The New Tutor Gig
How online learning created a new side hustle
I am flat-on-my-back exhausted. I dedicated my morning to helping a first-grade student I’ll call Xavier with his online school.
If you’ve never done a Zoom class with your child or any child, I want you to take a moment to fall to your knees and thank every deity in the sky for your amazing life.
I wasn’t the teacher. Instead, I filled in as an at-home helper or at least the helper’s sub.
I did everything I could to make my charge’s online classes bearable. I jumped up and down and shouted with joy during online P.E. I silently mouthed “Listen to your teacher,” to reinforce the English lesson. I pushed Xavier’s iPad into his limp hands while his Spanish teacher plowed through a bog of a grammar lesson. In his defense, her classes are awful.
Every moment counted. Every second my student got distracted he missed something crucial and I had to repeat it while listening to the teacher’s next sentence. It took every ounce of energy to communicate that the image on the screen mattered — pay attention, this is school now.
The new teaching gig
Educating is a strange mental dance. A teacher must have one eye on everyone’s behavior and another on her work on the whiteboard. At the…
