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 Tutoring fills growing niche By Alan R. Earls, Globe Correspondent, 10/9/2005
Tutor, a Latin word, is one of those slightly stuffy sounding occupations calling to mind the Jane Austen character Henry Tilney from the novel, "Northanger Abbey." But today, tutoring is anything but stuffy — in fact, it is a big business and, for many professionals, a great supplementary job or even a career in its own right. Kaplan Inc., for instance, which provides tutors that focus on improving students' SAT scores as well as a wide range of other subjects, has seen revenue grow from $89 million a decade ago to $1.35 billion today. For individuals, this means a lot of opportunity. For instance, Jessica Walton, who runs a program in urban design at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, says tutoring has proven to be the perfect adjunct to her day job. "I have always had to work my way through school," with positions that involved helping students write better or teaching adults with literacy problems, the Swarthmore graduate said. Now she is employed as a part-time one-to-one tutor by Summit Educational Group Inc. "I started looking at Summit when my son was born, and I realized I wanted to transition from what I do to actively teaching," she explained. However, having just moved into a new house, it was also important for her to make as much money as possible, she said. Walton said she teaches students across a range of ages and abilities. "I have some students that are still struggling to understand the difference between a noun and a verb and others who are already scoring 720 or 730 on the exam and want to do better," she said. More to the point, though, Walton says the pay is great, and if she chose to work full time for Summit at her current $26 per hour, it would add up to about the same as her earnings at Harvard. And tutoring, it turns out, fits perfectly. "I'm exhausted at the end of the day, but when I'm heading off to sleep I remember all over why I'm doing this," she said. Tutoring as a part time and supplemental activity is also just right for Bob Christie, who is an independent sales agent for AFLAC Insurance most of the time but spends his unscheduled time tutoring for Summit. "I have very flexible hours with AFLAC, and it's the same thing with Summit," Christie said. However, for Louis Zirin, a retired MIT engineer who spent much of his career at General Electric, the attraction of responding to the Summit ad was not so much the opportunity to supplement his income as it was remaining active. "I'm not one to play tennis and golf all the time, and I have always been interested in teaching, even when I was at GE, so I thought it would be fun to help students trying to get into prep schools or college," he said. Zirin says he typically sees between six and eight students a week, always one-on-one and always at their homes. In fact, Zirin says that brings to mind the only big downside of the job: driving. Zirin says while 80 percent of his students are located either in his own town, Swampscott, or in nearby Marblehead, he sometimes travels as far as Beverly or even Andover. Zirin tutors in preparation for the SAT, the SSAT (an admission test for private prep schools), and also the ACT college admission test. He says because of the test schedules, he is busy most of the year, except the late spring and early summer. Besides providing testing help, Zirin says he works with some students on more specific issues, including physics, chemistry, and math. Of course, tutoring does become more or less of a full-time job for some people. Julia Colton, for example, left behind her position as a Bearing Point consultant "for personal and family reasons" and now works 30 or more hours a week tutoring for Summit. Like Zirin, she finds the driving required to get to students frustrating but agrees the satisfaction derived from working one-to-one makes up for that. Then there's Aimee Demora, employed full time as a center director for a one of the 167 K-10-focused Kaplan Score centers based in Winchester. Since 1992, Score centers have provided help in math, reading, writing and other areas to more than 250,000 students of all learning levels. Demora said Kaplan recruited her out of college, where she majored in political science and minored in Spanish. She says it helped that she has spent some of her time as an undergrad tutoring fellow students and then teaching English to local children during a semester at the University of Seville in Spain. Since she joined Kaplan, she has continued to tutor but has also taken on management responsibilities — scheduling and supervising a staff of full-time and part-time employees. But for Kaplan, the focus remains on tutoring. "It is the best of both worlds, I get to work with kids from age 4 to 14, and I do everything from remediation of basic skills to working with advanced kids coming in for additional challenges," Demora said. Of course, tutoring is by no means only the domain of name brand businesses — it's also a cottage industry. Emma Lee, originally from Taiwan, started teaching Mandarin Chinese in the adult education program for the town of Franklin when her daughter was nine months old. "I was supposed to get an accounting job because I took accounting courses a few years ago and was doing quite well, however, I had a 7-year-old son and a little girl to take care of and I just needed a manageable night job," that wouldn't take too much time, she said. Because she had majored in both Chinese and in teaching English as a second language, she realized she might be qualified to teach Chinese, too. She ended up teaching a local adult ed class and then began to teach students individually. Lee has now decided to continue to focus on teaching Chinese and has even written a textbook to teach both Chinese culture and language. The inspiration, however, came from the students she tutored. "People always think Chinese is very hard to learn, but working with my students, I have found if someone is determined and takes the right approach it's as easy as ABC," Lee says.
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