You Go Nate!

DOING THE MATH

I am now a legal free-lanced English teacher here in Germany. Free-lance means that I don't hold permanent contracts with any one institute or school. I do my own taxes, my own insurance, but I can theoretically work as many or as few hours as like and I can leave whenever I want. Free-lance teachers usually sign framework contracts with several different language institutes. This means that when the institute has a client they will offer that client to the teacher who can then choose whether or not to accept it. The clients are almost always business clients and the teaching almost always takes place at the business itself. This is known as "in-house" training. The teacher then gets paid only for the hours spent in actual teaching. Travel time and preparation time are *not* paid for. Because of the busy schedules of most businesses, they usually want their English class either in the morning or in the late afternoon. It is rare to teach in the middle of the day. Thus most English teachers have a split day, with most of their free time occurring in the middle of the day. They also spend a lot of time on mass transit, several hours a day. Their schedules are always changing from day to day and week to week depending on which new clients they are taking, which ones are finishing their term, and which ones might cancel.

As you can see there are good things and bad things about this lifestyle. I knew that coming in, but I thought I'd go for it anyway. I've been in touch with several different institutes trying to put my teaching schedule together. There has been one institute in particular that has been especially helpful and congenial. The staff director of this institute is an Irish lady who has been extremely gracious with helping me to get my work visa and getting started here in Munich. This institute also offers an intensive course that occurs at the institute itself, is nine hours a day for one week, and is usually taught one on one or in a small group. The teachers for these intensive courses work from 8AM to 5pm, and their travel time consists of simply getting to the institute and back home each day. As far as I could tell, this seemed like a premium position. I figured someday I might be able to work my way up to it if I was lucky.

The other day I was meeting with this Irish lady in an orientation meeting and I asked her what the requirements are to teach the intensive course. She said that one must be able to speak some German and be able to pronounce it well and read it quickly. I asked her how much German was enough. She had me speak a little bit and read a little bit and then she said, "you know what, we need someone to teach an intensive course next week and I think you can do it."

So I have spent several hours today and yesterday at the institute getting trained in this very specific method of intensive English teaching. It will be a bit of a baptism by fire as I will be starting right away with 45 hours of teaching next week! I hope I don't blow it!

As a disclaimer, she said that this *does not* mean that I will continue on as an intensive teacher, however, once I have been trained and have had a week of experience (provided I get good feedback), it would be much more likely I could continue on in this capacity.

I've been crunching the numbers, figuring out every possible scenario, working out my budget and my schedule and the verdict is that it would be really cool if I could teach the intensive courses exclusively. It would be so good in fact, that I could actually support myself quite comfortably by working only two weeks a month if needs be.

So as Dad would say, cross both fingers and both eyes...

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