You get some pupils who are absolutely brilliant to teach every way you look at it. They book regular lessons, rarely cancel, always turn up, and they never cause you a problem.
On the other side of the coin, I’ve had pupils who have cancelled or changed more lessons than they’ve actually taken. I’m flexible to start with, I warn them if they carry on taking the mick, and I get rid of them if they do it again after that (I had one who had cancelled or rearranged 4 out of his first 5 bookings, then didn’t turn up to the next one he’d specifically arranged during a school holiday. To make matters worse, his dad reckoned he should be test-ready after only 12 hours, having never driven before!). To date, that’s only two out of hundreds of pupils I’ve ditched.
I have one who has only ever let me down once: I turned up one Saturday morning at 9am and he didn’t show. It turned out he was comatose in bed with a hangover. We don’t do Saturdays anymore.
I have another who had let me down by being at a music festival when I turned up to a booked lesson (apparently his phone battery had gone dead and he couldn’t contact me, nor I him). He’s on a final warning because the next lesson I turned up for he was absolutely paralytic at 6pm.
The other one I got rid of had used up all the possible excuses. One time she was painting her bedroom and ‘forgot’ the lesson. She was ‘ill’ more times than I have fingers to count with. But the best one was when she called an hour before her 6pm lesson – she was at school and the exam, which was scheduled to start at 3pm, still hadn’t begun. The last straw was when she was ill yet again. I simply told her I couldn’t afford not to teach her anymore.
To be honest, it’s best when they just tell you the truth: ‘I can’t afford the lesson this week’.
That’s becoming more common with the credit squeeze and all.