They're saving the author's face by not explicitly telling them that their services are no longer required. (They're obviously implicitly telling them, loud and clear.)
This makes me wonder if the author would get more response by phrasing it with less 'finality'. More 'please let me know if online lessons are not convenient right now' and less 'if online lessons are not good enough let me know to my face and we can end this forever'.
Possibly, but the way I read it, ghosting wasn't just associated with this last "online lessons" episode, but had happened before many times. At least the way she tells it sounds it was very common.
Sure, I'm just wondering why it happened in this instance. Apparently telling a teacher you won't need them anymore is a kind of impossible situation for them, so I was wondering if offering them an 'out' would help.
Otherwise you get some weird conflict where they need to tell a teacher, which I think is automatically a superior?, that they're no longer required. So they're in a position where they need to 'criticize' a superior, and it looks like they choose to do so obliquely, and then just freeze when said superior asks them to tell it straight.
Oh you're saying that from the student's POV they think the teacher will feel like having their services terminated is their own failure? Ok, that's plausible.
But how is ghosting saving face then? Wouldn't telling the teacher that the teacher is amazing, but for different reasons they can't have any more lessons be saving face?
Example: if you ghost your teacher without quitting that's inconsiderate, and calling it "saving face" is saving face.