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I use iTalki several times a week and have 'tried' probably 20-30 tutors over the years.

The #1 thing I look for By Far in an iTalki tutor is a knack for maintaining a good conversation. Generally iTalki people have this, but not always. I really hate it when the conversation lags and I feel like it is my job to keep it going and they make no effort to fill in the quiet spots. To me this is Way more important than grammar expertise or having good handouts, etc. Of course it is also important that they (almost) never look annoyed or bored, which must be hard at times. This is rare but happens to the best of us every now and then I'm sure. It must be hard listening to bad Spanish all day long ;)

Maybe you don't want specific names but here goes anyway: Nestor Cepeda from Bogota and Alfredo Gorga from Uruguay are both absolute masters of this. They always have something to talk about, it's almost always genuinely interesting, they always exude enthusiasm and they are both just obviously fun people that you'd happily spend time with in real life. I never feel like I am on the hook for thinking of the next thing to say, and the hour always *flies* by.

I have had only one truly negative experience and honestly, it was at least partly my fault. I had gotten into the habit of being lying down on the couch while talking, which is probably OK with someone I know, but maybe not with a new person and in this case it obviously offended a new iTalki tutor. Added to that, I accidentally mixed words up in Spanish and practically the first thing I said to her was "I prefer to talk bed to bed" instead of "face to face", and while that would usually be a funny error, in this case (on top of my inappopriate body position) I think she actually took offense. So that ended that.

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1 - Too much comfort

The online learning marketing always shows people very comfortable during their learning time, showing how cool it is to be able to learn from home, flexibility and convenience. True that! Best thing ever, but some people exaggerate.

I find it annoying students who take too much advantage of the comfort of online lessons and come totally unprepared, or when they schedule lessons at non-convenient time (on their sides) and they end up not attending to the sessions because they fell asleep (for having scheduled very late in the night) or because they couldn't wake up (for trusting too much that they would wake up on time) or "even worse", when students very early in the morning or late in the night keep distracted by their tiredness, constantly yawning for instance and clearly not learning a thing because their mind is somewhere else. There are also those students who schedule within tight time space and instead of focusing on the lesson, they are cooking their breakfast (spilling oil on my face :p)  , getting dressed and ready for work (looking for the other pair of socks) and all that with me in their hands (tablet or phone) making the video so shaky and in the end no attention at all to the session.

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