire tutors who can teach math and science, they’ve probably managed to pass their humanities courses in college and can teach those subjects too. I’m sorry, but English tutors are a dime a dozen.

4. To the acrobat I interviewed last week – I was willing to look past the unicycle you rode to our interview. I was willing to believe that your previous job, teaching trapeze at Club Med, was… a youthful indiscretion. I’m even young enough to think that living in a warehouse with your acrobatics troupe is edgy and cool (although probably drafty). But dude. When you divide a negative number by another negative number, the answer is positive. Sure you remember calculus. Sure.

5. To the nice older lady I interviewed yesterday – If your three huge witch-like moles on your nose were distracting ME, how the hell is the student supposed to concentrate. You seemed very nice, and I think it’s cool that you used to be a journalist. But you’re just not our “type.” (And the test is called the S.A.T., not the Sat, like the abbreviation for Saturday. It was really getting on my nerves. Almost as much as when my students learn sine, cosine & tangent for the first time and pronounce it “sin” like as in the 7 deadly. Makes. Me. Nuts.)

6. To the failed substitute tutor turned part-time librarian – I’m sorry I couldn’t hire you. You seemed kinda pathetic and shy and I kept wanting to fix your hair. (It was soooo stringy!) But when I told you that your math skills were too rusty for us, how was I supposed to respond to your reply:

“I appreciate your honesty and want to thank you for meeting with me. I will say however that with any preparation, I would have been able to answer those questions. I can do that stuff. Honestly, you just happened to catch me on a bad morning. I felt pretty silly not being able to answer that stuff off the top of my head so I went home and looked up a lot of those questions. I was able to figure it out right away by just seeing the equation. I've helped a lot of kids understand math/science on a lot of levels and when I have a book in front of me and I have a minute or two to remember it, I feel I can be really helpful. I respect your decision and understand you have to do what you think is best for your students as well as your company. I just want to express that I feel like I can really help kids out. Maybe I couldn't remember the m=(y1-y2/(x1-x2) equation off the top of my head but as soon as I saw it, I remembered and knew that I would be able to explain it to anyone who did not understand it. I also understand the reasoning behind your methodology of ascertaining a tutors skills. I would like to also venture that observing my girlfriend teach, she never enters a classroom unprepared. I'd like to think that any student I would tutor, I would prepare myself to be able to help them the best way possible. Again, I respect your decision but I feel like I need to vouch for myself a little bit.”

Yes. That’s what tutoring is all about… preparation. When I hire you for this job, you get a little implant in your brain that allows you to read your student’s teacher’s thoughts. That way, when you walk into a student’s house, you’ve already had a chance to spend the day boning up on whatever subject material the teacher dreamed up when they were revising their lesson plans this summer. Oh yeah, and the company’ll pay you for that prep time too. In fact, we’re a non-profit because we use all our revenue to send your ass back to college to re-learn all the stuff you should’ve learned the first time around.

Oh, and dude, get your “girlfriend” to fix your hair.