Preparatory School Tutor

Can you imagine yourself going to school to study after you finish school? You may not even want to think about doing extra work after school, but that’s what many children do in Japan. I was working at this type of school called "preparatory school" during last summer.

At this point, many people wonder what a preparatory school is. There are actually two types of schools which children attend after school. Some go to schools to review what they learned in their school or to prepare for their classes ahead. Others attend schools which focus on preparation for entrance examinations. This type of school is what I am talking now, preparation school.

In Japan, high school students must take entrance examinations to go to university. The big difference of the process of getting into universities between the United States and Japan is that earning high marks at entrance examinations is everything in Japan. However, universities take account for other elements such as GPA and extra-curricular activities besides standard tests like SAT in the United States. This is why many high school students go to a preparatory school for preparation of entrance examinations.

I hope that you get a sense of what a preparatory school is. Before getting into my responsibilities at my school, I want to give you a brief explanation of who tutors are. When you hear a term “tutor”, you may think of students who help students in need for academics or those who work for professors. Tutors in my preparatory school are similar. We are all university students who have attended our school in the past. We do not give lectures like teachers, but we rather help students in need. I will talk about this in details later. At the same time, we are also different from tutors at universities. We simply do more things besides teaching.

So, what are our jobs? There are numbers of jobs we have, but I can roughly sort them into three main tasks:

·      Opening and Closing

·      Doing Chores

·      Tutoring

I am going to describe each of them specifically.

Opening and Closing

This job is quite simple. Tutors need to come earlier than staff members and teachers to open doors. Then, we turn on all lights, air conditioners and check a schedule for a day. We usually need to come 15 minutes earlier than our opening time. While tutors need to do all these works alone in the morning, two to three tutors can do closing together. Unlike opening, we are not the one who do not lock doors or wait for everyone to leave. For closing, our jobs are cleaning classrooms and turning off all the lights and air conditioners except the ones at office, and throwing away trashes.

Doing Chores

We usually have some small tasks to do per day. Most of them are simple, so we don’t need to have specific experiences or skills to do. It is difficult to describe all of the chores since there are many, but I can list some which we often do.

·      Scoring quizzes and tests

·      Making a copy and scanning handouts

·      The proctoring of exams

·      Distributing flyers at high schools

Tutoring

I believe this is the most important job among all jobs. Comparing to other tasks, this job requires skills and knowledge. We must have basics of the field of study we teach so that we can deal with any questions students have. Our responsibilities for this job are following:

·      Reviewing materials and contents with students who missed the class

·      Speaking practice for English tests like TOEFL and TOEIC and interview

·      Answering questions students have

·      Keeping the record for what we did after helping students

Unlike teachers, we do not teach many students at the same time, but we only work with student for one hour session so that students are comfortable to ask questions, and they can focus on what they need to do.

Readability

Flesch Reading Ease 66.2

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 7.6