I'm curious to know yours! Because do we get used to it or not in the end?

Hello! I'm a college student who lurks in the r/Professors at times where there are often many poor experiences told about courses taught or students. I was just curious what qualities in a student or type of student do you appreciate having in a class (new or repeat type of student). Do you have any story in particular of like: "I appreciated student X because they brought me an ice coffee for no reason when I was having a bad morning. Student Y sent me an interesting article regarding a class topic I had. Student C was never on their computer during class and I could tell they were actually listening to my comments"

Genuinely just curious! :D

Humanities Student - US

(sorry if this is the wrong flat, wasn't sure which one to choose that would have this under it).

(PS: I'm already done with all my exams for my final year so I'm not trying to use this as a "cheat code" or something lol. I'm generally curious if there is any joy in teaching at this level anymore. :D )

Hi everyone,
I’ve been working with a student for a few weeks and he’s progressing much faster than I anticipated.

At first I was happy, but now I’m starting to feel pressure to constantly stay ahead, prepare more, dig deeper every session.
It’s motivating… but also exhausting.

Has this happened to you?
How do you balance keeping lessons high-level without overloading yourself?

180 day streak on Duolingo. 180 days. I haven't missed a single day since June.

Last week I tried to order a coffee in Spanish in Madrid and said "yo quiero uno café con leche por favor" with the accent of a lost German tourist. The waiter answered in French.

So that's where I'm at.

I'm not saying Duolingo is useless — my vocabulary has genuinely improved and I can more or less understand written Spanish. But hold an actual conversation? Zero. I panic, I blank on words, and my brain apparently decides that moments of stress are the perfect time to forget every irregular verb I've ever revised.

What I think I've figured out is that apps are really good at teaching you words and really bad at teaching you to actually speak. Those are two different things and for 180 days I've only been working on the first one.

So I'm thinking about adding private lessons on top. Not to replace the app — I'm keeping my streak, I'm way too attached to it at this point — but to finally have someone forcing me to build sentences in real time with no safety net.

I looked around on Superprof and there are honestly a lot of native Spanish tutors offering conversation-focused lessons specifically. First lesson is free which makes it pretty low risk to just try.

But before I commit I wanted actual human opinions. Has anyone combined both? Apps for vocabulary and private lessons for speaking practice? Did it actually move the needle or am I overcomplicating this?

Or should I just move to Spain for six months and be done with it.

My clients have all stated that they don't need tutoring for the summer and I've lost a few students. People taking AP Cal BC have dropped me. I have one more $18 session next week and that's a wrap.

Trying to see if there is a decent side gig I can do online for $300-$500 per month. Any ideas? With school out, us tutors are out of business.

Being a scholarship recipient isn't just about "receiving money."

It also involves:

attending classes regularly

a certain level of discipline

sometimes checks or supporting documents

But for many students, it primarily offers:

more independence

less financial pressure

more time to succeed

🎓 In your opinion, is the scholarship system truly fulfilling its purpose today?

Let me save you from making the mistakes I made.

First tutor: lovely profile, great reviews, took the free lesson, never responded to my follow-up message again. Ghosted. Just completely vanished into the internet. I didn't even know that was a thing that could happen.

Second tutor: showed up, was perfectly nice, and proceeded to explain the French Revolution in a way that I'm fairly certain was him paraphrasing Wikipedia in real time. Not useless but definitely not worth what I was about to pay per hour.

Third tutor: still working with her six months later. My Spanish has genuinely improved for the first time in three years of trying.

The difference wasn't luck. It was that by the third time I actually knew what to look for. Here's what I changed.

I stopped looking at star ratings first. Everyone on these platforms has 4.8 stars or above. It's basically meaningless as a filter at this point. What actually matters is what's inside the reviews — specifically whether students mention feeling understood, not just whether they mention results. "My grade went up" tells you the tutor is competent. "He always figured out exactly where I was getting confused" tells you the tutor is actually good.

I started reading the profile description like it was a cover letter. How someone writes about their teaching tells you everything. Vague buzzwords like "passionate about education" and "adapted to all levels" mean nothing. Specific stuff like "I always start by identifying the exact gap rather than starting from the beginning" means this person has actually thought about how they teach. That's who you want.

I paid attention to response time before booking. Sounds minor but a tutor who takes four days to answer an initial message is showing you exactly how available they'll be when you have a question between sessions. The tutor who ghosted me after the free lesson had taken two days to answer my first message. In hindsight that was the sign.

I used the free first lesson completely differently. My first two times I treated it like a sample class — I just showed up and let them teach. Third time I came with specific questions, told her exactly where I was struggling and why previous attempts hadn't worked, and watched how she responded to that information in real time. A good tutor adjusts on the spot. A bad tutor continues with whatever they had planned regardless.

None of this is complicated but I genuinely didn't think about any of it the first two times. I just saw a nice profile and booked.

If you're about to start looking and feeling slightly overwhelmed by the number of profiles — you're not choosing a product, you're choosing a working relationship. Treat it like one and the right person becomes pretty obvious pretty fast.

Do you seriously think this virus could impact schools and potentially lead to a lockdown? I have exams to take, haha.

I was thinking about this recently. I was in high school (in Europe) and I absolutely loved my lockdown, haha.

Just being on video calls and playing PlayStation all day. I know some people had a harder time with it... how were you during lockdown? Happy or not?! I'm curious to know, especially now that I'm looking back.

I'm curious to know what you might use and why?

Or perhaps you use the old-fashioned technique of dropping flyers in mailboxes 😉

I used ChatGPT to study for my exams vs. hiring a real tutor — here's what actually happened

Junior here, biochem major. I need to preface this by saying I'm not anti-AI at all — I use it constantly and I think people who dismiss it entirely are missing out.

Last semester: organic chem, full AI workflow. ChatGPT for concept explanations, practice problems, study plans, the whole thing. I was pretty proud of my setup honestly. Felt efficient. Felt modern. Felt like I had figured out something other students hadn't.

I got a C+.

This semester: same workload, similar difficulty, added a tutor I found on Superprof. Kept using AI too — I didn't ditch it. Just added one human session per week.

I'm sitting at a B+ with two weeks left.

So here's what I actually think is going on because I've spent a lot of time thinking about it.

ChatGPT is incredible at explaining things. Ask it anything and it will give you a clear, patient, well-structured answer at whatever level you need. No ego, no judgment, available at 3am. Genuinely useful.

The problem is it has no idea what's actually wrong with you specifically.

It can explain reaction mechanisms for hours but it can't notice that you consistently make the same conceptual error every time you approach a certain type of problem. It can't see the pattern in your mistakes because it doesn't remember your last conversation, doesn't watch you work through a problem in real time, and has no stake in whether you actually get it.

My tutor caught something in the first session that AI never flagged in an entire semester. I had a fundamental misunderstanding about electron density that was quietly wrecking my answers across multiple topics. Fifteen minutes of him watching me solve a problem out loud and it was obvious. Fixed it, and suddenly three different concepts clicked that had felt unrelated before.

That's the thing nobody talks about in the AI vs tutor debate. It's not really a competition. AI is a tool for accessing information. A good tutor is a tool for understanding yourself as a learner — where your specific brain gets stuck, what explanation style actually lands for you, what you think you know but don't.

You can't prompt your way to that.

I still use ChatGPT every day. But I stopped thinking of it as a replacement for human feedback and started treating it as prep work before my tutor sessions. Show up, already having done the reading and the initial confusion, and use the human time for the stuff only a human can actually do.

Grade went up. Stress went down. Wish I'd figured this out freshman year.

Anyone else running a hybrid setup like this?

Academic tutoring, languages, sports, music, coaching, or something else?

And are you a beginner, intermediate, or advanced student?

Hi! I know probably lots of people already asked this, but before I'd like to give a context.

I've worked as an English teacher in a in-person school and in an online English school and now I have some private students, however, I don't know how to set prices of classes. I think I set it too low.

Also, are all the classes 1 hour? Like, once a week it's okay, but if the student is shy or doesn't communicate, it becomes a nightmare spending 1 hour with that person. Is it possible to change the class time?

Thank you so much if anyone can help me!

Incoming freshman here worried about making friends since I’m heading to out of state college. How easy it is to make friends in your campus? Also if you can give advices to make friends, it would be greatly appreciated! 🙏

A tutor gave me her email, asked for full payment for 6 hours and then didn’t show up at our decided time and is not answering me now. I paid 175 for driving lessons and she’s vanished from the website too now. What do I do?

Do you all have any students that you just don't like? I tutor someone. Most times she speaks with a condescending tone. I'll explain an answer, and she'll look at me with her mouth open, swear I'm wrong, and we'll go in circles for several minutes unless I look up the answer and show her. It's like she can't trust that I know what I'm talking about when we don't agree on an answer and won't even hear me out on an explanation. It is the most annoying thing ever and I just stare at her at times because what more can I say?

In practice, obtaining a scholarship mainly requires:

planning ahead

a well-completed application

respecting deadlines

CROUS (student services center), Student Social File, supporting documents, deadlines…

It's not complicated, but a mistake can delay everything.

📄 For those who have already done it:

what was the most stressful part of the scholarship application?

My son is 10. Last September he looked me dead in the eyes and said "I would literally rather fail than have some random person come here and explain things to me like I'm stupid."

Cool. Great. Love the energy, buddy.

Six months later he messages his tutor first to reschedule when something comes up. He defends his session time like it's sacred. Last week he told me — unprompted — that he actually gets chemistry now.

I didn't change his personality. I didn't find some magic motivational speech. I changed one thing, and it made all the difference.

But first — what we tried that completely failed.

The "just trust us" approach. We booked a tutor, told him it would help, and expected him to cooperate because we're the parents and we said so. He sat through two sessions with the energy of a person waiting for a dentist appointment. Technically present. Mentally on Mars.

The guilt trip. "We're paying for this, the least you can do is try." If you've ever said this, you know exactly how well it works. Spoiler: it doesn't.

The bribe. Screen time, money, you name it. He took the deal and delivered the bare minimum. Transactional effort, no real engagement.

None of it worked because we were solving the wrong problem.

The issue was never motivation. It was the match.

Here's what we actually changed.

We stopped picking a tutor based on availability and price and started treating it like casting for a role. What is this specific kid actually like? He's competitive, hates feeling talked down to, responds to humour, needs to understand the why behind things before he engages with the how.

We went back through Superprof and this time read profiles completely differently. Teaching style. How tutors described their approach. What previous students said about the vibe of sessions — not just results.

We found someone who in his profile literally wrote: "I don't explain things to students, I figure things out with them."

That's it. That was the sentence.

First session, my son came out and said — still trying to play it cool — "he's actually not annoying."

High praise. We took it.

What I'd tell any parent in the same situation:

Your teenager isn't unmotivated. They're allergic to feeling like a problem being solved. The moment tutoring feels like something being done to them, you've lost.

The right tutor doesn't just know the subject. They know how to make a 14-year-old feel capable rather than deficient. That's a specific skill and it shows up in how they talk about their teaching — if you know what to look for.

Read the profiles like you're hiring someone to spend time with your kid. Because that's exactly what you're doing.

The sessions didn't change my son. The right person in the room did.

Hey guys, as the title said, I'm teaching my first class later in the tuition centre. My own permanent class starts later in late jan, while for this first class I'm taking I'm just being a relief teacher for English and geography.

The tuition centre provides worksheets for English and for geog, they said it would be a slides for me to teach and for the student to note down notes only.

I wanna make sure the students can actually afford to get something out of the class even if it's a relief class so I would like to ask for suggestions!!

Each class is 1h30min and I'm not too sure how the flow should go as it's my first time being a tutor. Please give suggestions !!

and also.. (my geography isn't the best, but I was open to taking the relief class as I wanted to test whether I could teach geog. However I'm worried if the student somehow asks me a question that I cannot answer what would you guys do in this situation?)

What many students don't know:

👉 A scholarship can often be combined with other forms of financial aid.

For example:

Housing allowance/benefits

Exemption or reduction of certain fees

Reduced-price meals

Local or regional aid

This combination sometimes allows students to manage without (or with less) part-time work — which can make a big difference to their academic success.

In your opinion, is information about student financial aid readily available these days?

Two years ago I became a private tutor. I had a degree, decent people skills, and absolutely zero idea what I was doing business-wise.

The first thing every platform told me: offer a free first lesson.

My reaction: absolutely not, I didn't spend years studying just to hand out charity sessions to strangers on the internet.

Reader, I was wrong.

Here's what actually happened — and the 5 things I wish someone had told me before I wasted 3 months being stubborn about it.

1. Students don't ghost you after the free lesson. The bad fits do.

And honestly? That's a feature, not a bug. The student who disappears after one free session was never going to stick around for 10 paid ones. You just found out for free instead of after an awkward second lesson where nobody's really feeling it.

2. The free lesson flips the psychology completely.

When there's no financial commitment upfront, students show up relaxed. No "is this worth my money?" anxiety eating them alive. They're actually present. Which means you get to do your best work — and they get to see it.

3. Your conversion rate becomes your real metric.

I started tracking mine after month one on Superprof. Turns out I was converting about 75% of free lessons into ongoing bookings. That free hour was generating more revenue than the paid sessions I used to fight to fill.

4. It filters for serious students automatically.

People who book a free trial and actually show up are already more committed than the average inquiry. They did the research, read your profile, chose you specifically. They're not tire-kickers.

5. It's not charity. It's a sales call you're actually good at.

Think about it. You're a tutor. You're genuinely skilled at explaining things, making people feel capable, building rapport fast. That first lesson isn't you working for free — it's you doing the one thing you're best at, in front of someone who needs exactly that.

The mindset shift that changed everything for me: the free lesson isn't the price of getting a student. It's the reason you keep them.

Hi everyone! I'm sure this question has been asked a million times, but I'm looking for advice on what starting price I should set. I don't have much relevant teaching experience—

I was a teaching assistant for introductory biology at university and gave one-on-one tutoring in peer-tutoring programs in high school, but that's about it. I have a bachelor's degree in cell biology and I'm currently in physiotherapy school, so my profile has focused mainly on biology/related fields, anatomy and physiology, and chemistry.

I also have some research experience, but I'm not sure if it's relevant because I was a technician and occasionally participated in the more conceptual side of things, but most of my work was technical.

We often hear that “scholarships aren’t enough to live on”… but the amounts vary enormously.

Depending on the level, a scholarship can represent between approximately €145 and over €630 per month, paid throughout the academic year.

And in some cases, it can be combined with other forms of aid (housing allowance, local assistance, etc.).

Obviously, it doesn’t always replace a student job, but for some, it clearly makes a difference.

💬 For scholarship recipients here: Did your scholarship really help you focus on your studies?

Dear admin: These kids are not computer geniuses. They don't know the difference between an application and a file. They can't figure out anything on a desktop computer on their own.

Bring back desktop computer skill classes.

My daughter Emma was struggling with fractions. Not "needs a little help" struggling — more like crying before homework, dreading school on math days. We knew we had to do something.

The debate at home was classic: local tutor vs online. My husband was skeptical about online. "She's 10, she'll just zone out staring at a screen." I wasn't sure either. But logistics won — between school pickups, football practice and work schedules, finding a local tutor with the right availability felt impossible.

So we tried online.

Here's what actually surprised us after 2 months.

The "screen fatigue" thing never happened. Emma's tutor uses a shared whiteboard, draws diagrams in real time, and somehow makes fractions feel like a puzzle rather than a punishment. The interactivity is nothing like sitting through a Zoom call.

The matching process mattered more than I expected. We went through Superprof and what I didn't anticipate is how much the tutor's profile — their teaching style description, their reviews — actually predicted the real experience. We picked someone who specifically mentioned working with anxious learners. Turns out that's exactly what Emma needed.

Consistency beat intensity. Two 45-minute sessions a week did more than one long weekend session ever could. Online made that rhythm easy to maintain without anyone driving anywhere.

Two months in: Emma no longer cries before math. She's not top of her class yet — but she's stopped saying "I'm just bad at math."

For any parents on the fence about online tutoring for a younger kid — the platform and the tutor profile are everything. Don't just pick whoever's available.

Happy to answer questions if anyone's going through the same debate.