Eva Gómez is a 44-year-old Catalan from Badalona who has been a tutor for more than a year on one of the main platforms for private classes in the world, GoStudent. Eva's dedication and her passion for helping others has earned her recognition as the first Spaniard to win the award for best tutor of the year 2022 in Germany. A recognition of her work as an online tutor and that is based both on the criteria of the families and students who are part of the platform, and on that of the team of tutors behind it.
This graduate in Translation and Interpreting and specialized in Economic Law in the languages of English, German, Spanish and Catalan has been living in Germany for about 20 years and currently lives in Böblingen, near Stuttgart and combines her work as an administrator and translator with teaching English, German and Spanish on this educational platform that she discovered in January 2022. “I have always liked teaching, in fact, during my time as a student I worked for three years as an English and German teacher at a language academy and before pandemic gave English as an extracurricular subject in a school. I loved that job, but when the pandemic hit I decided to reinvent myself. One day I saw an ad on GoStudent looking for tutors for different subjects, I sent my resume, I passed the interview and here I am.”
She is also the mother of an 11-year-old boy, so for her, having a job that she can do from home is perfect since she can combine it with her regular job and her family life. “When my son was born I had no choice but to cut working hours, since in Germany daycares only offer them from one year of age and with schedules that do not allow 100% work-life balance. In fact, I changed jobs to a company with less stress and very flexible hours when my son was one year old. It is a comfortable and flexible job, but I missed teaching.”
Therefore, when he saw the GoStudent advertisement it seemed like the perfect solution, since he could dedicate himself again to what he likes most and from his own home: language teaching. Among them, Eva states that among her favorites is Spanish, “I love teaching this language to foreign students. It is very satisfying to be able to guide students through the fascinating world of languages and, above all, the multitude of universes and spheres that Spanish offers us, a language immensely rich in lexicon, culture, traditions and grammar.”
This is one of the reasons why many people decide to take the step of complementing their work with private teaching, making it possible to generate extra income while organizing their time and dedication based on their lifestyle. In the case of Eva, she teaches around 120 hours of private classes per month between English, German and Spanish and to a very varied profile of students: “the profile of my students is very different, from 6-year-old children to adults and students. master's and university. I also teach economic Spanish and prepare students for the selectivity exams or to obtain their Spanish as a foreign language diplomas from the Cervantes Institute.”
Among its range of students are children with learning difficulties who find it difficult to follow the pace stipulated by schools. Each school and each teacher is different, but they have to follow the curriculum stipulated both by them and by the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) and teach the subjects in a very specific period of time. They are also classes very focused on grammar and lexis in which students must learn long lists of vocabulary without a clear incentive. A too traditional model that sometimes bores students and causes them to lose interest and that is why, when they arrive at the individualized online classes, they are surprised to see the immense possibilities that the digital world offers them to learn in a more enjoyable way.
In Eva's experience, everyone improves in a very short period of time and this is also due to her teaching methods: Eva creates ad hoc digital material for each student and personalizes the lessons. For example, for students who enjoy playing video games, she creates video games related to grammar; or for those who learn more visually, she works on the content with videos and creates specific lexical, grammatical and oral expression activities.
On the other hand, Eva highlights the differences between the German and Austrian teaching models and the Spanish ones, "in the German school more attention is paid to the particularities of each child and from the age of 10 parents focus on looking for a school that have a level of demand adapted to the characteristics of your children" to which he adds that "the school system in Austria is also based on personalization and for example there are institutes more oriented towards economics, languages or tourism."
“All the students are fantastic and have incredible potential, you just have to guide them, show them the way and adapt each of the classes to them. As tutors in virtual environments, we must adapt each material to each student and always create communicative situations of love and respect in the digital classroom,” Eva concludes.
