It’s been another quiet week at Inkreadable, dear reader. The only teaching that I did this week was with Isabelle on Tuesday. And even for that one, there was no prep because I had already prepped a lesson for her, and as ever we discussed an article. We also talked about our plans for Christmas and I checked in with her as to how she’d like the lessons for this package to proceed. We’ve been doing mostly conversations with syntax corrections if needed and trying to build her vocabulary. I think my next lesson will be about using idioms with her as we haven’t actually done that. In terms of English Center work everything else is in person and has to be completed when I get back to the Netherlands.
It’s not to say that I didn’t do any work for The English Center. In fact, I did quite a bit of scheduling work and trying to find rooms for various students who are doing intensives and the like. Scheduling work seems to be ramping up quite a lot as they have an influx of new students. It’s unfortunate however that they’re only using about 1/4 of their teaching staff to teach these students. I have figured out that they want to keep new teachers happy. I know this because that was how it was for me in 2019. Of course, the pandemic affected everything, but things are getting back to normal, at least in the Netherlands and there should be enough work for everyone. Unfortunately, there isn’t. And that means that the teachers who have been with schools for a long time are the ones that are being shafted and new teachers are being led to believe that they will have the volume of work that they have now for always. And I think that is across the board.
My Private Client world is also pretty slow with only Shinwei doing online lessons while I’m here. My Chinese kids are on hiatus as is Odhran. In fact, I won’t be seeing him until I get back to the Netherlands, and then we will have to do twice the work to account for the break. It gives us two weeks to get him ready for our trip to Greece on the 20th of January. In other news, the parent who contacted me for lessons for her son finally got in touch with me. We are going to set up a meeting when I am back in the Netherlands to see if I can start teaching her son. In true Dutch fashion, however, she has already asked me for a discount. I don’t think I can go much Beyond 20% off for both children. That means working with each child for 40 euros an hour. I think that is more than reasonable. Of course, it may come to nothing so it’s not something that I’m banking on.
There are some other things in my teaching pipeline but what I’m realizing is that given that The English Center feels mainly negative things about me and is trying to keep me happy with an administrative position, my conclusion is that I need to leave English language teaching completely. This isn’t a very easy realization as English language teaching was my career change. But I’m realizing more and more that if everything that is thought about me by the people that I work for is negative then there’s no point in doing the job. I am not going to take any action until I have another job and in order to do that I am going to start by getting some help from HR professionals who might be able to point me in the right direction in terms of resume and skill set help. For the moment I’m going to bide my time and see where things take me, but I’ve been feeling more and more that aside from the clients who have come to me of their own volition, English language teaching is starting to dry up. But it’s not just that, dear reader. I recently discovered that a friend of mine thought that I had taken someone’s job at English Center and that was not the case. While it was a misunderstanding I now feel that I cannot trust the friend who felt these things about me and as she is also an English language teacher, it’s time to go.
I’m not actually looking forward to looking for other work in an economic downturn, and certainly, I’m not going to let anyone know that I’m looking until I have something else that is not English language teaching. I’m not sure how this will affect the blog but of course, you guys will be the first to know once things change. I figure it’s better to look for a job from a position of having a job rather than leaving and trying to find a job without a source of income. The best of all worlds would be if I could make more passive income and not have to work as hard as I currently do with lesson planning.
Christmas Eve and Christmas day were both pretty quiet and spent with family. Christmas Eve was with Jasper’s family and that was a do-what-you-like kind of Christmas. My own family is a little bit more outwardly social and you always have to be on with them as opposed to being able to read a book like you can with Jasper’s family. I like both but I have to say that I do prefer that people don’t look at me funny in Jasper’s family when I want to read a book.
A belated Merry Christmas to you all dear readers. That’s All She Wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.
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