This week, dear reader, was a short one here at Inkreadable. I had decided to take the Easter weekend off, including Monday, ostensibly to take a break. But in the middle of last week, a chance conversation changed everything.
In my last post, I told you that I had been doing some editing work for a former student, which while unpaid, could have led to a paid commission from one of their classmates. That did not turn into anything, alas. Not only that but I did not hear from my student about the edits at all. Not even a thank you. I also did some editing for my friend Despina over at Lexus Amsterdam. As we are friends as well as colleagues of sorts she came over and we were talking about our trials and tribulations in the time of pandemic trying to teach our languages. I casually mentioned that I was surprised that she didn’t have any group lessons for English and apparently, it blew her mind. She had simply never thought of it. So in a back-and-forth that would extend for the whole week, we decided to start two different fluency courses and one course for business English. They are going to run in the summer over eight weeks And at the end of September when I am back from my travels in Greece. I am quite excited for the possibilities and have spent quite a lot of time looking at different books and how best to structure all three of them.
With my private clients off the schedule for Monday, I took the time to take a walk but also do more planning and plotting for the syllabus for the courses. That is in addition to my normal lesson planning for my private clients. I am quite pleased at least terms of scheduling. My Monday private client is taking the week off but Alena and I have switched the lesson to later today, and we were going to have the lesson outside but the weather has been uncooperative since yesterday. In fact, my iPhone weather app had been calling for snow for both yesterday and today. Needless to say there will be other lessons in the package where we can meet in person.
Over on the Preply platform, things have ground to a halt. My one and only student says she has Covid and so we have suspended lessons until she feels better. I am also trying not to be a cynic and am choosing to believe that she is telling the truth. After all, she has already paid for the lesson so why would she then not want to take them. My plan is to contact her in a couple of weeks so that I can figure out my own schedule. After all, if I’m not gonna be teaching her on Tuesdays or Thursdays I can be teaching someone else.
In VIPKid world, I am basically only teaching the students who ask for priority booking requests. I am not really getting any new students nor am I getting any trials. It seems to be an up-and-down kind of thing. A lot of my teacher colleagues on the European Facebook group that I run, do have more consistent bookings but have also noticed that there is an up and down quality to the bookings as of late.
Writingwise, things proceed well. I am attending the Sunday Write-Ins and the Thursday Write-Ins quite regularly. I have an interesting dilemma in terms of plotting because my brain is working quite a bit faster than my fingers can type. The ideas are coming fast and furious and I’m not quite sure how to handle all of that creativity. It’s actually quite a good problem to have. But I will say that I was rather annoyed at some of the members of my group who either could not figure out how to get in to the meeting on Saturday, even though I have never had any trouble, or compounded the drama by giving me grief. The short version is that a new member of the group wanted me to post the link to the meetup website, which I refuse to do because I don’t want that many people on Zoom. I did explain how to access the meetings form WhatsApp but that seemed to be too much for the person to understand so I gave in. I duly set up recurring meetings in Zoom and sent emails to the people who requested them. I was touched that a VIPKid teacher friend who is also in the group, but is in the states now was following the What’sApp drama and wrote me privately to offer caring and support as it is a lot of work to keep track of. Managing the differing personalities in the group can be quite a challenge.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.
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