Firing my tutored students

Tutoring students for the English sections of the SAT exam does not keep me busy. It’s just meager supplemental income. The outlier tutor may earn two to three hundred dollars per week while also holding down another job. Students are engaged on a short-term basis, so you are constantly looking for the next students, and are keen for referrals.

It is late June 2018, school is out, and I do not have a full-time job. My latest tutees are Chinese students who live in a little-known North Carolina city that rhymes with the Marx Brothers’ fictional nation state, Freedonia. They’re 17-year-old identical twins who have lived in the States for just three years. Their mother runs a factory in rural North Carolina.

The family lives in a gated community. When I cannot get in at the gate for the first meeting, I call the girls’ mother, who tells me to piggy-back on another resident’s entrance, because her gate code does not always work. Will a hurried resident rear-end my car or report me?

The twins greet me cheerily at their ornate front door, wearing somewhat different outfits and sporting different haircuts. I am led to a long, formal dining room table. They shuffle ahead in open-toe terrycloth slippers. I take a seat at the head of the table, and they flank me. They have prepared by bringing notepads and pencils to the table, as many diligent students…