I Didn’t Learn the First Time

I, for some crazy reason, agreed to another part-time job. But, this time I made sure that I set the schedule. No working 7 days a week this time. And I can set my own schedule, to a degree.

I hated having my last part-time job at the kindergarten. I didn’t get along with the headteacher. I wasn’t the energetic, over-the-top foreigner that they were expecting. And most of the kids were brats. I had no time off. I was tired all the time. It was not enjoyable.

I had a cake to celebrate never going back. I did also like all the extra pretty, pretty money I got.

The Offer

I got a message from someone that works for my employer that I’ve never had a reason to talk to before. I still have no idea who he is or what he looks like.

He wanted to offer me a chance to teach online with some new thing that the company is doing, probably because they can’t get many new teachers in the country (pandemic and all).

Some of my coworkers got the same message a week or two before I did. I was slightly jealous as I want the extra money, but I really don’t want to work for it.

When the first message showed up, we all took the opportunity to discuss it. At length. Of initial concern was that it sounds like we have to do this in our “office” at our school, aka the training center. There’s no way in hell I’m getting up to go to the training center early in the morning for anything other than classes on Saturday and Sunday.

I’d also have to bring my own computer as the computers at work don’t have webcams. And, as I just have a tablet, I’d also have to bring my keyboard, mouse, headset, and all the chargers. It’s a lot!

And too much work for my lazy butt.

Which is exactly what I told the guy when he messaged me. He said I can work from home, have my two days off (Monday and Tuesday), and work as much or as little as I want.

Damn him for giving me everything I want! Now I don’t have any excuses for not agreeing to the job. And I do want the pretty, pretty money.

I have to do a demo with one kid before I’m officially hired to do the online teaching. Maybe that will be horrible and I won’t want to do it anymore. A girl can hope, right?

The Platform

With the guy from my employer’s help, I log into the platform. He also sends me a couple manuals to read. A couple weeks afterwards, I still haven’t much more than quickly glanced at one of them. They’re insanely boring!

After a couple false starts and crashing my computer (blue screen of death for trying to change the camera the program is using), I get shown where to go to see the lesson I’m teaching.

The classroom interface is very simple. I mean, there’s nothing there. Just a small and sometimes hard-to-see bar of buttons on the side. I have to open everything. And the background is a gloomy black, kinda depressing for a classroom, but good on the eyes.

I was also sent a few videos of classes to see how other teachers have taught these classes. I watched them use the tools and figured I had learned enough to make it through the demo – I know where the ppt is, which button is the pen so I can draw on the screen, and the arrow to get the slides to animate before going to the next one. What more do I need?

The Demo

My demo class is set for a week later with one student. I just have to go through the lesson that they give me, not screw everything up, and I’ll have a second, or really 4th, job.

The second time I go to look at my teaching materials, it doesn’t crash my computer. Guess, I’m not getting out of it that easily.

I’m teaching “magic e”. Or, for the non-teaching world, long vowels. Things such as “cut” to “cute”. It’s all very boring but many students have some issues with it for the first few (thousand) times they learn it.

After the phonics bit is a story about a birthday gift. Also very boring. Then it’s a fishing game that I don’t really know how I’m supposed to teach it, the materials are a little light on details, but I figure out a way that should be ok-ish.

As it’s so basic and things that I’ve done a whole bunch before, I don’t plan on looking at it again until it’s time to teach it.

But I do spend the week chatting with coworkers about how boring the materials are and how wrong we were in some of our original assumptions about the program, like being able to teach in the comfort of our own homes. I also find out that a coworker is teaching her demo right after I am. We compare notes.

On the day of the demo, she checks on the materials early and warns me that hers have changed. I check and mine are different too. I’m now teaching the letter N and its sound with another boring story. Easy enough.

The actual class goes easy enough. The kid did great. My only problem was when I went into the classroom 20 min before class started, it wanted to start recording already! I was planning on using that time to check my set-up and make sure everything worked and the background wasn’t horrible. Oh, well. Guess they get what they get.

I find out the next day that I’ve passed. And that there are more training materials to get through. This time with tests.

The Training

Guess I’m actually going to have to read some of it.

I have just over a week to read an unknown amount of pages and possibly watch a few videos so that I can take 3 assessments. One is on their reading strategies, one on phonics, and one on cultural differences.

The documents were definitely not written by a native English speaker, and neither were the exams, making the whole process just a little bit more challenging.

I take the culture one first. The materials have gems like these:

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The test is all true and false, but I don’t know what I got because there was some “network issue”. Maybe my VPN? I have no idea what I scored or if I have to take it again.

The reading strategies one was much worse, the PowerPoints were almost incomprehensible, the Chinglish (Chinese + English, like Spanglish) was fairly bad. And the whole thing had basically no details!

I had the assessment open at the same time I was reading the materials. The questions were extremely specific, unless you memorized the materials, you were probably getting a bunch wrong. I just read the question, found the answer, answered the question, and wrote the answer in a word document in case I had to do the quiz again.

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I got a 64 out of 92! I have no idea how I did that badly! I’m just going to blame it on machine grading. There were fill-in-the-blank questions that are marked automatically, which can lead to the right answers being marked wrong, for example, if the right answer is “Understand”, using “understand” or “understood” would be marked wrong.

The phonics, once I found the correct videos (How hard is it to give me a link?!), was more basics. I skipped most of the talking parts to just read the PowerPoint slides and copy the answer. I don’t know my score.

But I’m done! I don’t have to deal with it anymore. Finally!