As says on tin, I am now running a one-man tutoring business and needed somewhere to rant about it a bit
I've got one tutee I've started working with now, who's doing some GCSE (done aged 15-16 for you non-Brits) coursework on the New Deal in the USA. It's a really tricky thing to help with - it's a controlled assessment so I can't see his work directly, and he doesn't have much past essay work so working on his prose style is going to be tricky to say the least. His teachers have I think fed him strong advice to argue that the New Deal
was a success, but they don't seem to have told him what criteria to set by which to judge that. He's also got a fairly pre-set essay structure of "good stuff then bad stuff" which is really hard to make flow nicely. The range of sources he can quote is pre-set, and includes (by design) far too many things from modern educators (which shouldn't need quoting as they only contain background knowledge) and some egregiously bad material which is there presumably in order to force some source analysis.
The tutee seems a capable guy, and I hope we can do some good work, but this has certainly been an eye-opening crunch into how GCSE history works from a teacher's perspective, and how maddening some of the ways it's done are. I've got an A Level student lined up in a couple of weeks doing Russian stuff, which should hopefully be more fun though I'm going to need to give myself a crash course on the Russian revolution and civil war again first...
