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This page, How To Become An Associate Tutor with A-1 All Subjects At-Home Tutoring Service®, is for those who wish to tutor for us anywhere in the United States (except New York City and suburbs) or in Canada. Here you'll find complete details about everything you need do to become one of our A-1 All Subjects At-Home Tutoring Service® associate tutors.
If you DO want to tutor in New York City (Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens or Staten Island) or the neighboring counties of Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess, Rockland, Orange, Ulster and Sullivan, then leave this page by clicking on the How To Become A Tutor link.
If you'd rather be self-employed and develop a tutoring service in which several tutors work for you, then leave this page by clicking on the The Partner Program link.
First, let's clear up one very important point. This is a job. This means you work as a tutor giving lessons to our students and we pay you a set fee for your labors. You never pay us. If anyone offers you a "job" but you first have to pay a fee, get up and leave immediately. It's a rip off!
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, there are three things you must complete before you have a telephone interview with us:
You must follow the following six steps before you can join us as an A-1 All Subjects At-Home Tutoring Service® associate tutor:
Remember, you first finish the six steps and then return to step 5 to complete and submit the application to be an associate tutor.
This page covers the following topics:
Before beginning the six steps leading to becoming an associate tutor with A-1 All Subjects At-Home Tutoring Service®, it's vital to find out if you qualify for the job and if you'd like to tutor for us. Click on the web page Teacher Requirements to learn what requirements you must fulfill to become one of our associate tutors. Click on the web page Why Teach With Us for several excellent reasons why you might like to become one of our associate tutors.
The first step in becoming an A-1 All Subjects At-Home Tutoring Service® associate tutor is to learn about the educational, theoretical and practical principles of our tutoring service.
Carefully read the following four web pages which constitute the backbone of our service:
Once again, please read the above four web pages carefully and thoroughly. During the past decades, every tutor who these web pages to heart held on to students for a long time, enjoyed many pleasurable tutoring experiences, helped students make substantial progress and won the undying loyalty of the parents. Conversely, tutors who ignored these web pages had very few lessons and ended up with dissatisfied students and disappointed parents. These web pages and the philosophy they express are based on 50 years of extensive tutoring experience with actual students at actual lessons. So we hope you'll use the valuable information they contain and have much success in your tutoring efforts.
In Step 1, you learned about our basic principals and techniques. In this step, we need to make sure you can comfortably and successfully handle tutoring calls and become an effective, successful, professional associate tutor.
First, you need to take care of the following four essential items:
Make Sure We Have The Correct Information About You Top Of Page
A few days after being accepted as an associative tutor, we'll add your email address to our Associate Tutors List. However, your information will not become visible until after we've received at least two consecutive Associate Referral Reports on time from you.
Please visit our Associate Tutors List web page about one week after you've sent us your second Associate Referral Report. There, you'll find a list containing the name, telephone number and email address of each of our associate tutors. Carefully examine each of your listings. If they are correct, contact us to let us know. If they are incorrect, contact us to give us the correct information. Email us at associate@a1tutor.com, FAX us at (206) TUTOR-77 or call us at (800) A1-TUTOR.Make Sure Your SPAM Filter Is Letting Our Email Get To You Top Of Page
We receive over 100 tutoring requests a day from people throughout the United States and Canada. Most come as Formdesk forms which arrive daily in our email box and those of our associate tutors. Unfortunately, some email programs regard these mailings as spam and put Formdesk forms in the junk folder. This also happens to some of our mailings we sent to our tutors.To prevent this from happening, please instruct your email program to regard all mail with the return address . . . @formdesk.com or . . . @a1tutor.com as desired email to be delivered normally and not to be added to the junk mail folder.
Make Sure You Send Us Your Associate Referral Report The Last Day Of Each Month Top Of Page
We carefully track the student referrals we give you each month. Make sure you email or FAX us a completely filled-out copy of your Associate Referral Report on (or before) the last day of each month so we can be informed about your dealings with all the students we have referred to you. The report must include each referral you received from us, even those you did not actually tutor. If you received no referrals that month, send us a blank Associate Referral Report with the single statement: I received no referrals this month. If you fail to email or FAX us an Associate Referral Report on (or before) the last day of the month, we will cease sending you referrals and terminate you as an associate tutor.Make Sure You Reread This Web Page From Time To Time Top Of Page
From time to time, we'd like you to reread step 4 of this How To Become An Associate Tutor web page. Our main goal is to help people to acquire the skill and knowledge to master a particular academic course or overcome an educational problem. To bring this about, we want all out associate tutors to be completely successful in giving lessons and achieving long lasting results. So, whenever possible, we add additional paragraphs to step 4 of this web page to enable your work to be more successful. Please read them. We're sure you'll find them quite useful.
Next, you must master everything involved in being a successful associative tutor:
How We Give You Student Referrals Top Of Page
We’re a nationwide tutoring service receiving over 100 tutoring calls a day throughout the United States and Canada. Most of these tutoring requests arrive in one of the following three ways:As an A-1 All Subjects At-Home Tutoring Service® associate tutor, we'll give you new student referrals by leaving messages on your voice mail/answering machine or by sending you emails. Naturally, you'll need to have a reliable answering machine and check for new messages frequently. Once you receive a message, you'll need to call the student's parents as soon as possible to discuss the student's problem and, hopefully, sign them up. We've detailed a most effective way to sell students in Selling Students and hereby give you permission to make use of this approach. This is how we've signed up students during the past 50 years and we feel this approach should help you a great deal.
Please reread Winning The Parent's Trust two or three times to learn a highly effective and professional way to handle your first call to a new parent and your first lesson with a new student. It will show you how to make your first contact with parents and your first lesson with a student real winners!
Suppose we give you a student we received in one of the above three ways and you decide to charge $45.00 an hour for lessons. We’d split this $45.00 in half, with $22.50 going to you and $22.50 going to us. This arrangement would continue until the student finishes taking lessons. On the last day of the month, you’d total our referrals for that month and use a free Paypal account to pay us.
Canceling Appointments Top Of Page
We have two distinct cancellation rules which must be firmly, but politely, enforced without exception.
LAST MINUTE CANCELLATIONS AND CHANGES: To cancel or change an appointment, the parents MUST telephone you directly (not us) no later than 3:00 P.M. of the afternoon of the previous day. If the parents cancel or change an appointment after 3:00 P.M. of the day before the scheduled appointment or if the student is not ready for the lesson when you arrive, they must pay you the full fee due for one hour of the lesson.
FREQUENCY OF LESSONS: The student must have at least one hour per week of tutoring as long as lessons continue. All missed lessons must be made up in any of three ways. They can schedule a make-up lesson for later that week, a make-up lesson for the following week or extra time (for example, an extra 10, 15 or 30 minutes) during the next few weeks.
These two cancellation rules are clearly explained to the parents on several occasions:
In your initial conversation with the parents when they agree to use your services.
In our New Student Welcome web page which you give them at the first lesson.
At the first lesson, explain both cancellation rules and make sure the parents tell you they've understood them.
The Subjects Most In Demand For Tutoring Top Of Page
During the past fifty years, about 90% of all tutoring requests are in one or more of the following areas:
In addition, about half of those who require tutoring in elementary school reading also want lessons in elementary school math, both taught by the same tutor.
During my first few years as a tutor, I noticed how much lesson time was lost due to lack of advance preparation by the student. Some students weren't able to find writing implements or left their books in school or at a relative’s house. Others didn’t have books because the school had failed to hand them out yet or had already collected them near the end of the year. Many times, parents who promised to purchase needed materials did not get around to it until a few weeks later.
To remedy this tremendous source of annoyance and waste of time, I began to require every new student to buy a kit from me at the first lesson. The kit consisted of the following items:
I clearly instructed both the parents and the student to ALWAYS leave the kit at home and use it ONLY for work having to do with our lessons. I presented the parents with a bill to reimburse me for both the cost of the kit and my time in getting it. I was paid either at the first lesson or at the second.
What was the result my requiring every student to have a kit ? All the problems mentioned above immediately vanished and all my lessons became more effective and well organized.
Scheduling: How To Tutor More With Less Travel Time Top Of Page
The following statements are true for most tutors in most cases in most parts of the U.S. and Canada:
These four facts are the bases by which an associate tutor can make effective of travel time and scheduling.
Suppose someone who lives 30 miles north of you wants you to be their tutor and you agree to have lessons every Monday. Suppose, a few days later, someone who lives 30 miles south of you wants lessons with you and you agree to set the schedule for Tuesday. Suppose, a few days later, a third person who lives 30 miles east of you agrees to see you every Wednesday. Suppose you get another student a few days later who lives 30 miles west of you and you set the tutoring day for Thursday.
At first glance, this seems to be a waste of time and money - you've agreed to a sixty mile round trip every day for just one lesson a day. That's true . . . But, during the subsequent weeks, you get more and more new students and gradually fill up each day of the week. You put those who live north of you on Monday, south of you on Tuesday, etc. By the time six to eight weeks have passed and it's late October, you now spend Mondays seeing several students to the north of you and having them split the travel time among them. Likewise, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are filled up in the same manner. This is really the only sensible way you can build up a satisfactory quantity of students.
Of course, you could have turned down those first four students with the statement: No! He's too far! However, this way you'd end up with just one or two students, rather than ten or more as described above.
To sign up new students and keep a record of lessons taken, you need Student Information Sheets and Student Report Cards. You'll see an example of a Student Information Sheet in Student Information Sheet and an example of a Student Report Card in Student Report Card. You may print out copies of these forms to use for all your lessons with students we refer to you.
Set An Effective Tutoring Fee Top Of Page
If you wish, you may charge $50.00 per hour for lessons. This is the rate we charge A-1 All Subjects At-Home Tutoring Service® students and is pretty much what most tutoring services charge. However, your knowledge of your area's particular economic conditions may cause you to decide to charge a lower fee of $45.00 or $40.00 an hour, or even $35.00 an hour. Or, perhaps, you feel you can charge $60.00 or more per hour. You might even decide to offer a case-by-case sliding scale rate. Whatever you decide to charge, make a mental note of all your tutoring fee decisions before you begin selling students.
There is an excellent way to decide what to charge. Go to the tutoring section of your area code's yellow pages. There you'll find a list of most of your area's tutors and tutoring services. Pretend you're a parent with a grammar school student and a high school student both having trouble with math and in need of tutoring. Call up each tutor and tutoring service and ask what they would charge to tutor your two children. When you're finished, you'll have a list of the current rates for tutoring in your area which you can use to intelligently set your own tutoring rates.
What we pay you is determined by what you decide to charge for lessons. On the last day of each month, you send us half of your tutoring earnings using your PayPal account. So, if you earned $1200.00 in November tutoring the students we referred to you, you would send us a $600.00 referral fee the last day of November.
Inform A New Client About The New Student Procedures Top Of Page
Be sure you're intimately familiar with all the procedures parents and students are required to follow. These procedures are fully laid out in the New Student Welcome web page. Inform your clients about the New Student Welcome web page when you call them to set up the first appointment. Give them the web page's exact address both during your first call and then again during the first lesson. The address is a1tutor.com/a1welcome.html. If the family has no internet access or is computer illiterate, print out a copy of the New Student Welcome web page to give them at the first lesson. If the parent gets a copy of this web page at the first lesson, it will make running all subsequent lessons much easier for you, the student and the parents.
Know How To Find The Student's Home Top Of Page
Make sure you know exactly where the student lives, including the address, cross streets and apartment number. It's completely unprofessional to be late or not show up because you got lost. To avoid this, buy appropriate zip code/street guide maps of the areas in which you'll tutor. For example, copies of
make locating any house in the greater New York City area a snap.
Nationally, you'll find maps for any part of the United States in the
and for any part of Canada in the
With these maps, getting lost is a thing of the past; they are truly indispensable aids for any tutor.
Make Sure You Exchange Correct Contact Information Top Of Page
Make sure you give the family your name and phone numbers (home, work and cell) and write them down in a safe readily accessible place. Check to make sure they have your correct contact information at least three or four times, including during your first call and during your first lesson. Also, during your first call, make sure you have their address (including apartment number and cross streets) and phone numbers.
The relationship which exists between us (A-1 All Subjects At-Home Tutoring Service®) and you (an associative tutor) is NOT exclusive. This means giving you a particular referral in no way prevent us from giving the same referral to another associate tutor. In other words, we may send a particular tutoring referral to one, two or even five associate tutors simultaneously. Although there's no problem in most cases, this is one of the reasons we strongly recommend you don't delay in managing your tutoring calls. The only way to have exclusive rights to a particular area code is to become a member of the Partner Program.
The Associate Tutor List Top Of Page
For a list of all tutors in the United States and Canada that have agreed to be A-1 All Subjects At-Home Tutoring Service® associate tutors, please go to our Associate Tutors List page.
Now that you know how to handle the day to day requirements of being one of our associate tutors, you must make sure you know how to handle the monthly Associate Referral Report. On the last day of each month you have active students, send us half of the tutoring fees you earned for the month and give us a report of your tutoring activities of the month. However, you must first open up a Paypal account before you can proceed.
Opening A New PayPal Account Top Of Page
All A-1 All Subjects At-Home Tutoring Service® associate tutors must immediately open a PayPal account before we can allow them to tutor our students. PayPal accounts are free of charge, carry no fees and take just a few minutes to open. So, make sure you open your account; we can't place students with you until the account is up and running. Here's what you do:
Again, there are absolutely no costs nor fees. Remember, however, you can fund your account only with your checking account; you CANNOT fund it with your credit card.
Using Your PayPal Account To Send Your Monthly Report Top Of Page
Now that your PayPal account is established and verified, let's examine the three clerical chores you must execute the last day of September. Suppose you had three students in September 2005: Ann Abrahams who spent $200.00 for 4 hours, Bill Brewster who spent $300.00 for 6 hours and Chuck Cochran who spent $250.00 for 5 hours in September. Here's how you'd proceed on September 30:
These three steps should take up no more than a half hour of your time. All three steps must be done on or before the last day of September. Once they are done, your clerical duties for September are finished and your attention can then turn to October tutoring.
Everything stated above is to be taken at face value with absolute seriousness and conviction.
In particular, we carefully track the student referrals we give you each month. The Associate Referral Report you submit on the last day of each month keeps us informed about your dealings with the students we have referred to you. There are three situations which are totally unacceptable to us:
In addition, if you act unprofessionally, if you're careless in your treatment of students and families, if you disregard any of the rules and procedures we've set up, if you fail to apply the comprehensive diagnostic test with every student we give you, if you're not on time with mailings and payments or if you're in any way a black eye for our service, we'll take strong and immediate action. So, it's imperative you always behave in the most professional way; we don't want to be forced to let you go.
Once you've carefully and thoughtfully read each of Steps 1, 2 , 3 and 4 above, followed and read all the links contained in each step, feel certain you understand our tutoring philosophy and accept the conditions under which our tutors agree to follow, it's time to fill out and submit the Application for an associate tutoring position A careful reading of Application Directives will help you in selecting subjects, grades and zip codes. When you're ready to fill out the application, please click on Application.
After we've received your application, we'll keep it on file and consider it very carefully.
Once we've received your Application, all that remains for you to do is to have a short telephone interview with us.
Before you call us, carefully reread Steps 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 above, the web page Winning The Parent's Trust and the web page Selling Students as many times as necessary to fully know and understand them. There, you'll find all the tools you'll need to comfortably, professionally and successfully handle lessons with the students we place with you. Familiarity with and knowledge of the principles and pointers you'll find there can easily convert you from an unsuccessful tutor with a few short-term students into a successful tutor with many students taking lessons with you for several months. As a result, we'll not be able to complete the interview unless you're intimately familiar with all of Steps 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 above, Winning The Parent's Trust and Selling Students.
After you've reread Steps 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 above, Winning The Parent's Trust and Selling Students several times, call us toll free at (800) A1-TUTOR (That's 800-218-8867). If we're out of the office or otherwise busy when you call, please leave a message stating three different days and times when you'll be home and be ready to complete the interview. We'll be glad to return your call during one of the three days and times you specified.
It's most essential you call us! If you do not call us as described, there will be no interview, your application will be discarded and you will not be hired as an associative tutor.
In the interview, we'll discuss the following:
If we're completely happy with the interview, we'll welcome you aboard as one of our new associate tutors!
Once again, don't call us for the interview until you've completely familiarized yourself with Steps 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 above, Winning The Parent's Trust and Selling Students!
In addition, make sure all these pages remain readily accessible after the interview so you can consult them whenever necessary. From time to time, we add new material designed to help a tutor maintain a high level of skills and professionalism.
Well, we've covered everything. However, please revisit this page from time to time. As ideas and pointers occur to us, we intend to add them to the mix. We wish you much success, satisfaction, profit and enrichment in all your future tutoring efforts with A-1 All Subjects At-Home Tutoring Service®. Good luck!
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