Pros
- Company provides textbooks and curriculums for numerous subjects ranging from upper elementary to high school level - Pay rate is pretty good, and there are usually enough students that hours are reliable for teachers who want them - Scheduling is pretty flexible when the EC is on top of things, and management usually request politely if they need you to come in - Teachers get Fridays off - Free company polo shirts
Cons
Most of these problems started within the last year. Company leadership changed, and apparently the focus has become more about profit than effective teaching or helping students. - The 3 to 1 student-teacher ratio is simply a bad method of tutoring. The students often compete for the teacher's attention. This problem is exacerbated when the students are of different grade levels and/or getting tutored in different subjects, resulting in inefficient teaching. - Teachers are part-time workers, and the only benefit we get is paid sick leave, but even that is difficult to use without management being uncooperative. - Some of the textbooks have errors or are out of date and there seems to be no sign of them being updated anytime soon. - For pre-elementary students and certain subjects, there is no curriculum/textbooks provided by the company, so it's on the teachers to find resources and create curriculums from scratch. - CD has been enrolling more pre-elementary students and expecting tutors to teach them how to read and write, a task made near-impossible by the fact that those students usually come in for maybe two hours each week. - ECs are overworked and constantly having to take on more duties than one worker should, leading to high turnover of the position and subpar workers being hired out of desperation. - Multiple periods of weeks or even months without an EC, resulting in unpredictable scheduling being done by the CD, who failed to communicate effectively. Teachers also had to pick up the slack of EC duties, which was not part of the job description. - Even with competent ECs, students often show up unscheduled or at the wrong time but tutors are expected to teach them anyway with no warning. - CD often overrides EC scheduling to make last-minute changes, forcing tutors to adapt to unexpected students, making the mandatory prep time moot. - CD often pressures teachers to tutor subjects that they are not familiar with or qualified for. For example, a US History tutor being forced to teach AP Euro because "both subjects are history," or a Biology/Chemistry tutor being told to teach Physics because "they're a science teacher."