This week at Inkreadable, dear reader, started out pretty quiet and then ramped up to almost insane. While VIPKid remains the same, and with Lingueo wrapping up later this week, my schedule was going to get pretty empty. I still have my private clients but their packages are winding up and should finish sometime next month. I am not sure, or at least I cannot read, whether they’re going to renew. In any case, my private client will take the summer off which means six weeks. With me going to Greece in August it means that I won’t see him until mid September at the earliest. And while I think Alaina likes my lessons I’m not sure she wants to keep going. And it’s not yet the time to ask.
I have had a bunch of work from the English Center. One is a client who wants 10 lessons online and two lessons in person in Amstelveen, which I think the owner of the company is going to give her. Although when I talked to the student, she did say that she only wanted the in person lessons for a change of pace. If she wants to do them with me maybe I will head out there. I also have a second client with the company who has asked for 6 one hour lessons. We had our first lesson week before last on a Friday and two lessons on Tuesday and Friday last week. Our last three lessons are this week, we’ve already had one yesterday, we will have one today and we will have one on Friday. Instead of doing grammar, like I normally do, the student has tested at a C1 level and so I have been started using a lot of Linguahouse lessons with her. We also did a lesson on human resources and prepositions because she finds them confusing. I think the student will continue with me which will be great. I did however, make a mistake with The English Center. They offered me a client for 18 hours who is an executive and needs help with writing and the language of finance. All of which is fine except that they have waived their usual policy and have told the client that she can cancel with three hours notice with no penalty to her. And what that means for me is that I can’t charge her. Jasper rightly pointed out that the English Center should have offered compensation to the teacher for their flexibility. But of course, they did not say anything about that. I didn’t ask either. What’s more concerning to me is whether I’m going to be able to handle the timing of these 3 English Center clients, and the potential to teach for Lexis Amsterdam starting in June. But I will deal with that when I have to as it is not a sure thing by any means.
By far the most interesting events of the week was getting contacted by The Conversation Playground to confirm a teaching gig starting on 11 May and going through 7 July. I will be heading out to the middle of nowhere on Tuesday afternoons to teach English in the context of playing games. The pay is good and the owner of the company has offered to pick me up and drop me off. What they do is they have 12 kids between the ages of six and nine play games and speak English while doing it. The facilitator sets up a whiteboard where the kids can go and write the Dutch word that they don’t know in English but they are not allowed to speak Dutch for the whole hour. It’s an interesting concept, and there isn’t a lot of correction involved but I will be correcting three points that I hear through the games. I’m kind of excited by the possibility. It’s not something that I’ve ever done. I have gone to see how they conduct the lesson once. It was interesting. We will have to see if I’m up to the challenge as I haven’t facilitated a classroom of kids in years. And even then, I was teaching creative writing so there wasn’t a lot of classroom management. They were also English native speakers. It should be an interesting couple of months.
In other news, I’m headed next Monday for an MRI. It’s the first MRI to monitor my brain activity in three months. I will say that I have felt no changes and I’m not tripping or doing anything neurological that is weird. So I’m hopeful that there has been no change. Still no news on the cataract surgery and I’m kind of thinking that there won’t be for a little while. I hope it doesn’t conflict with my trip to Greece in August, because that will be difficult to try and change.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.
Inkreadable 