Can be a good opportunity but there are a lot of cons
Pros
Once you're assigned students, it's consistent work. It's also easy to request and accept substitute opportunities, which is great if you are disabled/need time off or if you want to work more hours than you've been assigned. The curriculum and lesson scripts are straightforward and effective, and training is paid, although they reduced the training pay despite growing massively as a company. It's better than some other remote tutoring opportunities but not a company you want to partner with for longer than you have to.
Cons
- If a student is struggling you're supposed to reach out to a literacy specialist for advice, but there's no incentive to do that because the specialists are rude, condescending to both tutors and students, and simply aren't very helpful. (I spoke to two, and there's one for each school district. Adding this info in case it's just bad luck on my part.) - Slow response time for tutor inquiries - They advertise 30 hours a week but you definitely won't get 30 hours, and if you give them open availability like they ask then you'll get a scattered schedule that doesn't fill your time, making it impossible to supplement with other part-time work. - I think they're making improvements but overall they're a very disorganized company, files are scattered around and some lessons have random edits on them (making them difficult to use in-session). They focus a lot on forming new school partnerships and end up scrambling because they aren't prepared for the quantity of work they're taking on, and tutors are sometimes blamed for this disorganization and lack of awareness. For example, they get frustrated when too many tutors ask the same question, instead of taking ownership over the lack of clarity in emails and in training. You can ask three different people the same question and get three different answers, and at the end of the day you could be blamed for not knowing which one is correct. The biggest example of this was when they sent an email in the middle of the semester forbidding tutors from playing non-educational games with students during sessions. Teachers complained, and instead of taking ownership over their own role in this issue arising (they told us we could play games at the end of sessions and even provided the games for us) admin sent a passive-aggressive email to tutors and forced an immediate change that negatively impacted some students. This was when it started to become clear to me that this company values its school partnerships more than its individual students/tutors.
