William
Professional Tutoring
In tutoring I provide quality tutoring lessons for reasonable rates that each client may think worthy of another’s choice and, thus, refer us to another for similar services. General Context Description: The industry background of tutoring as a service has its roots at the dawn of civilization, notably with Aristotle as the paradigmatic tutor of Alexander the Great, teaching his pupil curricula of wide breadth and vast scope, ultimately leading to success in terms of the pupil’s intentions. Tutoring continued through the Renaissance and brought attention to the correspondence form (e.g., Descartes and Princess Elizabeth’s tutoring via epistolary exchange on metaphysical topics such as the possibility of mind-body dualism). Those paradigms of tutoring as service, however, are not reliable for understanding how tutoring works today qua service for high school students (and my customers are usually grades 9-12). Tutoring in the twenty-first century in the United States takes a different form from its earlier developments largely because of the advancements in technology that have enabled the tutoring industry to reach more audiences than ever before. Tutoring services tend to stand divided based on the audience for whom proprietors and/or corporate owners market the service(s). In the literature on tutoring as a profession, the consensus holds that there are two main options for tutoring platforms as businesses. The first is the franchise based company that bifurcates into learning centers (e.g., Huntington Learning Center, Kumon), on the one hand, and independent contractors as tutors, on the other. Tutoring has also been reputed as a service for low achieving students who are falling behind in whichever subjects they seek private instruction. Tutors today, however, are “now being used far more to [1] guide students through particularly tough courses, [2] insure their grades are equal to or above their peers’ and, in the end, [3] polish a child’s college application.” In this way, tutors are sought out in much the same way as tutors were traditionally sought out in the above description. I address this contemporary student who seeks tutoring in subject-matter that challenges his or her reasoning abilities in quantitative, verbal, and languages other than English. Because parents and individual students themselves seek out tutoring beyond the hard cast mold of tutoring the cognitively and/or economically disadvantaged, the market for tutoring services has expanded and, thus, it is no surprise that spending on tutoring increases each year, as executive director of the Education Industry Association Steven Pines reports, “more than five percent a year.”