Zoology with Will F.

WillTutor

Students do not select individual tutors through my company WillTutor. There’s only one tutor. My company is not an agency. Tutoring costs are $40-60 dollars per hour. You cannot participate in a free tutoring session before commiting to the service. There are no refunds for tutoring lessons. All transactions are final. I send a lesson plan prior to the scheduled lesson and have the tutee sign off on it; though no refunds exist - all lessons are final transactions. WillTutor operates out of what some consultants refer to as "a virtual office" by which the company's administrator means a worksite outside of the traditional office in which people still do the work associated with a traditional office. Tutors are entrepreneurs, i.e., they are self-employed. People who work in a virtual office can be either telecommuters, who work outside of a corporate office for an employer, or entrepreneurs, who are self-employed. The ‘virtual’ in the term ‘virtual office’ implies the use of technology. Tutoring services do not require a status operative from traditional worksites because the paperwork involved does not require the staffing needs, mailing needs, liabilities potentially incurred from the activity of tutoring itself, etc. What a ‘traditional’ office is becomes vague when we start to ask what establishes its minimalist identity. WillTutor has filed 1099 independent contractor agreements with several tutoring companies, e.g., Parliament Tutors, TutorSpree, WyzAnt. In what follows I sketch the different segments or platforms by which tutoring can proceed as a service. These include the online medium/modality, the in-person (in-home, in public venue, et al), and the combination of the two. The online format is accessible to clients who are interested in tutoring lessons with subject-matter as ancient languages, symbolic logic, calculus, proofreading, and English Language Arts. (WillTutor has provided services for clients in these subject areas and has experience with handling their respective curricula.) Online lessons include a virtual whiteboard or blackboard where tutors and students can write, draw, and work through problems together. My students and I communicate through video, audio, and texts when tutoring online. Lessons sometimes include practice quizzes and assignments that test and reinforce comprehension of the material. I send online progress reports by which students can track their overall progress. There are additional resources for continued learning outside of tutoring lessons (study guides, blogs, pre-recorded lessons, etc). WillTutor has a calendar on which clients can make their appointments (http://bookedin.net/willtutor), a blog (http://willtutorblog.wordpress.com), a facebook page (http://facebook.com/willtutor), and an instagram account (tutor_will). The blog posts review sheets per subject. The subjects that the company offers are posted anew every year on the blog. For actual online tutoring the company uses different software. There is no set program that is in use at present. Some options are Google Checkout, Itutor.com, Google Classroom, Socratic, etc. Any of these make possible ‘online’ tutoring. Tutoring online is best when conducted using the materials common to all devices (i.e., common to phones, desktops, laptops, tablets, etc). The online platform for tutoring in general has a lot of structures. If there are organized structures for online tutoring, they are to be general enough that allows for multiple capabilities. Google’s structures allow for much of the requirements of tutoring: Google Voice, Google Classroom, Google Domains, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, etc. Apple also combines the needs for tutoring also - FaceTime, Office, etc - though not as comprehensively as Google does. So, Google is preferable because it can be used via multiple devices (cell phone, television, computer, laptop, iPad, etc). For all subjects does the in-person tutoring lesson provide an opportunity for clients to work hands on with a tutor. The two main platforms for in-person tutoring are in-home services and public venues. For the former, WillTutor insists on conditions, stipulations, provisos that lessons must be conducted under – largely for the safety of both the tutor and the client. WillTutor is going to have its clients sign an agreement before lessons are conducted stating that all transactions are final. Some companies, like WyzAnt In-Home Tutoring, have similar guidelines and stipulations. The public venue options include either public or private libraries, classrooms, student centers, university campus junctions, and other areas that allow for tutoring lessons. Tutoring via phone is an option for clients interested in essay writing, having papers proofread by WillTutor’s tutor(s), ELA (more generally), reading classical languages, and ESL. Combined segments of online tutoring (e.g., Skype, Vyew, White Board) and phone allow tutors and clients to engage in both platforms simultaneously; this allows for two to yield more than one. In most instances, some sessions are conducted solely online, others solely over the telephone with Skype. Socrative? Google classroom? WillTutor has conducted lessons in the ancient languages (both Greek and Latin), symbolic logic, calculus I, proofreading, GRE: Analytical Writing, and other subject areas via this mixed segment option; our clients have found this method of tutoring paradigm satisfactory. WillTutor tracks all of its phone logs. Voicemails are transcribed through the Google Voice account.

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