29.11.2018
450
5

One day from the life of Skyeng teacher

There are so many stereotypes about teaching online: lack of a personal connection with the student, limited resources, more preparation work, etc.. Of course, there are some pitfalls but does the work of an online teacher dramatically differ from the work of an offline one? Let’s see. Here is a typical working day of one teacher from Skyeng team.

6.30 am

I am waking up, well, trying anyway. My alarm goes off the fourth time. I am quietly shutting the bedroom door behind me. The cats are running ahead to the kitchen making hopeful glances at me. They get their soft food, I get my coffee. The world slowly starts to make sense.

8.00 am

My first lesson. Student S has been with me for about 10 months now, and he is a perfect one to start my day with. A doting father and husband, and a manager in a huge international company, he is hardworking and highly motivated, but he is also fun. With his busy schedule, I never know where he is going to be having his lesson – in the office, at home, in a hotel or in his car. No matter what we are talking about – procurement or friendship – we always have some good laugh. He speaks English fluently but with quite a few mistakes. A typical holistic learner, he just cannot pay attention to articles, prepositions, or auxiliaries. We start with him telling me about his son’s last hockey training and then move on to discussing globalization. I also ask him to use the phrases ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’ minimum 8 times during the lesson to help his autopilot remember and retain the correct version of it.

9.00 am

Student K is Russian but lives in Amsterdam. She is naturally beautiful and astonishingly smart. Her progress amazes me, as her English was so much worse when we started some 67 lessons ago. Obviously, the environment helps, but she is also very goal-oriented. She needs to pass IELTS to enter university there, so the stakes are high. In the video, on the platform, I can see part of her little apartment which she shares with her boyfriend, and can’t help noticing the Scandinavian style of it. Anyway, today we focus on Writing task 1, describing tables. Quick revision of necessary phrases is followed by me and her writing paragraphs in turns. She forgets that the table is about data from 2009 and uses present tenses. Again. (sigh)

10.00 am

Oh, here comes my veteran, student Y. 135 lessons have passed, and I still cannot figure out what motivates him to learn English. It might be his perfectionism, but with his advanced level of English, how far up would one still want to go? We have covered Business English, General English and Spoken courses for his level on the platform, and eventually ended up using CAE prep materials to work on grammar, vocabulary, listening and speaking. Student Y is a manager in an IT company in Belarus, so I learnt a lot about life in that country, work in an outsourcing company, and football. Yes, he is really into sport, so we had sort of philosophical discussions about the nature of sport and its current state. When we are working on a vocab task, he is begging me not to give him the answer and wait until he actually gives up, which is hardly ever the case.

11.00 am

It is an unusual time for student O to have a lesson, but student N had asked to reschedule his lesson because of a meeting, and student O was happy to take the suddenly vacant slot. We are friends on Facebook* and Instagram*, and that bond just developed from the very first lesson with her. She is incredibly positive, outgoing and lively, and could be astonishingly open at times. She travels a lot on business and I start to recognize the hotel where she stays in Samara, Saratov or Penza – the regions she’s responsible for. Student O is a typical modern young woman – no family yet, moved to Moscow, successful in her career, she travels a lot and does yoga every morning. Today the topic is having a small talk at a conference. But first, she will tell me everything about her last trip to Italy.

12.00 am

I cannot even imagine how student A could do it all. I mean, seriously. A full-time job, 2 kids, the youngest is a little over 1 year old, a husband working in a different city and coming home for 2 days a week, driving courses, and an IELTS preparation course on top of all that? Oh boy… It is always very noisy in the background when she is having a lesson, and her toddler is often in the same room, so she is keeping an eye on him while speaking to me or listening. Nevertheless, with her ability to concentrate I have no doubt she will do well in the exam, where it’s going to be much quieter than in her usual environment anyway. She lives in Kazakhstan and works for a big oil company, loves her job and has ambitious career plans. Student A utilizes English at work quite a lot, and can easily score 8.5 in Reading, but needs to work on her other skills. Somehow she cannot spell her answers correctly, and we both tear our hair when she hears the correct answer but cannot spell it right.

1.00 pm

Student D is a new one, we only started a couple of weeks ago. He is young, still at university, quite insecure but very smart and conscientious. He speaks fluent Arabic as it was his major, and it takes time for him to switch to English, but we can talk in a ‘linguist-to-linguist’ manner and he already has a lot of learning strategies. He uses high-level words, e.g. ‘adolescent’, ‘facilitate’, ‘frustrated’, ‘dormitory’, but then cannot remember simple ones, for example, ‘honest’ or ‘ride’, so he is right when he says he needs to work on speaking skills mostly. He is currently taking part in a business competition, so he’s asking me to listen to his presentation in English and give some feedback. With pleasure!

2.00 pm

It is now 10 pm Moscow time, so my students are going to bed, while I am going to have lunch. The cats are happy to see me, and although I hate to wake up early, I like to finish early in the afternoon. It’s been not too hard a day so far, and I always enjoy communicating with my students. They are so different, yet somehow I seem to find a common ground with each of them, and I hope our lessons are as enjoyable (and useful) for them as they are for me.
I will spend a couple of hours later on preparation for tomorrow, as I am going to have eight lessons with a single one-hour break, so I need to check my IELTS students’ writings and look at the lessons on the platform (this part is easy as I have already been through about 80% of the standard courses).
Looking forward to meeting my tomorrow’s students and talk, listen, discuss, correct, be surprised, praise, agree, all in all, do my job. A wonderful job, at the end of the day.

*Instagram belongs to Meta Platforms Inc., whose activities are recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation.
*Facebook belongs to Meta Platforms Inc., whose activities are recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation.
Комментарии (5)
  • Фото аватара
    Anna

    Marina, no, not really. I guess I am used to it. I occasionally have 8 or 9 lessons a day, and that IS too much, frankly speaking. 4-6 lessons a day are pretty normal for me.

    08.12.2018
    • Фото аватара
      Bohdan

      4 lessons is a bless, I’ve got 7-8 lessons regularly. Have you tried working in the evenings?

      28.01.2019
  • Фото аватара
    Marina

    Six hours of non-stop teaching must be exhausting and deteriorating for teaching concentration.

    01.12.2018
  • Фото аватара
    Evgeniya

    Anna, our students seem to be so similar. I guess all Skyeng students are really busy, but highly intelligent and open-minded people. Thank you for sharing your day with us. You’ve made me smile.

    29.11.2018

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