With most of my students still out with colds and COVID, this week at Inkreadable in terms of teaching was quiet. It is picking up somewhat this week with everyone back on my schedule with the exception of my Polish client. She is taking a bit of time off post a visit to Asia. But I expect to see her sometime in the next couple of weeks. I was a little bit busier with administrative work this past week. I spent the weekend lesson planning for all of the students that are now back on my schedule as of yesterday. I also have a new student. He is an Italian student who wants pronunciation help and has signed up for a 12-hour course. I approached planning his first lesson as I do every other pronunciation client I’ve ever had and that is to go to Google and see what pronunciation mistakes speakers of Italian make. Google is quite good for that, and if you simply Google the words pronunciation mistakes and the language of origin it’ll come up with a whole host of things. It took me about 30 minutes to plan an hour lesson. The rest of the week was quite easy as I already had lessons planned for almost everyone since I hadn’t been able to give the lessons while my students were sick. I was able to plan almost the whole week on Saturday. George and Jerry this week were a bit of a challenge as I did a lesson on Marvel Studios and they really struggled with the vocabulary. It also didn’t help that for some reason zoom has decided that it doesn’t want to load when I screen share very quickly. This was more apparent with George’s class than with Jerry as I think they are using different tech. Toward the end of the half-hour with George, none of the lessons were working and we just had to have a conversation which is never easy with him because I sometimes have a hard time understanding him. In addition, he tries to get a little bit cheeky and tries to make my life difficult just for a battle of it.
Last week, dear reader, I told you how scary it was at my writers’ group last week. This week proved to be much calmer as the gentleman who came and wouldn’t stop talking did not show up. But I did notice that instead of being a 5-star meet up we are now a 4 and 3-quarters-star meet up so someone has given us a bad review. And while that makes me sad, I am not going to go looking for the review and see who actually didn’t like us. I actually got a bit of writing done on Thursday which was great but it was nowhere near my colleagues who were all writing thousand-word and up workouts. Still, I was pretty pleased with my own production, even if it wasn’t either quality or quantity. It was very nice not to feel like there were people of questionable mental health having a conversation largely with themselves at the table. There were a couple of new faces but it was mostly familiar faces. I even managed to find the energy to go out afterward to have a drink. What remains a challenge is writing at times that are not Thursdays.
I’m sorry that this week’s blog post is so short, but I’m not the type of writer to make stuff up if there is nothing to say. So that’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. There’s always there is more to come.
Inkreadable 