It really annoys me when people take me for a language tutor. I always make a point of introducing myself as a professor of literature, yet somehow this always leads to people trying to make appointments for language tutoring with me.
Sometimes, this takes really weird forms. A Russian lady I met last week told me in a very aggressive way, “OK, I need to think about it. But you’ve got to give me some time. I might hire you to teach me some Spanish, but I can’t say for sure right now!”
Then I ran across her again, and she announced defensively, “I’m still thinking about it!”
I feel like a door-to-door insurance peddler even though I have zero interest or need to offer tutoring services.
Clarissa's Blog 
I know what you mean. One of my best friends is an artist, and she’s constantly getting hassled for free work–work that would normally cost somewhere around $250-350 per job. More along the lines of what you’re experiencing, my cousins all think they can exploit my musician cousin for free lessons, among other things having to do with her exact profession. It’s awful. The most you can really do is try to talk them down from their insistence, but that doesn’t always go well.
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Not exactly the same thing, but once I was sewing in public and a guy tried to pay me to fix his backpack. I looked at it and realized I’d have to take the whole thing apart to do what he wanted.
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A good answer is something like: I will be glad to tutor you, but I charge $1000 per hour.
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Isn’t this an Eastern European thing?
The idea that a professor of literature can make a living from that alone is profoundly absent in the region and so the assumption would be that you supplement it by private language teaching. She assumed that you introduce yourself as a professor to stress your qualifications as a language teacher trying to drum up some business.
(I’m assuming you know all this but a lot of your readers won’t)
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The locals do it all the time, too, though. Not as aggressively as the Russian woman, but still.
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This may actually be a subtle compliment …
The thinking behind the concept: these people like the cachet of “having been taught Spanish” by a professor outside the university setting.
They are assuming that the “right amount” plus the right connections might make this possible.
The funny thing about this is that the first thing I think of after thinking of this is that it would have made a great Evelyn Waugh novel, but not so much a great Nabokov novel — at any rate, I don’t believe you’re a Professor Pnin for a moment … 🙂
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Neither am I a Dickensian sort of teacher. 🙂
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(and we had such great expectations for that)
🙂
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Ugggggg. My department is always getting requests for help with translations. I’m happy to do them for free when it’s something really short and simple, but I’m not going to translate 15 years of great-aunt Irmengard’s handwritten correspondence with her sister back in the old country. I wouldn’t do that if you paid me, though I’m happy to refer them to people who will do that for money, But it always turns out that great-aunt Irmengard’s letters are much less interesting when they find out it’s going to be $30/page to get them translated.
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We have a lot of those, as well. I always wonder how the people who ask for free translations would feel if asked to do their work for free.
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Ohhhh, they would never work for free. But they are sure that great-aunt Irmengard’s letters will be SO interesting.
And then there are the people who bring in boxes of old books that they think out students are just dying to read.
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