Greetings, dear reader, from Amsterdam. I have been back for a little under a week and I’m finally getting back into the swing of things. But all it was not as happy a homecoming it should have been. I returned to find that all of my outdoor plants had died and that the gallery outside my door was full of dead leaves that I had to clean for my neighbors, as that is just good manners.. This is what happens when I leave Jasper in charge of watering my plants. I choose to think that there was an illness in the rose that spread to the other plants. But it was still sad because I managed to keep the things alive for about three years. Over the weekend, we therefore went to a garden center to get the pots ready for planting. in the spring.
I am still enjoying my VIPkidless schedule. I now have six clients for English Center, four clients of my own learning English, and one learning Greek. I won’t say that I’m not tempted to open up slots for VIPid to see what I can get, but we learned last week that VIPkid is trying to sell AI classes to parents. What they’re doing is they’re saying if you have 20 classes with a teacher left in your package they will convert that 20 classes to 60 AI pre-recorded classes. That right there is enough to stop me from giving classes. Over the weekend, I contacted some of my students to let them know that I would not be opening us any more slots. They’re Just going to have to find another teacher or go private with me.
For my part, I am going to try And fully open either Lingueo or Italki. I might also uploaded a new video to Preply and also give Colanguage a try. I’m not sure if any of this will make a difference but it couldn’t hurt certainly. There was no reponse from the company in France that contacted me even though I sent them a resume, so I’ll instead try to contact them this coming week.
The Conversation Playground did not get enough sign ups to begin on 27 September and instead is going to keep advertising until 4 October. They are also running a Boot Camp which I am not teaching for the fall break which is later in the month. Instead the glorious Erica, who is a good friend of mine, will be running it if they can get signups, which I am OK with, because I believe there is enough English language teaching work to go around. Also I’m not a very competitive person. I hope for her sake, it works out, because she really likes being in the classroom with kids.
The Writers Group met at my house this Thursday. I did get a bit of time to do some writing myself which is great, but one of the members of the group took my phone by accident. What happened was this: Once everybody had left, I cleaned up the house and was looking for my phone. I used find my phone from my computer through iCloud as it’s in an iPhone. And it showed my phone somewhere in the center of the city. I quickly got on WhatsApp web and found out that a member had accidentally put it in her own bag. We arranged for her to return it to me on Friday. But this member is a little bit helter-skelter and scatterbrained and I was waiting around until 2 PM for her to come and bring me my phone. Which I thought was going to happen at 10:30. I got really sick of waiting and went to visit my friend Rose who also works for the English Center. It was a very novel experience trying to find my way to a new house without Google maps and GPS. Although, it isn’t strictly true that I had no directions. I had taken the precaution of printing them out when I left the house but didn’t realize that Google gave me directions to the street Rose lived on but that the building number. I figured that it was 24, but once I got there it was really difficult to find. It took me about 20 minutes and a nice Dutch person asked me if I could find what I was looking for since she had passed me twice already. It all worked out for the best as Rose found me wandering around near her house. But the moral of the story, dear reader, is this: our phones are now our appendages and being without them is tantamount to losing a limb.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installmen. But stay tuned. As always, there’s more to come.
Inkreadable 