Tutors usually don't do so much during holidays. Apart from 11+ preparation, summer booster courses, marking as an examiner, helping with mocks and resits... Ok, there's actually a lot tutors can do over the summer holidays. But often it's not as much as during the school year.
So how do tutors afford their groceries during school holidays?
Full-time tutors like me often have to work periodically. With a high peak of workload before the main exams - in Scotland it's Nat 5, Highers and Advanced Highers, in England it's GCSE and A-level maths exams in May and June, for example.
Teachers seem to be lucky - 13 weeks of paid holidays over the year, right? Well, yes and no, as a tutor I don't have to do so much marking and all the other paperwork so I rather have a normal life and work balance throughout the year, thank you very much, although I don't get any paid holidays (heck, not even sick pay - the caveats of being self-employed).
But every year of my tutoring career, which I love so much, I wonder how to survive summer and I hear many colleague tutors asking the same (usually those who are just starting tuition and haven't been hardened by managing little to no income for 6-8 weeks year after year).
Summer without any income. Sounds scary, right?
Well, ot so much, when you're good with numbers, you're good with money and you know your budget, so you just plan for those two months throughout the year as you earn. But that doesn't make it feel any easier either.
So what could a tutor do, (ideally education-related), to stay on top of the summer income dip?
For me, once, the inspiration came from several sources. Do you see my tee in the picture above? That's from my friend. It's soooo cool! (Especially when you know maths and when you watched The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)
Later I saw one of my students(!) wearing a really cool tee. It was a chemistry thing, but chemistry is full of maths too.
People do love nerdy science and maths stuff! It's not only me =) So for example, for a good few years, I was creating cool maths tees (and mugs and the usual novel gifts) for sale. They were usually gifts for teachers for the end of the school year as I'd often find out from the happy reviews.
I do not sell them anymore, Covid was great for switching to online tuition bad bad for everything else including doing post office rounds to ship my fun maths creations to the whole world. But Covid is gone, and post offices run as usual (not-so-well but they do), so if you're a tutor and aspiring designer/comedian, you might want to give it a go and create some giftware for sale. I had loads of fun with it.
It was a very exciting little venture - a lot of ideas were bubbling in my head for years, so I was able to unleash my creativity (and years of living surrounded by maths craziness) without taking too much time off what I love the most - and that's my maths tutoring.
But this may not be everyone's cup of tea. So is there anything else? Yes...
Now, a bit less fun but way easier should any Covid 2.0 happen, is selling digital/printable resources. A lot of educators do that to supplement their tuition income (not just for the summer, but throughout the year). I've done that a little bit but it's really not as much fun as creating crazy maths designs and imagining how someone on the other side of the world is wearing them perhaps on their school trip or even in the classroom (if their principal is not a total buzzkill and let's the staff wear slightly informal clothes to work).
Or you can actually become a part-time comedian and do a few summer gigs to supplement your tuition income over the summer.
The choice is yours!