Surviving exam season without burning out

For a private tutor, exam season is the month the income arrives and the month the work becomes unmanageable: extra revision groups, more marking, more anxious parents, and no slack anywhere. Most tutors handle it by working more, which functions for about three weeks and then quietly stops.

What actually degrades first

What goes first is not your energy. It is your judgement. The first thing to go is the decision-making: what this group needs next, which student to check on, whether this explanation landed. You keep teaching, the sessions still happen, and the choices inside them get worse. This is why exhaustion in a teacher costs students something even when attendance and delivery look unchanged.

Cut the things that feel productive

• Marking everything. In peak season, mark one thing properly per group per week and use whole-class feedback for the rest. Students lose almost nothing; you recover several hours.
• Making new material. Use last year's, unchanged. This is the single largest saving available and the one most resisted, because remaking a sheet feels like effort well spent when it is mostly avoidance of finding the old one.
• Extra sessions added in the last fortnight. They rarely change an outcome that three weeks of targeted work would have. They are usually bought by a worried parent, and they cost you the capacity that makes your existing sessions good.

Protect three things absolutely

Sleep, one full day off per week, and the first thirty minutes of your day. The day off is the one that gets sacrificed first and returns the most: seven days of teaching produces worse total teaching than six, and every tutor who has tried both knows this and does it anyway.

The signals you have gone too far

Tiredness is not one of them; tiredness is normal in June. The real signs are that you cannot remember what you did in a session an hour after it, you are irritated by ordinary student questions, you are avoiding parent messages rather than being too busy for them, and you have stopped noticing which students are struggling. That last one is the point at which the students are paying for your schedule.

Decide next year's capacity now

The honest fix is structural rather than personal: fewer groups, or an assistant, or a cap on extra sessions declared before the season starts. Written down in November, that cap holds. Decided in May, under pressure, from a parent asking for one more session, it never does.

Sources

• International Labour Organization — Teachers and education personnel
• World Health Organization — Adolescent health