I have been running sessions of tutoring near me for a number of years now, supporting the local schools and community and helping in any way that I can. During that time I have helped a number of students with orange of topics and issues, and it has become a great side-side-hustle for me. Back last January I made a fateful decision and decided to quit the day job and focus entirely on tutoring as an income, I decided to study marketing during that time with a view to eventually switch careers, then the pandemic came.
As soon as the lockdown was announced I knew that I wouldn’t be able to give tutoring sessions any more and as I didn’t have an official employer I was genuinely worried about my income, and so I took the steps to move online and boy did things turn around.
Learning
To be completely honest I had only ever used video calling to catch up with my parents, I never really considered the idea that I would be able to offer tutoring via that means too. After catching up with a friend he told me about Zoom and that was a game changer for me. The reason why Zoom was so much better is because it was more interactive and using that service I could focus more on helping the students with visual aids as well as speaking with them.
Increasing Students
If giving up a job just before a pandemic began was bad luck, the good luck would soon come back my way, because I saw a sharp increase in students who wanted me to help them out. This of course was because of the fact that so many students were now learning from home and this presented something of a problem which they needed some additional support with, and I was more than happy to help where I could.
Switching the Plans
Owing to the fact that my overheads were drastically reduced, and because of the situation that we are all going through, I decided to drop my prices for a single hour of tutoring. I knew that this would cost me a little bit of money but I was confident that it was the right thing to do in the interests of my students. I did not realize however that this price drop would also see a huge increase in students who wanted support and that meant that I was in fact making more money than I believed.
Tutoring has been able to help me support myself, it has helped so many students who had been going through difficulties and it has also been of great support to so many parents who were charged with home schooling their kids once the pandemic and subsequent lockdown hit. If you need any support as a student, tutor or a parent then please don’t hesitate to get in touch, there are always people out there who can and who will help.