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"Dan Tynan has been writing about technology since Steve Ballmer had hair. He is a contributing editor for Family Circle, where he writes about the intersection of parenting and technology. He also blogs about social media and privacy for IDG publications and is the co-founder of a disreputable humor blog. Tynan is the father of two smart-yet-sassy teenagers, but nothing he says should ever be construed as professional parenting advice. Follow him on Twitter @tynanwrites or at his blog Hopeless Dork.\nAll parents believe their kids are geniuses. It's in our DNA. And even if little Lisa and Lenny aren't acing algebra, they're probably scoring touchdowns, singing arias, or finagling their way onto the top of their social pyramids. \nBut my 16-year-old son Cole? Smart. Really smart. Even people who aren't his parents say that. \nYou'd think, then, school would be a breeze for him. But it's not. We discovered early on Cole's brain moves too quickly for our public education system; whatever was going on inside his head was far more interesting than what was going on inside the classroom. So school has been an excruciating experience for all of us. Meanwhile, Cole has stubbornly repelled every effort we've made to find alternatives. Kid just wants to be normal. Go figure. \nLong story short: Despite having a keen mind for mathematics, he is floundering in calculus. Endless sessions with Saul Kahn at the Kahn Academy were helping, but not enough. So we decided it was time for a tutor.\nThis did not sit at all well with my son. Eventually I had to invoke the \"no tutor, no computer\" rule: If he didn't agree to get some kind of academic help, he'd be back to using a pencil, paper, and abacus to do his homework.\nSEE ALSO: Get Thee Onto Tumblr Before it's Too Late\n\nWe decided to try out a new online tutoring service called InstaEDU. It looked promising: Dozens of college students from the cr\u00E8me de la cr\u00E8me of higher education \u2013 Berkeley, MIT, Yale, Princeton, and so on \u2013 available to offer one-on-one help via video chat and IM for $24 to $30 an hour. And all of them looked like Abercrombie &amp; Fitch models. At least, the ones on the home page did.\nI set up an appointment for him with Ross, a graduate math student at CalTech. Ross couldn't do it at the time I requested (6 pm ET) so he suggested 9 pm. That was a little late but I said OK. InstaEDU sent us both a confirmation email and a reminder with a link to the session. We were good to go.\nAt 5:40 pm on the day of the session I got an email from InstaEDU. Ross needs to reschedule; could we possibly do it at the original time, or 20 minutes from now? Because I wasn't home \u2013 and there was no way I could ensure that my son would actually attend the session \u2014 I said we'd stick to 9 pm. \nAt 6:20 pm I received an email from Sophie, InstaEdu's \"community manager.\" Ross called to say his car had broken down and he couldn't make our 9 pm session. She's looking for a substitute tutor and will get back to me. I am starting to suspect Ross has a hot date with another Abercrombie &amp; Fitch model and is blowing us off, but I say OK, fine.\nSEE ALSO: Parent\u2019s Dilemma: Are You Raising Tech-Addicted Kids?\n\nSophie emails back and says she's found a great math tutor named Adam who would be happy to fill in for Ross. I say OK. So at 9 pm my son is sitting in front of his laptop with his calculus book, his homework, and a pencil, waiting. He wants to do this about as much as he wants to go have his teeth drilled, but he's doing it nonetheless. I am proud of him.\nAt 9:05 he's still waiting. Then it's 9:10 and still no sign of Adam. I contact Sophie and ask her what's up. She apologizes profusely, says this is \"very uncharacteristic\" of InstaEDU, and suggests Cole do an On Demand search to find an instructor right now. I suggest that to my son, who is less than keen. We decide to wait a few more minutes.\nBy 9:25 pm it's clear that Adam is on a double date with Ross and two A&amp;F models, so I persuade my son to try InstaEDU's On Demand tutors. The result: \"No AB Calculus tutors are available right now.\"\nBack to Sophie: \"It looks like a couple of our tutors tried to connect, but weren't able to get their video feeds loaded in under 5 minutes.\"\nI tell Sophie I am beginning to understand why InstaEDU still has the word 'beta' on its home page. She begs for another chance to connect my son with a tutor and I grudgingly agree. After another ten minutes she's got one cued up for him, and I persuade Cole to go ahead with the session.\nAfter that, things went fine. His tutor appeared in a small window on my son's laptop, hunkered down over her laptop in a dorm room while her roommates were having a lively conversation in the background. I really expected him to cut the session short, but he stuck with it for 38 minutes. At the end I asked him. Did it help? Yes, he said, it did. Was it fun? He looked at me.\"Dad, it was a tutor.\"\n\nSEE ALSO: Learning Real Life Lessons in the Virtual World\nWould he do it again? Yes, he said, if he felt he needed it. OK then.\nI told Sophie she owed us some free tutorial time for our pain and suffering, and she added an hour to our account. The next day I received an email from InstaEDU's CEO, Alison Johnston. She wrote:\nI heard that you had a horrible time getting a calculus lesson for your son today, so I wanted to send you a personal apology. Our main goal is to allow students to get great academic support extremely easily, and today we obviously failed. Situations like this are rare but unacceptable. Study time is valuable, and it's our job to make sure that we're allowing students and their families to make the best possible use of it.\nI really like the concept of having the best and brightest college students tutor my kids. But I remember what I was like in college \u2013 not the most rock-solid reliable human being on the planet. I suspect the folks at InstaEDU are discovering that as well. Smart and attractive does not alone a good teacher make.\nWill we give InstaEDU another shot? Probably. Hopefully we all learned a few lessons from this.\nThis post is part of a series on the digital dilemmas of raising digital kids. We'd like to hear some of the parenting issues technology has raised for you. Please let us know in the comments, or on our Mashable Lifestyle Facebook page. You can also follow and tweet us @mashlifestyle. \nPhoto courtesy of iStockphoto, MorePixels"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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