That’s a good idea! It would presumably work for other native speakers too. Like, if you have access to a native speaker who is willing to help you, but doesn’t know how, here are some things you should do (and perhaps some things you shouldn’t do).

Recently I had the experience of attending a 2-month course in Taiwan, and I can honestly say that during that time my oral skills regressed – in part because of the time taken working on homework instead of going out and speaking, but also because the course materials were substantially aimed at literacy rather than speech. To those you can add to that the absence of any planned repetition/revision (let alone spaced repetition), a commitment to teacher-led classes and cardinal sins of bad pedagogy such as “teaching to unteach”.

So to end on a constructive note, how about advice on how to retrain a teacher/tutor? Clearly, the training undergone even by professional teachers of Mandarin is generally far from the ideal of additional language teaching, and so students should be armed and ready to fight back against the weapons of anti-learning with which teachers have been equipped. In short, what should an active student require of teachers, tutors and language partners?

At the moment, my frustration and disappointment are such that I feel avoiding trained teachers in favour of naive language partners is likely to be more productive.