EDible News: Ana-Maria Jerca, Contributor
I always knew I wanted to be a teacher. I remember telling my parents so in the first grade. Since then, numerous other career options were explored by my young mind - in the second grade, I wanted to be an astronaut; in the tenth, a screenwriter - but I always came back to teaching. I felt happy envisioning myself in the role of an educator, specifically, a language teacher. I watched my French and Spanish teachers make learning fun in such a way that we didn't even realize we were in class and I wanted to be just like them.
Looking back, it was for this reason, because teaching as a career was always somewhere on my mind, that during high school and university, I was subconsciously only pursuing part-time jobs that had an educational aspect. I never thought of working at a coffee shop or as a waitress - I simply just tutored. It was where I felt most comfortable.
Tutoring, of course, has many benefits, for teacher candidates and students alike. It provides the student with the one-on-one attention that they need in order to learn better and succeed (but that perhaps cannot obtain from their teacher), while simultaneously encouraging a more personal relationship between them and the tutor. Thus, we may have a tendency to question anything that could separate tutor and tutee, such as thousands of kilometres.
Despite rapid technological advancements, many people are still reluctant to accept that the closeness of certain relationships is almost at the point of being replicated via technology. For instance, Skype has replaced the long-distance phone call, but we are still not at the point of saying it has replaced seeing our loved one face-to-face.
In the case of tutoring, however, I will beg to differ.
In addition to in-home tutoring, I also work for a company called Telelingo. Telelingo uses an online meeting room called Zoom to connect students and tutors from across the world for the purposes of language and music lessons. The tutors are required to have native-like fluency in the languages they teach, so I've been tutoring English as a second language. At first, the experience seemed daunting, but soon I came to realize the many benefits of online tutoring that in-home tutoring simply overlooks. Here's why:
(In order to protect the privacy of my student, I will change her name for the remainder of the article.)
My first session with Emma was on a summer morning. For me, at least. Emma lives in Poland. She had just gotten home from camp. This is the first benefit of online tutoring: the time difference can actually be convenient for both tutor and tutee, which provides a whole new dimension to scheduling that I wasn't used to, and that in-home tutoring cannot offer. Not only was our particular time difference convenient, it was ideal. I work better in the mornings than later in the day, and Emma could only have her lessons after camp, but didn't want to wait till the evening, either. In other words, if it weren't for the time difference, I wouldn't normally have been able to take on this student. The online medium made something that would have been impossible happen.
Of course, another obstacle overcome by the e-aspect of our tutoring is the immense distance between Toronto and where Emma lives in Poland. However, e-learning solves this problem to such a great extent that it is actually easier to tutor Emma in Poland than it is to tutor someone in the GTA sometimes. No matter what the weather or traffic, I can still tutor Emma because when I wake up in the morning, I'm already at work. Likewise, when I go on vacation or to visit my family, our lessons continue uninterrupted. Online tutoring has made commuting a stress of the past, and this, combined with the possible benefit of the time difference are what really set e-learning apart from in-home tutoring.
You might be wondering what the catch is, given these immense benefits. "Surely she's got to miss the personal aspect of face-to-face tutoring", you might be telling yourself.
Ironically, I spend more time face-to-face with Emma as we both look at a camera than I do with my in-home students, whom I sit next to. And in addition to video chatting, Zoom allows me to share and give Emma control of my computer screen so that we can read stories together, watch videos, and even interactively give each other directions on Google maps. Using Zoom, Emma has shown me her computer programming homework, and we've even made origami cows together by watching a tutorial on YouTube. I feel like I know Emma just as well as I do my other students. It's almost as if the miles don't exist.
With Emma, I don't have a textbook or homework to work from. But thankfully, the internet has such a wide variety of resources we can use with our students. In fact, we often overlook these in favour of textbooks and homework from their teachers.
Therefore, if we start thinking of bringing the Internet to our in-home tutoring sessions as beneficial, then really, online tutoring with Telelingo is just a step away. Furthermore, it's a step in the right direction, as it allows more convenience for tutor and tutee alike without sacrificing the profound relationship every teacher wishes to have with their students.
This is not to say that in-home tutoring is a thing of the past. Rather, it's something we can expand on not only for the benefit of convenience but also for knowing that we're bringing millions more students the possibility to learn and have fun doing it, which is an endeavour I have been dedicating myself to for years.
