This week at Inkreadable dear reader, ended up having some surprises in store. Teaching a second language is always an exercise in time management. Some weeks are worse than others. So it proved with this one. It wasn’t that there were so many changes, but the ones that there were had the potential to severely impact both my time and my income.
Over in VIPKid world, all of the teachers face one of two situations. You either have more students than you can handle, or you don’t have enough students. That is dependent on a couple of factors. For me, it so happens that I have every certification except for the Littles. I refused to do level one as it’s just not the vibe I want to project. I can act like a silly idiot in my level to class is just fine. But not in level one where the kids are three years old and sometimes younger. That is beyond my talents. I’ve also been on the platform for 4 1/2 years. We are now edging closer to the five-year mark with VIPKid, and because I’m on the higher end of their pay scale, they have hidden my profile in whatever algorithm rankings they use so that I don’t get as many students. Most of my days are filled with regulars. But even that I barely manage to fill the coveted 1 PM CEST to 3 PM CEST slots. This week was particularly harrowing because it was the Mayday holiday and the kids were out of school. So while the beginning of the week was ok and I was able to fill Wednesday the fifth with lots of classes, the rest of the week wasn’t great. The worst of it was Saturday when I had three hours booked, and then only one half-hour class. I managed overnight to get one more class for a total of two on Saturday.
The scheduling shuffle continues across my private clients, with my Dutch client still on vacation. I had my penultimate class with Alena but then she went to Paris and asked if we could switch the last lesson to when she is back in Amsterdam. That is fine because I could use the time to lesson plan for the week after I am back from Middleburg. Jasper and I will be in Zeeland next weekend just to get away from Amsterdam. Over at the English Center, Claudia had to cancel her lesson because of stress over the drama in Colombia. If you’ve been watching the news you know what I’m talking about if you haven’t, the government tried to impose a hike in the gas tax, and people are protesting. But there has been violence in her city and she is worried about her family. I completely understand and was happy to give her a break. Lily continues to be a fairly easy student to teach as she is quite bright and fun. She has also asked to switch the schedule from Wednesdays at 3:30 PM to Wednesdays at 10 in the morning. I closed my VIPKid schedule for the 12th to accommodate that. Also back on my schedule starting at the end of the month is Freek, an Amstelveen client that I’ve been working with since the end of 2019. Covid has taken a bite out of our lessons. We had a package of 18 we needed to finish and managed to get seven done before everything shut down. So that means I have 11 lessons to handle with a commute out to the suburbs. That will start at the end of the month.
With the Conversation Playground starting later today, and the time being 2:40 to 3:40 in the afternoon, I have had to reschedule George and Jerry in China as well. I have moved them to 2 PM on Wednesday instead of 2 PM on Tuesday. But I made a mistake with my schedule and I opened Wednesday the 12th at that time to VIPKid and the slot booked. I’m lucky that George and Jerry’s mom is understanding and was willing to cancel the lesson. My sticky fingers will just have to be more careful in the future. The last schedule shuffle of the week was caused by a student from Lingueo. She wants Thursday, Friday, and Saturday afternoons at 2 PM. She wanted both this past week May 6, May 7 and May 8, As well as the following which is May 13, May 14, and May 15. I was already scheduled out for the first week and couldn’t do those lessons and of course, I’m on vacation for the following week and didn’t want to give that up. I was able to contact the student and she has agreed to start with another teacher until 20 May. But yet again, I’m going to have to be careful with my schedule and look on my phone first before opening up VIPKid.
One of the most interesting things about VIPKid is how aggressively they market to their teachers to refer other teachers. They sent around a survey this week which I was very candid about telling them exactly why I will never refer and did in no uncertain terms. In the first place, with 120,000 teachers, possibly more, why the hell do they need more teachers when the teachers on the platform are struggling for bookings. In the second place, why would I refer so that they can pay another teacher less than they pay me and market that teacher so the teacher gets five hours a day of bookings and I don’t? I told them that I would not ever refer. I hope it doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass but I just couldn’t stay silent over the shoddy treatment that VIPKid is giving to the teachers year after year.
Over in the writing world, I spent a week trying to figure out how to use a magical item as a plot device and couldn’t. Many, many years ago I found a listing of the 13 treasures of Britain on Wikipedia, and have been using them as a reference in my novel. I had been using one of the magical items in the thirteenth chapter of my book but this week discovered that that particular magical item wouldn’t work and had to switch to another one. Thank you for having a find and replace feature Microsoft word otherwise it would’ve been impossible to find all the instances of the magical item, delete it and replace it with another one. I was also a little worried because I thought that I had given the chapters to my critique group where the magical item is featured but we haven’t gotten there yet. So that makes giving the chapter where it is most prominent much easier. Of course, I had to rewrite significant portions of the chapter to make a bit of sense. I was rather pleased with the exercise as I hadn’t done something like that in quite a while.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.
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