It is really difficult to pinpoint a “difficult” client because I had very few. My most challenging client is easier to pinpoint because of repeated visits. The main problem with this client was not that he was unwilling to learn or hostile towards me in any way. His difficulty was that he had a very difficult time learning and it was therefore very frustrating to try to tutor him. He would visit at least once per week and would have forgotten almost everything that we had gone over in previous sessions. This repeated occurance was incredibly frustrating to me and as supportive and friendly as I was to this client, it seemed as though my suggestions to work on the material, review past exercises, and work on additional problems either were either being ignored or were as inaffective at helping him to retain material as our sessions seemed to be. One key element in tutoring is to ensure that you are not doing their work for him but instead are helping them through the work. I would encourage him to understand the process by asking questions as we went along, only to look up, and see a completely vacant look on his face followed by a string of completely off base guesses despite the fact that we had done a problem almnost exactly the same together moments before.
The other most difficult session I had was also my fault. A partnership came to me for help on a project. The most frustrating thing to me was that they showed me the problem they had been having and that I had absolutely no idea how to solve their problem. I tinkered and tried different things for the length of the session but it was essentially a waste of a half hour both for me and for the client. As a tutor, the service that we offer is our knowledge and it is so dissapointing to me when I feel like a client has come to me and I just do not know enough to help them.
