It has been another interesting week here at Inkreadable. While my calendar is not terribly full of teaching, I have a good mix between private and the English Centre. The challenge in recent days is trying to figure out those people who are still outstanding in terms of packages and where to put them on my schedule. Last week I contacted Sander to see if he wanted to finish the last two lessons of his package. He got back to me saying that yes in fact he wanted to finish but that his son decided to go to the British School this fall and so would need some help with his English. It won’t take me long to get him up to scratch. He has a good base and is of an age where language tends to stick. It did with me. My concern is that Sander will give his last two lessons to Yves and then I won’t be able to take him on as a client because they might decide that two lessons are enough. I don’t think it will be, but that’s always the danger when you work for yourself. ShinWei and I have one more online lesson before he heads back to Amsterdam from Taiwan. George and Jerry have been a bit off again on again, with George being the most off. So much so that he is still a bit behind his sister in the book we have been using. On Sunday they let me know that their classes will go down to an hour on Sundays as their school is ramping up and they will have no time to have a class during the week. I have established a good rhythm with my client who needs testing help where we do a test in person together but I also give him a ton of exercises to do at home. Galini is still in Greece until the 13th of September so I have a bit of a break from her lessons. Greek continues to be a bit of a challenge for Odhran with him not remembering the pronouns for verbs and struggling with the endings. I sent his mum what I had for using pronouns and I hope that will help. Odhran’s mom is the easiest client because she understands the struggle that teachers have. The children that are somewhat on the spectrum can be hard to teach and I know that when Odhran starts singing he’s bored. So I have to pivot pretty quick. My German intensive student from July was supposed to start with me online once a week in September and I contacted her on the first. She got back to me on Sunday and we have decided to do a couple of lessons of an hour and a half each. I was supposed to meet with Samar on Sunday afternoon in person but she contacted me an hour before our lesson to let me know that her son was sick. It’s fortunate that I was not already on the way there as I would have been quite pissed off.
The English Center has been kind of quiet. At the moment I only have one client with them, who is on vacation until September 13th. In the middle of October, I start back up with Marco, my client who went away on medical leave and so it will be almost like starting again. I will check with him to see if anything has changed in the last year in terms of his needs. I remember him as being quite low-level, but what was worse is that he lacks self-confidence. There has been no word from the girls in Palestine about whether they want to start again yet. I have decided they can come after me if they want lessons. Tomorrow I go to the English Center to talk about doing some more consistent admin work for them and I’m still not sure what that will look like. I was very clear that I did not want to take any work away from anyone working on the admin team. As always when I know what’s going on, dear r reader, so will you.
The writer’s group continues to go quite well and we have many people who have been coming to the group regularly. Thursday there were five new people signed up for the meeting but only one showed up. It was a woman that I had met about 5 years ago at Weight Watchers here in the Netherlands. I was quite excited to see her only to find out that she is leaving the Netherlands permanently to go live in Scotland. Still, she will be there with us for the next writer’s group this week and I’m hoping that we will keep in touch when she finally moves to Scotland. In other (kind of) related news, I had been a member of the Girl Gone International Amsterdam book club, and this past weekend they asked me to be part of the team. Of course, I said yes because I quite like the women that I meet through the book club. I am also friends with two of the other admins and I like the fourth person on the team as well. We will just have to see what form my contribution to the book club takes because I really like hosting and I don’t even mind doing the writing Workshops on occasion. They cost me more money than they make me but it’s a way to connect with people.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.
Inkreadable 