Tracking progress without a spreadsheet

It dies because updating it is a separate task, done after a lesson, when you are tired and the next student is in ten minutes. Any record that requires a second act of writing after the teaching will be kept for a month and then quietly abandoned.

It also dies because of what it asks for. Columns want scores, and a one-to-one lesson does not naturally produce scores. So the tutor invents one — a 7, a "good" — and within a few weeks the column is full of numbers that nobody trusts, which makes filling it in feel even less worthwhile.

The useful unit is not a score but a claim you could defend: this student can now use the past tense to narrate a weekend without stopping to think. It is specific, it is either true or not, and it is exactly what a parent wants to hear.

Marks compress away the information you needed. Two students at 7 out of 10 can have completely different problems, and in three weeks the 7 tells you nothing about what to teach. A short list of what is confirmed and what is still shaky survives the same three weeks intact.

This is also how the CEFR describes learners, and for the same reason — see what the CEFR levels actually mean. A level is a summary; the can-do list underneath it is the working record.

The only records that survive are the ones made while the lesson is happening. A note written next to the exercise that provoked it, at the moment it happened, costs nothing extra — you were already looking at the thing.

That is a strong argument for teaching on a surface that keeps what you write on it, and it is the whole case for teaching online on a board rather than a shared screen. If the lesson leaves behind a board with the exercises, the corrections and the notes still in place, the record exists without anyone doing paperwork, and it is a better record than any summary written afterwards would have been.

Parents do not want a data export. They want an answer to one question — is this working — and the answer that lands is a short list of things their child could not do in September and can do now, with one honest sentence about what is still hard.

Honesty about the hard part is what makes the rest believable. A report that is all progress reads as marketing; a report that says the past tense is solid and the articles are still unreliable reads as someone who has been paying attention.

This is also the material a referral is made of. A parent who can repeat something specific about what their child has learned is a parent who can recommend you: see how to find your first tutoring students.

The other half of the abandoned spreadsheet is usually the balance: lessons taken, lessons paid for, what is left. It goes stale for the same reason, and it fails more visibly, because a family will eventually query a number and a tutor reconstructing it from memory loses either the money or the goodwill.

A running balance derived from the lessons themselves — rather than typed in a second time — cannot drift, and it makes a waived lesson visible as a waiver instead of as a gap. That matters most when you are being generous, which is the case a cancellation policy is really about.

Halgo keeps both in one record: students, lessons and payments together.