I completed the CELTA in mid-August 2016. The next task was, of course, to find a job. At the end of the course, I was exhausted and looking to get away from the DC summer. Accordingly, I bought my ticket to Greece on the last day of the course, IN the class, earning me the award “most likely to travel spontaneously”. It’s not a bad honorable mention. I left the US in mid-September. I was also heading to Amsterdam to see Jasper, and my return ticket to the US was not until just before December.
I have always been an entrepreneurial sort of spirit, and I did what every enterprising person who wants some extra cash does in the emerging gig economy of the 2010’s. I posted my extra room on Airbnb that year. It was a great success and I met some amazing people that I am still friends with today. I had about 200 people stay with me from January to September. A couple from Beijing stayed with me after my CELTA course was done and they told me about an ELT company that was taking China by storm. VIPKid was its name and edutainment was its game.
I wasn’t sure about the edutainment aspect of teaching, and the jury’s still out. I had wanted to teach in a classroom environment to adults initially. But then I considered the possibilities with teaching online. Online allowed me to be anywhere in the world with stable internet. I was a little concerned with the entertainment side of teaching kids as I am a natural introvert but thought that I’d be able to be a little entertaining. So I took the plunge and applied. I did two mock lessons and got hired. I started teaching in October 2016. I left for Greece shortly after being hired and I opened my schedule to classes as soon as I got there. In those bygone days of 2016, you had to open a minimum of 7 hours a week and wear an ugly orange shirt. Luckily the minimums are a thing of the past and thankfully so is the orange shirt. Though I will say that on the days that I didn’t feel like figuring out what to wear, the orange shirt as ugly as it was, came in handy. But woe unto you if you dare to get sick at VIPKid because their cancellation policy is on the draconian side, though that too has loosened up a bit. You could get six cancellations in a 6-month contract period, so you had, and still have, to be super careful. I went to Denmark and set a stupid hour and a half a day teaching schedule. I used a few cancellations for that. Then I got more careful and the only other times I canceled were because of tech issues I couldn’t control, like when my dad’s internet died while I was staying there, and when I accidentally spilled liquid on my Mac while teaching in August 2017.
I discovered that I am a pretty good edutainer, but I am a better teacher for the older kids who have language than the younger ones. There are of course exceptions to that, like two of my students who are beginners who make my week when I see them. I am in touch with a few parents via WeChat, a Chinese chat app, and one mom has told me that I am the teacher that gets her soft-spoken, rather shy kid to talk. I used to have to prep a lot for each class, but now can literally do them in my sleep.
In my last post, I talked about the insane hours that I was waking up to keep my head above water during the CELTA. Once the idyllic vacation in Europe was over in the winter of 2016, I started thinking about working a 36 hour week in the US. You are likely rolling your eyes at that if you are a teacher at a brick and mortar school. But those were teaching hours, as in on camera, with the student teaching hours. That didn’t include any prep time. And did I mention my workday started at 3 am in the winter and 4 am in the summer? And so it was that in the winter of 2016 while everyone was snug in their beds while sugarplums danced in their heads, I was teaching Baobao (it means very clever in Chinese) his ABC’s and learning how to hide my yawns in the absence of coffee.
Needless to say, it wasn’t long before I started thinking about the glorious European hours and how to get back there. That story’s up next.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. Stay tuned, as always, there is more to come.
Inkreadable 