For families
Getting the most out of your sessions
X Tutoring · hello@xtutoring.ca · Last updated: September 2026
You haven't signed anything and there's nothing to agree to here. This is just the handful of things that, in practice, separate an hour that moves your child forward from an hour spent catching up on what the hour was meant to be about.
The short version
- Send your tutor the next test date, and anything your child is working from, a couple of days ahead.
- Have your child at the table at the start time, with their books already out.
- Give us 24 hours if you need to move a session.
- Somewhere quiet, with a charged device and whatever the course needs.
- Tell us early when something isn't working. We would much rather hear it at week two.
1. Send us what they're working from
This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do, and it costs you about ninety seconds. A tutor who knows on Monday that Friday's test covers trigonometric identities builds two sessions around it. A tutor who finds out at 4:58 spends the hour reacting.
What helps most, roughly in order:
- The last graded test or quiz — especially the questions your child got wrong. This is worth more than everything else on this list combined. Wrong answers tell a tutor where to start. A grade doesn't.
- Upcoming test, quiz or assignment dates, and what's on them.
- The unit handouts or textbook your child's class is actually using — courses with the same code run differently from school to school.
- Anything the teacher has said about where your child is struggling.
Send it to your tutor directly, or to hello@xtutoring.ca and we'll pass it along. A photo taken on your phone is completely fine. It does not need to be tidy, scanned, or organised — we would much rather have a blurry picture of a marked-up test than nothing.
2. Be ready at the start time
Sessions run for the length booked. If your tutor arrives late, they'll give you the full time wherever they can — the reverse is harder, because the hour after yours usually belongs to another family.
"Ready" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It means at the table, phone somewhere else, books and calculator already out. Ten minutes spent finding a charger is ten minutes of tutoring you paid for.
For online sessions, it's worth opening the link a few minutes early rather than at the start time. Audio problems are always easier to solve before the clock is running.
This goes both ways. If your tutor is ever late without telling you, we want to know about it — email hello@xtutoring.ca rather than letting it slide.
3. If you need to move a session
Tell us at least 24 hours ahead and there's no charge, and you don't need to explain why. Inside 24 hours, the session is charged in full — your tutor held that time, turned down other work for it, and usually can't fill it at short notice.
That rule exists to protect your tutor's time, not to catch you out. Life happens: a kid gets sick, something comes up. Tell us as early as you can either way and we'll do what we reasonably can.
Message us, not only the tutor. We can see the whole schedule and are usually able to find you a replacement slot the same week.
The full rules, including what happens if we're the ones who cancel, are in our Terms of Service.
4. Where the session happens
Somewhere quiet, with reasonable light and a table. Not the kitchen during dinner, and not a bedroom with a screen on in the background.
The kit is boring but it matters: a charged laptop or tablet, the right calculator for the course, paper and a pencil. This sounds too obvious to write down, and it is still the most common reason a session starts slowly. For online sessions, headphones make a genuine difference to how much gets done.
5. Keep us in the loop
Read the session note. You get a short written summary after every session — what was covered, what's solid, what's still shaky. It is the fastest way to know what's actually happening, and it means never having to interrogate a teenager about how it went.
Tell us when something changes. A new unit, a test that went badly, a teacher change, a genuinely rough week at home. Your tutor can adjust to almost anything if they know about it.
Tell us when it isn't working. Fit matters more in tutoring than in almost anything else. If your child doesn't click with their tutor, say so and we'll switch at no cost, without a conversation about why. We would far rather hear that at week two than lose you at week ten.
If something about a session concerns you, bring it to us directly rather than raising it with the tutor alone. That's what we're here for.
6. What you should expect from us
None of the above is a one-way list. Here's our half of it, and you should hold us to every line:
- The same tutor every week, by default.
- A written summary after every single session.
- Cover when your tutor is away, rather than a cancelled session.
- The price you were quoted, with nothing that renews on its own.
- A different tutor whenever you ask for one, free, no questions.
- An honest answer when we don't think we're the right fit.
If we're not doing these things, tell us. That's not a formality — it's the only way we find out.
7. Questions
Anything at all, at any point. There's no such thing as a question too small to ask us.