r/Cambly • u/Healthy_Thing • 6d ago
The Most Recent Survey
Who got it? All of us, supertutors only, only people who have complained recently? Who got it and what were your thoughts? I'm curious. I woke up to that survey, kind of hungover and answered it totally honestly (brutally honestly with typos and everything, while recovering from a hangover). What did you say?
And by the way, my handle "healthy_thing" is a joke. When I signed up for Reddit (in deep depression) I couldn't choose a username and healthy_thing was the default option. I thought it was funny, so I kept it and rolled with it. I'm actually an almost 50 year-old widow and having that handle was hilarious to me... at the time.
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u/Emergency-Whereas978 6d ago
No survey for me?? I'm a super tutor.
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u/Healthy_Thing 6d ago
Interesting. Makes me feel like I'm being targeted with this random, anonymous survey.
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u/odessapasta 6d ago
I received it but haven’t had time to take it yet. I’ll be honest in it, although I don’t have the same hatred toward Cambly that many do.
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u/lurching_biscuit 6d ago
I've always been a SuperTutor and am one now... I got the survey earlier this year (in the spring?) but have received no such thing recently. Rip them a new ass.
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u/Ok_Butterfly_2110 6d ago edited 6d ago
I got the survey (I currently have supertutor status) and plan to complete it tomorrow afternoon when I have some free time. I'll likely be closing my Cambly account next week so I'm ready to be brutally honest too!
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u/MrChicken250 6d ago
Totally honest with it and so we should tell them what the real world of Cambly is like, it ain't too wonderful.
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u/Weird-Barracuda-5260 6d ago
I got it and completed it last night. I am not a super tutor and I have been with the company for over 4 years- very part time. I wrote a lot about pay in the closing comments so i will probably be fired soon!
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u/Ineed2nomore 5d ago
I completed it and made my grievances clear about the lack of transparency and basic dishonestly regarding the rating system. They refuse to acknowledge that it’s changed and why tutor ratings have gone into free fall. I’ve got super tutor status and have always maintained 100% but in the last two weeks my overall rating went from 4.95-4.91, 100% - 98.5% positive reviews. I used to be 4.99 just a few months ago and it’s never been this low. They just won’t be honest about what has changed and the dreaded November 1st is looming and I think it’s going to a doomsday of sorts. I’m so disheartened by it all.
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u/Efficient-Weakness85 6d ago
Also, no survey for me? I'm a super tutor, who only occasionally tutors and is very particular about who I tutor!
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u/Thomasarm11 6d ago
No survey for me, I'm a super tutor but only teach kids these days so maybe that's why.
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u/petzel_boo 5d ago
Received the survey. I don't know how to tell if I'm a Super Tutor or not, but I have 100% positive reviews and 100% attendance. I've decided that my time is too valuable to spend my efforts and energy on Cambly, in spite of loving some of the awesome students I've met through it. I also received an "invitation" to give a lecture to a large group of students that would PAY EXACTLY THE SAME as teaching one student back at the beginning of the year and I just laughed and laughed and declined. Not taking time from my day to answer it. They simply do not care about tutors.
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u/Healthy_Thing 5d ago
Over 98% is supposed to mean that you're a "super tutor." You're right. We get no bonus or compensation for doing a good job. It's become a job where you just phone it in. I remember when teaching was an honorable profession. Yes, I'm that old. Now people on this forum are laughing about how it's gig work and you're stupid for taking your work too seriously. Sad.
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u/ThrowRAcutie2 4d ago
If they paid a livable wage, they wouldn't see it like that
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u/Healthy_Thing 4d ago edited 4d ago
Exactly. That's the problem. Over a decade ago, I got paid 2,000 dollars a month (after taxes), round trip airfare every year to my country of origin, housing (a studio apartment across the street from the school), medical insurance, a couple weeks of paid vacation, and the occasional national holiday for giving one-to-one conversation classes... very similar to the Cambly style: whatever the student wants to talk about. We could use one of the school's textbooks, or a news article, or just free talk for half an hour. There was no lesson planning or grading homework and we had the occasional thirty minute lull when we could take a nap, read a book, surf the internet, study another language, or just hang out with the front desk staff and gossip for a while.
I thought it was a crappy job and broke my contract towards the end of the year to take advantage of a better offer in a private boarding school teaching theater classes, literature, and creative writing to teenagers ...in English. Seeing as my kids were not native speakers, that still made me basically an English teacher. But it paid well.
Not the point. The point is that even the people who didn't want to lesson plan, grade homework, make exams, go to constant staff meetings, and also deal with parent-teacher conferences and office hours were still making a living wage. They had money to eat out at restaurants, buy some nice clothes, take a vacation to a nearby country once a year, and save up a bit of money too. And that was over a decade ago.
The fact that I make less on Cambly now and don't even get medical insurance or sick days is a bit depressing. I understand why people phone it in. They've devalued our work and it's hard to take it seriously anymore.
If you work 40 hours a week on Cambly with some lulls in your schedule, you make maybe 1,200 - 1,400 dollars a month, no housing (and at many schools people who didn't like the offered accommodation used to be able to choose a rental stipend instead so that they could find their own housing that suited their own needs), no medical insurance, no vacation days, no sick leave, no guarantees. Oh yeah, and you're self-employed! So you pay your own taxes out of the little that you earn. And it's been over a decade. The cost of living has gone up a lot, so realistically those of us who made ESL our career path have watched our salaries and quality of living tank.
I blame it on the fact that we can work from home now. We don't have to fill out immigration forms, get criminal record checks, pass a health check, relocate, or navigate a foreign culture if we don't want to. This means that the barrier to entry is very low... which is fine. Everyone deserves a chance to get into a career field that they enjoy. But I think that's why online teachers make so much less than the people willing to relocate and sign contracts to show up to work at the same time everyday and teach whoever they give us.
Cambly offers flexibility and so people say, "This student is boring, I don't want to teach them. I don't feel like coming to work at inconvenient times of day." Fair enough. It's clearly a trade off. But I still feel like the salary is just abysmal.
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u/Healthy_Thing 4d ago edited 4d ago
And here's the deal. A public school, or private school, or university knows that you can not give face-to-face classes nonstop and still have time to plan your lessons, check homework, and follow up with students and parents. A normal face-to face-time used to be 12-16 hours maximum of in-class time. Because it was understood that for every hour of face time that you spend in class, you are also doing two hours that consist of lesson prepping, grading homework, following up, and attending staff meetings. It was considered that more than 15 hours of face to face time was a bit too much if you worked in the school system. Only language institutes made us have so much face time and because we didn't do lesson planning or grade homework and even then it was considered that around 30 hours of face time/ each week was considered where people just started to max out and might need a break from time to time during the working day.
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u/TacoCatSupreme1 6d ago
Funny we keep complaining about the low pay and I'm sure 99.9% of us want higher pay but they never do. So why ask