Pros and Cons of tutors

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Re: Pros and Cons of tutors

Postby lingua » Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:43 pm

Cavesa wrote:But you seem to be missing my point. Writing is an integral part of language learning, it is in every exam, it is needed for jobs and normal life. A tutor not willing to really focus on it, that's like a doctor not wanting to treat a boring illness within his specialty.


Like I said I've had no problem finding Italian teachers who are willing to work with me on writing so I'm not sure why you do. I've just been too lazy to take them up on it. If a doctor doesn't want to treat a boring illness she can omit it from her specialty and refer to someone else.


It is all about the expectations. If I wanted to just pay for chatting, I would find many tutors fitting the bill. But that's simply not worth paying for imho. Perhaps you have lower expectations, and I don't mean it in any offensive way. But as Italki tutors start around 10 euros (many cost much more), which is double the hourly payment of a doctor in half Europe


But, I'm not paying only for chatting. I'm paying for feedback on my chatting by having my errors pointed out. Once in a while I even focus on some particular verb conjugation or other grammar point but not usually since that's not my primary focus. We also tend to speak on only one or two subjects so I frequently end up adding new vocabulary in a more natural way. For me it's cheap though it's closer to $20/17€ these days. Spending many hours trying to finding good rapport via language exchanges where I have to spend half my time with English isn't worth my time.

And yes, they are mostly failures. Of have you met a single person with high IQ, who would choose a teaching degree? :-D :-D It's mostly for people, who don't get accepted to something more prestigious but just want any degree. And many even admit being faiulures. Many of the expat tutors even admit that they failed at a different career, so they took the CELTA or something like that to get an expat life. So no, it is no offense, just the reality.


We'll have to agree to disagree as my experiences are different. I've found the majority of tutors to be quite satisfactory and I don't know how you could possibly know their IQ. I don't assign prestige to jobs and unless something has changed in the US education system IQ testing isn't a common thing here. But yes I know several reasonably intelligent people who chose teaching as their career path because they were passionate about education.

I see a lot of potential in tools like Speechling and hope to see more of them in the future, perhaps even in the area of writing. If you take the main initiative and decision making away from the tutor, and pick only those good at a particular task, it works really well. That's the future.


I agree that Speechling is an excellent resource. On a practical level I don't know how you could extrapolate it into writing very easily. But if someone takes it on as a project that would be fantastic.

In the US we have remedial courses available in reading, writing and math at some community colleges for those who aren't quite ready for university level courses for whatever reason (high school dropout, grew up in a poorly performing school district, non-native English speaker, older returning student needing a refresher, etc). It seems like a remedial writing course could be beneficial to a language learner but I don't even know if this is available in other countries.
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Re: Pros and Cons of tutors

Postby Cavesa » Wed Jun 30, 2021 11:32 pm

s_allard wrote:The student sends me a version of the document that I examine before we meet. I notice the mistakes and take notes. Then we meet online and go over the document line by line. We discuss my suggested corrections. I ask questions. We move things around. We look at word usage. I have to learn about the terminology used in the field. Now we have a revised version that the student reads out loud. Then we let the text rest for a day or two before having a last look and making any final changes.

The student is invariably very happy with the end result. But the process itself is interesting. My goal as the tutor or coach is not to rewrite the text to my satisfaction; it's really to help the student express themself in an appropriate and pleasing manner. This is also a learning experience for all the subsequent documents to be produced.


What you describe sounds actually really good. Too bad it is simply not the norm. When I asked, the tutors either refused to help me with writing, or they made it obvious they don't do it usually (so, they would probably do a poor job due to lack of experience), and the best ones still refused the part with me sending it and they actually preparing for the video call. They really expected to just see it at the beginning of the video call and start from there. The same was true about the in person offline tutoring, he saw it only during the meeting. I find such an approach to be highly unprofessional.

lingua wrote:Like I said I've had no problem finding Italian teachers who are willing to work with me on writing so I'm not sure why you do. I've just been too lazy to take them up on it. If a doctor doesn't want to treat a boring illness she can omit it from her specialty and refer to someone else.

No, that's not how it works, it looks like you have weird ideas about doctors (yes, people can refuse a few very exceptional kinds of work, and even that only under certain conditions. Being bored is not on the list of allowed excuses :-D ). Every job includes more fun and more boring parts. As I was trying to illustrate, it is childish to just avoid the boring parts.


But, I'm not paying only for chatting. I'm paying for feedback on my chatting by having my errors pointed out. Once in a while I even focus on some particular verb conjugation or other grammar point but not usually since that's not my primary focus. We also tend to speak on only one or two subjects so I frequently end up adding new vocabulary in a more natural way. For me it's cheap though it's closer to $20/17€ these days. Spending many hours trying to finding good rapport via language exchanges where I have to spend half my time with English isn't worth my time.

I agree it's better to pay than waste a lot of time trying to find language exchanges, which are far from guaranteed to work anyways. But still it really depends. In some cases, the price may be well worth it.


And yes, they are mostly failures. Of have you met a single person with high IQ, who would choose a teaching degree? :-D :-D It's mostly for people, who don't get accepted to something more prestigious but just want any degree. And many even admit being faiulures. Many of the expat tutors even admit that they failed at a different career, so they took the CELTA or something like that to get an expat life. So no, it is no offense, just the reality.


We'll have to agree to disagree as my experiences are different. I've found the majority of tutors to be quite satisfactory and I don't know how you could possibly know their IQ. I don't assign prestige to jobs and unless something has changed in the US education system IQ testing isn't a common thing here. But yes I know several reasonably intelligent people who chose teaching as their career path because they were passionate about education.

Unfortunately, IQ is not taken into account in Europe either, and that's why we've seen such a fall in quality of the students (and subsequently schools, which cannot just kick most students out and still survive), and in the inflation of degrees. If objectively unfit people were banned from attending (those with IQ under 110), it would help in many ways. More public funds on the people that are worth investing in, and fewer people with easy degrees running around, demanding undeserved respect and money, delusional about their worth. It would also bar objectively not too brigh people from access to jobs, where their low intelligence can damage others, teaching being a prime example.

I've seen extremely few of those really intelligent people, who opted for teaching. Most are just not too bright. Some of the stupidest people I've ever seen (except for people with a known medical pathology) were language teachers.


I see a lot of potential in tools like Speechling and hope to see more of them in the future, perhaps even in the area of writing. If you take the main initiative and decision making away from the tutor, and pick only those good at a particular task, it works really well. That's the future.


I agree that Speechling is an excellent resource. On a practical level I don't know how you could extrapolate it into writing very easily. But if someone takes it on as a project that would be fantastic.

It wouldn't be that hard, even though it would be more demanding than the short bits worked with in Speechling. My ideal would be sending in a text, getting high quality feedback in writing (no need for a video lesson), and paying a fee based on stuff like length, or level, or type of work.


In the US we have remedial courses available in reading, writing and math at some community colleges for those who aren't quite ready for university level courses for whatever reason (high school dropout, grew up in a poorly performing school district, non-native English speaker, older returning student needing a refresher, etc). It seems like a remedial writing course could be beneficial to a language learner but I don't even know if this is available in other countries.

This is not usual as far as I know, and it is not something easily findable by a language learner. I tried.
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Re: Pros and Cons of tutors

Postby CC93 » Fri Jul 02, 2021 8:56 pm

I can't really think of many cons. It's a service and there are plenty of bad service providers across any field. I mostly use tutors as conversational practice as paying $5-10 for an hour of conversation is so much easier than trying to set up a good language exchange. Most are very responsive to providing feedback if you make clear what it is you want. The only really important aspect is chemistry with the person. I've found you can get a feel for this within the first few minutes and worst case scenario you can just drop them and the initial lesson won't generally be a waste. You also pretty much get what you pay for. I don't pay $10 dollars an hour for any other service in my life and expect brilliance.

It's a bit like paying for a personal trainer. A lot of people don't need them, you'll get what you pay for and ultimately they aren't going to be the ones who determine your success but can be a big help for some. You still have to exercise outside your hourly session and diet etc which comes from your own determination.

Cavesa wrote:I've seen extremely few of those really intelligent people, who opted for teaching. Most are just not too bright. Some of the stupidest people I've ever seen (except for people with a known medical pathology) were language teachers.


That's interesting that that has been your experience. I'd say I have seen a lot of teachers who are very intelligent people or have a high level of expertise within their domain but who are not skilled at actually teaching. The same for language teachers. I have had some bad experiences with teachers who were academically qualified and generally seemed intelligent but are not effective at teaching or maybe it's just that their style hasn't suited me.

I see this in stereotypically "intelligent" professions as well (e.g. doctors, lawyers etc). My experience has been that most doctors aren't very good at their job but I wouldn't always say it's a lack of intelligence (even though a lot of doctors aren't very intelligent).
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Re: Pros and Cons of tutors

Postby s_allard » Sun Jul 04, 2021 3:43 am

CC93 wrote:I can't really think of many cons. It's a service and there are plenty of bad service providers across any field. I mostly use tutors as conversational practice as paying $5-10 for an hour of conversation is so much easier than trying to set up a good language exchange. Most are very responsive to providing feedback if you make clear what it is you want. The only really important aspect is chemistry with the person. I've found you can get a feel for this within the first few minutes and worst case scenario you can just drop them and the initial lesson won't generally be a waste. You also pretty much get what you pay for. I don't pay $10 dollars an hour for any other service in my life and expect brilliance.

It's a bit like paying for a personal trainer. A lot of people don't need them, you'll get what you pay for and ultimately they aren't going to be the ones who determine your success but can be a big help for some. You still have to exercise outside your hourly session and diet etc which comes from your own determination.
...

To take CC93's point even further, I don't think there are any cons about having a tutor. What's there to say against having the opportunity of working with a native speaker?. The issue is more one of what makes a good tutor or how to find one. And as CC93 also points out, the real question is the fit between the tutor and the tutee.

In my opinion, intelligence has nothing to do with all this. I'm looking for a good fit in terms of compatibility. I don't ask for an IQ score when looking for someone to work with. Maybe I'm not that intelligent myself. I would say that level of education if probably the most important factor for me but even then I'm very flexible.

Just yesterday and today I had two very different experiences, one with my least favourite tutor and the other with my favourite tutor, both from the same tutoring service for 30 minutes each. Since I knew the supposedly bad tutor very well, I knew how to "squeeze" some value out of her by taking charge of the session and forcing her to work by asking a few questions. With the "great" tutor, it was all pleasure from beginning to end. I had come prepared with some things to work on but we started talking about other stuff and just continued on. At the very end of the session I used a great idiomatic expression but with the wrong verb. The tutor burst out laughing and spontaneously corrected me. The correction now sticks in my head.

The point of all this is that you get what you pay for. This tutoring service I use is dirt cheap and I wouldn't recommend it but I can eke some value out of it by using it my way. Since it's so cheap I can use it a lot.
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Re: Pros and Cons of tutors

Postby Pikaia » Sun Jul 04, 2021 7:47 pm

The only con for me is cost. Cheap tutoring is easy to find online, but I struggle to find high quality tutoring that I can afford long term.

In an obscure corner of the internet I was told that it is exploitative for me to pay less than the rate charged by an in-person professional tutor where I live ($60USD/hr), regardless of the lower cost of living where my online tutor resides. I tried to explain that only the truly wealthy can regularly afford $60/hr, but this was rejected as an ugly American excuse. I no longer frequent that corner of the internet. ;)

I can sort of see the rationale. Tutors in moderate and higher cost of living countries probably resent it when their wages are forced down by competition from tutors who can live on a lot less money.

Maybe I need to start buying lottery tickets. A big win could buy a lot of tutoring! :lol:
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Re: Pros and Cons of tutors

Postby Kraut » Tue Jul 06, 2021 3:19 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_nzSYbOmxM


How to find a good language tutor online


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Hier findest Du den YouTube-Kanal von Stefano „linguaEpassione“:

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Re: Pros and Cons of tutors

Postby Cavesa » Tue Jul 06, 2021 7:25 pm

s_allard wrote:In my opinion, intelligence has nothing to do with all this. I'm looking for a good fit in terms of compatibility. I don't ask for an IQ score when looking for someone to work with. Maybe I'm not that intelligent myself. I would say that level of education if probably the most important factor for me but even then I'm very flexible.


Well, it can be a problem. For example my only attempt at getting an Italian tutor (I have much more experience with those in my other languages) really had the intelligence issue. How is someone objectively stupid supposed to teach me? Someone, who cannot even imagine that other people can learn for several hours a day? Someone unable to understand how a self teaching learner could have learnt some basic Italian, enough to hold a basic conversation going? Unable to understand that some people can really learn fast and make tons of progress in a few months? Her low intellect and disbelief in existence of people with better mental capacities was clearly an issue. All the changes she "proposed" (but would insist on, had I decided to continue with her) were clearly affected by the fact she couldn't even imagine what are the clever people like.

We see that all the time. The people (including language teachers), who are always worried that the learner might learn too intensely, burn out, or simply not manage to focus for more than an hour or two. They are projecting their own experience, with life and learning with a lower intellect, onto others.

So while it is not realistic to ask for IQ score, and while it is definitely true that the IQ score reflects just some part of the overall intelligence, it is naive to believe stupid people can teach as well as the clever people. As someone with high IQ, I've always struggled with the significantly stupider teachers and their methods. I am no longer willing to inflict that upon myself. And I wouldn't recommend it to others either.

Just yesterday and today I had two very different experiences, one with my least favourite tutor and the other with my favourite tutor, both from the same tutoring service for 30 minutes each. Since I knew the supposedly bad tutor very well, I knew how to "squeeze" some value out of her by taking charge of the session and forcing her to work by asking a few questions. With the "great" tutor, it was all pleasure from beginning to end. I had come prepared with some things to work on but we started talking about other stuff and just continued on. At the very end of the session I used a great idiomatic expression but with the wrong verb. The tutor burst out laughing and spontaneously corrected me. The correction now sticks in my head.

The point of all this is that you get what you pay for. This tutoring service I use is dirt cheap and I wouldn't recommend it but I can eke some value out of it by using it my way. Since it's so cheap I can use it a lot.


But that's a part of the issue. When I pay someone, it's because I believe they are able to do a better job at something than I can. So, if I have to do all the lesson directing job, insist on the methods used, squeeze the value out of it, it is really a bit too much work, considering I am paying for that. Don't you find it a bit too tiring?

It sounds a bit as if you paid for a car repair, but actually went to the garage, and just used it to do all the repairs yourself, with perhaps a few of their tools.

Pikaia wrote:The only con for me is cost. Cheap tutoring is easy to find online, but I struggle to find high quality tutoring that I can afford long term.

In an obscure corner of the internet I was told that it is exploitative for me to pay less than the rate charged by an in-person professional tutor where I live ($60USD/hr), regardless of the lower cost of living where my online tutor resides. I tried to explain that only the truly wealthy can regularly afford $60/hr, but this was rejected as an ugly American excuse. I no longer frequent that corner of the internet. ;)

I can sort of see the rationale. Tutors in moderate and higher cost of living countries probably resent it when their wages are forced down by competition from tutors who can live on a lot less money.

Maybe I need to start buying lottery tickets. A big win could buy a lot of tutoring! :lol:


There is another issue. This forum is an exception. But vast majority of the language learners are people from poorer countries learning langauges of the richer countries. So no, language tutoring is not cheap at all. If someone says it is cheap (like s_allard), they are just extremely privileged and oblivious of that privilege.

A typical German/French/English learner is much poorer than a typical German/French/English tutor online. So, language tutoring is really not cheap at all. The cheapest French tutors get twice as much per hour as a Czech doctor. All that with much less sacrifice, lower education, and so on.

Really, asking 60 dollars for language tutoring is exploitative in the other direction, the tutor asking so much is probably a privileged native of a popular rich language (usually a colonialist language), being paid by people without the privilege, and profiting from the myth that self teaching a language is impossible. A tutor asking so much is an extremely immoral person, who doesn't really deserve such money (a language tutor is usually a person with just a humanities degree, therefore just twice their local minimum wage is plenty for them in my honest opinion. Really, we need to start paying more the essential workers and less people, who preferred a beautiful and easy youth).

That's why language tutoring needs to stop being described as the most awesome way to learn a language. In most areas, it is no better than self teaching (and the areas in which the tutors are being fully replaced are fortunately growing!). Most tutors are stupid or otherwise bad. And most of them are very expensive.
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Re: Pros and Cons of tutors

Postby rdearman » Tue Jul 06, 2021 7:33 pm

Cavesa wrote:When I pay someone, it's because I believe they are able to do a better job at something than I can.

Did you know that Tiger Woods has a coach? Almost all the great tennis players have a coach. And none of the coaches are better than them. However, the view point of someone external to oneself can bring clarity and highlight things of which one is not self aware.
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Re: Pros and Cons of tutors

Postby s_allard » Tue Jul 06, 2021 11:22 pm

rdearman wrote:
Cavesa wrote:When I pay someone, it's because I believe they are able to do a better job at something than I can.

Did you know that Tiger Woods has a coach? Almost all the great tennis players have a coach. And none of the coaches are better than them. However, the view point of someone external to oneself can bring clarity and highlight things of which one is not self aware.


Again very well put. Really, if the tutoring experience is so painful and expensive, as we keep hearing, the choice is simple: do without. As for me, I'll take any opportunity to work with a native speaker, even a fairly mediocre tutor, rather than simply speak to myself. If the person can put two words together with good pronunciation and the price is right, then I can make do.
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Re: Pros and Cons of tutors

Postby Kraut » Wed Jul 07, 2021 8:36 am

I am trying to emulate conversation within my bidirectional translation approach: I record the - often quite literal - translation into L1
and do the reverse translation via listening to this L1 and translating loudly orally - quite like "consecutive translation". (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyvrU6FYN7o)

Of course this is not a real conversation but the prompts that I get I suppose must be quite similar to real conversation

example
L2:

Estaba realizando el Camino de Santiago en bici y poco antes de llegar a Nájera me pilló una tormenta.
El albergue del pueblo estaba completo pero en este hostal me habían dicho por teléfono que tenían una habitación disponible.
Cuando llegué allí, el dueño me hizo esperar más de 15 minutos, a pesar de verme empapado y tiritando, para finalmente decirme que se trataba de un error y que estaban completos. .........


In case I need the audio, there are some very good text-to-speech tools

------------

L1: translation into German recorded

Ich machte den Jakobsweg mit dem Fahrrad und kurz vor der Ankunft in Najera erwischte mich ein Sturm. ......


--------------

reverse translation into Spanisch orally: half a sentence, whole sentence, two sentences ..

-----------

I am in control of difficulty, subject matter, my time ...
I am also practising this method in pen friend exchanges.
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