Bad Tutor

Yesterday I got called a Bad Tutor...

So here's what happened. I was working in the tutoring center with a girl on some Pre-Calc. There were three other girls working with another tutor on the same subject so I offered for one or two of them to come over and work with us if the other tutor was too busy. The first girl I was helping was great; model student, super nice, asked questions, desired to learn the concepts instead of just getting it done, took directions well (she even emailed me later thanking me for my help and asked if I would tutor her privately for her test coming up)... We finished up and she left so two of the girls from the other group came over. One was good; nice, kinda quiet, definitely just was looking to get the work done instead of understanding the whole concept, but was polite and listened. The other girl was pretty awful; rude, only wanted me to do the problems and give them the answers, impatient, extremely sarcastic (I mean, I get sarcasm... at times I am guilty of some sarcasm... But you know those people who just take it too far? They are so sarcastic that anything out of their mouth is just mean even if it's not true?).

I was getting pretty fed up with this kid (I say kid because she was acting like a kid... maybe 19) by the time we got to the last problem. Without going to much into the mathematics of what we were trying to do, the question wanted us to use a theorem (that I have never seen before... it happens pretty often where something pops up that I have never seen but I usually can read the book a little and find an example and explain it in ways other can understand) to find an exact value of a complex, un-real number. I found an example and followed it but ran into a problem which ended up requiring us to approximate a number to find an exact value (if that's confusing to you, that's because it is... In math we like exact values because they are complete; no information gets lost along the way. As soon as you approximate, you loose information... So to approximate something in order to find an exact values is counter-intuitive and far beyond what you should be doing in Pre-Calc). The girl was so impatient through this whole thing, saying things like "maybe you should ask another tutor... I hear that's what you guys are supposed to do..." and "What's your name? I'm taking names." I did ask another tutor who ran into the same problem so we asked our boss (who runs the tutoring center and just gave her thesis talk or something on some math topic... basically, she's smart and knows her stuff). She went through the exact same process I did and got the exact same result. We gave them some other problems to try that would give them nice answers that they could apply the theorem to and called it a day. By that time, I was off duty and started to pack up my stuff. While I was packing up, the girl, talking to her friends, said, "It's fine, my teacher will just say I had a 'bad tutor' again." I couldn't hold it in any longer so I replied, "Thank you! That's really encouraging. I am glad we could help. You actually can tell you teacher that the person who runs the center helped you with that problem and got the same result."

So really, she didn't call me a bad tutor directly, but implied that someone (her teacher I guess... but I have doubts that any teacher would say that which makes me think it is just her... but I could be wrong) said myself and anyone else who has helped her before in the center were "bad tutors." I talked to my boss about it today and she said that she has had issues with this particular student before and has had to ask her to leave, which makes me feel a little better. Not that I am taking anything that she said seriously because she seemed like a really unhappy person who thinks the world should bow at her feet. Still, it was an interesting way to start out the week.