My favorite Spanish teacher is leaving her full-time job teaching at a Spanish language school because she's been working two jobs (she's also a professional singer) and she needs more time to plan her wedding (in December). She does, however, have enough time to tutor a few students part time in or near San Jose in the afternoons or late mornings.Susana is a really great teacher. She's a native Costa Rican Spanish speaker plus she speaks English fairly well and thus is also able to explain grammatical concepts and other things to beginners in English if necessary. She has a lot of experience teaching Spanish to native English speakers and thus has a good understanding of what sort of things we tend to struggle with and how to explain them to us, and she's also great about adjusting the complexity of the Spanish she uses to the ability level of the person she's talking to. (She has a background in teaching young children as well, which I think actually helps quite a bit when talking to adults who are at a similar level of language understanding.) She's very warm and friendly and funny and animated when she talks and explains things which I've found makes learning Spanish a lot more interesting and fun.
Pay is negotiable depending on how many hours you schedule and how far she has to travel to meet with you. For example I pay her 10,000 colones (about $20) for about an hour to an hour and a half of tutoring a day a few days a week but some of that is to compensate her for needing to travel from the other side of San Jose to get to my house. I don't know what other freelance private Spanish tutors charge but the language schools I've looked at all charge about $18/hour for private classes and their teachers don't come to your house. So I think that's already a pretty good deal for private tutoring in your home from a very good and experienced teacher, but you might be able to work out a lower hourly rate if she doesn't have to travel very far to meet with you or if you schedule more hours per trip.
If you are interested in setting up some tutoring sessions with her please e-mail me at mail@jacquelinepassey.com for her phone number (she doesn't want it archived on a public internet site for all time).
Jacqueline Passey
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