The last few weeks have felt, dear reader, like the halcyon days of VIPKid. When I started VIPKid in 2016, I did not know the following two years would be as good as they were. As one of the first 5000 teachers, I was able to get fully booked. During the school year that meant that I was working about 35 hours a week and in the summer 42 with an hour break. It was rewarding in its way, but I have never been #blessed to be working for VIPKid. I viewed it as the first step in a career change. My ultimate goal was to get offline and teach in a classroom mainly to adults, although I was not at that time opposed to teaching teenagers. With the fullness of time, I realized that I really do like teaching people who are already working. They are motivated to be in the classroom. A teenager is not. I still have a couple of teenage clients of course, but my focus is always to get more adult clients.
The last few weeks with The English Center have felt a little bit like the honeymoon that VIPKid was for me in the first year. While it’s not the consistent amount of income that I want at the moment, the last few weeks have had more teaching hours than I have had since June 2019, which was when I first started teaching for TEC. My intensive with Fiol ended yesterday and I think she was generally happy with the course. I am not sure what she retained from the course, but I think she is one of the people that I’m going to stay in contact with. Tomorrow starts another intensive, which is a hybrid. It is a 20-hour intensive of which 8 are taught by me both in person and online, while the rest are self-study. It seems to be a strange configuration but apparently, the student is paying for this themselves and they have a very limited budget. I am a little nervous about this client because I’m not entirely sure that my thought process on these lessons is correct. Still, I’m going to do my best for the client as I always do, and maybe they will be vocal about whether I am on the right track or not. She is interested in medical consultancy so I spent the weekend trying to figure out with that meant. I am a bit annoyed that for the online portion TEC would like for me to use my personal Zoom account rather than give me n upgrade, but I am going to see if the student would like to meet in person at a cafe instead.
This weekend, dear reader, I had every intention of going to write with my writing buddies at a cafe that we like to go to on the weekends. I left my house at 1 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, in plenty of time for 2 p.m. when we were due to meet. I opted to take the tram which came rather quickly. We had gone one trM stop from my house and then we were told that WE would not go any further than that stop. Rather than panic, I got out and walked to the closest square where I thought I could take another tram to get into the center. I waited for half an hour at one stop and another half hour at another stop. Then got fed up and finally gave up. There was a demonstration going into the city center. Had I been aware of this, I would have just walked at 1 and been at the cafe in plenty of time to meet my friends. What ended up happening was I was so frustrated by the whole experience that I went home and got nothing done. The weekend wasn’t a complete loss as I was able to prep for all but two of my classes. But I do not like being out of the loop when it comes to transport. It makes my life quite difficult. Still, in comparison to the District of Columbia, Amsterdam is a paradise when it comes to transport so I can’t complain too much.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But, stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.
Inkreadable 