This week at Inkreadable dear readers, was fairly quiet. You know from my last post, that VIPKid has been almost nonexistent, at least for me. From five hours a day to less than two. Last week was a hiatus for me with the English Center as they are between group classes and 27 April was a holiday here in the Netherlands. I suspect that most of my Dutch clients were out on a boat somewhere, maintaining a suitable social distance. My other Dutch private client, who I thought I had convinced to try and take an online lesson so that we could finish our 13 lessons in his package, has opted not to. His boss, who is paying for the lesson, feels that online security is not what it should be and is afraid of us taking lessons. I’m fine with that, but I have to ask myself what kind of security does a building corporation need for an English lesson? I mean it’s not as though we were talking about state secrets or even how many bags of cement my client purchases. Oh well, it just means that come September I will have 13 lessons to give, And that means 13 hours of income to look forward to. Still, it was a busy week as for me the week was full of planning for Karolina and Katya.
That’s right. Katya’s mom got back to me and we started pronunciation lessons last night. They went well as I have found many resources online for pronunciation. It’s been a bit of a challenge trying to adapt pronunciation exercises for kids. It involves quite a bit of reading and quite a bit of listening. We have tentatively scheduled eight lessons that will take us through my birthday. We will see if she is able to keep to a schedule. Particularly as she has quite a few commitments of her own. Still, I’m super excited to see her as she is one of my favorite students.
By far the most interesting portion of last week, was the fact that we started a critique group offshoot of the writer’s group online. We are currently five people, and are open to more but I think five is a good number to start with. We are also members of the writing group on Thursday but this will focus on actually reading peoples’ work and talking about it as opposed to what we do on Thursday which is just type together. And drink. There is drinking involved. We spent about an hour and 45 minutes talking about how we want to structure the group. It was a productive session and we decided to model it a bit on both the Washington and Edinburgh groups I that I ran. We are going to read things in advance for now because it’s hard to read out loud online, with the intention of meeting in person at some point when all of this COVID-19 business is at a more manageable level. I am really excited to have my work critiqued, but also have a bit of trepidation as Jasper’s cousin Ilana has already read my submission and has lots and lots of notes she says. Still I have a thick skin and I can handle most things.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.
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