Can I have a few minutes of your time? I want to vent a bit. Mostly, I want to talk a little bit about how English is
taught in the country where I live, and how 2020 changed me for the better. I know what I have to say sounds very personal and it might not apply to you in particular, but I want to share some of the insights I had throughout last year. This story has a happy ending, though, so you might want to stick around.
TL;DR I kinda seized the means of production, my life is now much better than it used to be, and I wish that every single worker in the world could have this same opportunity.
For the past five or so years, I have been working as an English teacher in my home country. I started doing it professionally as soon as I dropped out of a STEM course (which was something I hated yet kept pushing myself to do, because money), just in order to have some spending money, as I still lived with my parents back then and didn’t need to worry about paying any bills.
Here’s the thing: language schools in my country are a cutthroat industry. These are large corporations which mostly operate on a franchising model, which means anyone with enough money can own an English school. The result is that you can find a dozen in any neighborhood, and there’s always plenty of job openings for English teachers.
Sounds good, right? Well, the flip side is that hiring practices in this job sector are absolute bullshit. Essentially, you don’t need to have a degree to teach, all you need is to have some kind of proficiency in the language. You’ll find plenty of schools where none of the teachers have any sort of teaching experience, or any deeper kind of knowledge about the learning process. Most of them have never studied that, after all. Their main qualification is having lived abroad for about six months, and that’s it.
And that’s fine, really. That is, after all, who I was when I started working. I was a fluent speaker who wanted to eventually go to university and study language and pedagogy, but I was also a college dropout who had lived for a year in New Zealand. I had to start somewhere. My first teaching job was at a local school, and I was paid about $4,50 an hour. That was actually above average pay in the city where I live.
During the “teacher training” process, which was absolute bullshit, we were told that studying at that particular school wasn’t cheap. I never knew how much they charged students but, judging by the average cost of an English course, it would probably be around $75 per student. Each student had two one-hour lessons a week, which means they’d have, on average, eight lessons each month. So they’re paying somewhere around $9 per lesson, and I’m earning half of that.
50/50 split between school and teacher. Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Well, each group had up to nine students, and regardless of how many students were in each group, we’d get paid the same. This means that now I’m getting paid $4,50 and the school is raking in $81 per lesson. What a fucking great deal, right? These are all approximations, but you get the gist.
That makes it extremely beneficial for the school to have as many students as possible in a group, at any given time. That includes squeezing in additional students in the middle of the semester, without warning. As a teacher, it’s like I’m juggling and then you suddenly throw an extra ball at me, and I’m supposed to carry on without missing a beat. Also, the proprietary learning materials I had to use (and couldn’t even take home with me to prepare because of copyright) were absolute garbage, so not only was I juggling, but was also having to do it with my feet.
Also, English schools are notorious for two things:
1 – They don’t give a single fuck about labor laws, and instead hire teachers as “outsourced contractors”, so that they have no obligations whatsoever and can fire you without warning whenever the fuck they want.
2 – Remember that shit salary I was talking about? Sometimes they decide not to pay you. I’ve lost count of how many other teachers I know who got shafted by the schools where they worked. Some of them are seeking legal action but, as I said before, these are large corporations. You know the deal.
Noticing all this was what started radicalizing me, all the way back in 2017. It sucked, going to work every day, teaching for hours on end, only to earn a salary that wouldn’t allow me to ever move away from my parents’ home. I’m very lucky to have a supportive family, but I was in my mid-twenties, itching to start my independent adult life.
I got fully radicalized in 2020. That’s when I started reading more about leftist theory, started visiting the old subreddit and listening to podcasts, all of which helped me articulate the anger that I felt, and gave me a way to conceptualize what it was that made me so miserable.
It was the exploitation. It was the guilt from being told to shut up and work, because there are people who can’t afford to eat, and it was anger at the self-righteous people who failed to realize that neither of these two situations should ever be allowed to fucking happen. It was feeling like I was being chewed up by some cruel, uncaring machine and spat out, with no hope and no expectations for the future.
And then came Covid, and the last layer of the illusion of importance my employers held for me was broken: with social distancing, we had to work from home. They provided me nothing, so I adapted, I used what I had in order to teach as well as I could. I found software that allowed me to better interact with my students, and I pirated educational materials that I couldn’t afford. And then I thought: what the fuck is the school doing for me? I’m doing all the work here. It suddenly became crystal clear that they were nothing but blood-sucking parasites, who offered me nothing at all.
In other words, I realized that I was the worker, and I also happened to hold the means of production, so to speak. Why not fucking seize them?
So I did. I was communicating with my students through my personal phone number and email, so they knew how to contact me. I started dropping hints that I also worked as a private teacher. I decided that I was going to charge them the same amount that they were paying the school, but the money would be all mine, if they ever got in touch. And they did. In one fell swoop, I proudly snatched three students away from the English teaching industry.
As an autonomous, self-employed language teacher, I now make my own schedule and I name my own price. Through word of mouth and referrals, I’ve now got enough students to pay my own bills, and with a great deal of initial support from my family, I finally managed to move to my own place, and now I’m financially independent. I took the most important step of my adult life, and I’ll never look back. I also have more free time, in which I can take care of myself, physically and mentally, and enjoy my hobbies. Life suddenly feels worth living, and now I realize just how much work takes away from us as human beings.
I don’t know how to organize my fellow teachers, but I always make sure to tell my story to my colleagues. I could do it and I hope that they can do the same. I swore to myself that I would always do everything I can, in order to help fellow teachers in their attempts to break away from this poisonous, vile industry. I share my materials. I teach them how to use the software I use. If there’s a prospective student that I can’t work with for any reason, I refer them to my fellow teachers. We’re all on the same boat, we’re all workers, and solidarity is the only way out of this shitshow. I hope that, one day, each and every one of you has the opportunity to break free from your own chains.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a fantastic week, you beautiful :LIB:s.
