Welcome to Tony Richmond Tutoring!
The past 4 months have led me in a direction that I was not expecting to navigate but am thankful to have been forced along. My tutoring business has changed from face-to-face, in person tuition to, almost overnight since lockdown, a wholly online enterprise.
From the week leading up to March 20th, my tutoring business pivoted into a full-time online operation. I pulled together my laptop resources, familiarised myself with Zoom and Skype (the former in particular at that time a stranger to me), bought myself a new and quicker refurbished laptop, invested in a drawing tablet, a headset with mic, and encouraged all my students to continue their tuition journey with me online.
Fast forwards to now, and all seems to have worked out well. Whilst some Year 11 and 13 students have fallen away due to the lack of summer exams, there have been many replacements in the form of locked down students desperate to continue their studies in the absence of a physical school to visit. We have learnt together how to make the online tutoring experience the best it can be; I’m still learning, picking up new tricks, learning of new websites and ways of interacting with students to simulate teaching in person.
So, the experience of engaging with students online is different to in-person tuition. I’m staring at a screen all day long after all. I can’t be hospitable and provide a glass of water or cordial, or a phone charger, or house slippers and somewhere to put dirty shoes. I can’t see a student write on a sheet of paper, or on a printout that I have just produced. But on the flipside, I can do things in the digital realm that I never did before. We can screenshare. I can use Paint and manipulate images on our shared screen. I’ve more fully entered the digital realm.
And that has opened up more opportunities – take the existence of this website for example. I’ve paid for it, and a friend has helped me to develop it (thanks David – let this be a marker in your journey as a website developer!). It now has an SSL certificate, so it is visible to google search as a “secure website”. For whatever reason, I still rank higher than myself on google search (my LinkedIn, Facebook, google maps profiles all rank higher), but that should change over time. I have started tutoring students in other countries, including Hong Kong, mainland China and Portugal (the latter being summer tuition for a student who is spending family holiday time overseas). Online visibility extends my reach, tutoring opportunities, and hopefully enhances my reputation.
All this has coincided with entering early middle age (40 was a recent birthday!), experiencing a global pandemic, increasing numbers of friends and friends-of-friends dying, but also the lure and realisation of burgeoning new opportunities, in social, leisure, and business domains.
During and after university I was a backpacker. I had itchy feet, I wanted to explore the world. I lived in mainland China for four years in my mid-twenties, and taught in an international school there for several years (IB Biology). I’m happy to be able to tutor there again, even whilst my physical body remains in the UK, and hope that international online tuition is a growth area for Tony Richmond Tutoring!
If you are interested in online tuition in Science or Maths, please contact me for further information. I currently have some daytime availability, daytime mornings (UK time)!
