AITA for setting my boundaries?

For context,

I am a humanities tutor and I am taking this student for H2 Geography since around April 2024.

Since two weeks ago, she has been sending me 5-6 questions to mark before the lesson because she wants to “make the most out of our lesson timing”. I told her that it is the exam season right now and I have many other students to attend to, but I will try my best to mark the papers before the lesson

First 🚩(imo): Tried to request to change lesson timing if I cannot finish marking her papers (at that point in time she sent some question a day prior the lesson). I replied and say that I cannot change the lesson timing for reasons like this as my schedule is really packed like sardines.

Second 🚩: When I sent her the marked papers, she did not even say “thanks”, which made me felt taken for granted. To be honest, I am taking time out of my own free time to mark her papers (which is unpaid hours btw), if I managed to rush the marking the night before her lesson, I think it is basic manners to acknowledge my effort and say “thank you”.

+ To make it worse, I misses out one question and her response was “You didn’t mark the CJC paper” - plain rude 😤

Third 🚩: Sent me 6 completed questions this time round after last week’s lesson. For context, 6 questions is essentially 30 questions because it is divided into 5 subparts (iykyk) so it is really very time consuming. Last lesson I spent the entire 1.5hrs going through the 5 questions that she sent me and explaining my comments without catching a break and I don’t know how I am going to go through 6 questions at one go. What’s the point of me marking the paper beforehand when I have to go through them again in class and you don’t read my comments before lesson?

Fourth 🚩: Spending our previous lesson time going through her school tutorials. Usually for my other students, I will assign questions for then to do in class while I mark their homework, so when I am done, I can give my comments regarding their hw - so basically, they will be doing new questions while i mark their work (which is efficient imo). But for her, she will always request to go through her school’s tutorial and want me to look through her essays, which I am ok to do so (because different students have different ways that they want the lessons to be conducted right?). What triggered me was when she suggests changing lesson timing because she “wants to make the most of the lesson time”, I’m sorry who is the one wasting lesson timing? Instead of asking me to go through the tutorials questions so that you can present the “best answer” to your school tutors, why not just do your homework yourself, and get feedback from your school tutors (which BTW most JC tutors don’t mark tutorials, at least when I was in JC my tutor didn’t so correct me if I am wrong), and then during our tuition timing, we can do MORE questions and you get more feedback

p.s she asked me to help her cut down word count for her essay homework so that she can submit to school. Which I did, I cut down her examples because it was lengthy and have a lot of statistic which realistically speaking, high chance nobody can remember so much statistics and long examples during exams (but she said she could 🙄) , I managed to bring down the word count to the max. limit and she texted me again after to cut down the word count AGAIN (I went to see the document and realised that she added back in the same statistics! Then what’s the point of asking me to help 🙄) And who is wasting the lesson time asking their tutor to cut down their essays 🤧

Fifth 🚩: When I went to her place for lesson last week, she asked me “will you be giving me the answer scheme” and said “next time can you mark more specifically so that I know which sentence is the one getting the marks” - come on, first of all maybe I am too sensitive but I was really triggered, I don’t have time to make the answer scheme from scratch, and I already gave you my feedback on the correct points that you gave as well as the missing points? So shouldn’t you already know how to score the missing marks (what’s the point of me going through with you then?), secondly, the audacity! 5 full questions took me almost 2 hrs to really look through and process her answers, and you still want to imply that my comments are not enough?

Sixth 🚩: I talk very fast sometimes especially when I have a lot of concepts and content to convey, so when I am talking I do stumble on my words sometimes, and she will 偷笑 (basically smile and laugh like it’s funny) I don’t know what’s so funny about it actually. Even when I am just giving my comment she will also smile sometimes (am I being too sensitive???)

All in all, before I sent the messaged, I also DID mark the 5 questions she sent me. And honestly, I did thought about dropping her as a student but I thought that it’s only 2 months more before her A levels and I want to be responsible and commit til the end (newsflash, she contacted the tuition agency that she want to drop me as her tutor after I sent her the message) I think me requesting the lessons to be online is fair given that I am spending more time marking her papers.

If you read till the end, I want to say thank you and that tutors’ life matters too!

#rant #RealTalk #GirlTalk #SocialDiscussion