At the moment, this isn’t a self help, instructional post. Those types posts are, I think, what is wrong about the social media age we find ourselves clinging to. They are the equivalent of the self help manuals that were popular in the early naughties. They are written or presented by someone who seems to be in control. Someone who knows the subject inside out and is on hand with a desire to explain it all, in easy bite-sized chargeable chunks to your needy dumb ass.

This post is me reacting to shock. For the last year and a half I have been teaching online with Whales English. They have been a pretty good company to work for. Their materials are OK, and they had a familial and concerned approach to communication with their teachers and staff. The platform they created to teach was easy to use and they made the marking of homework and the giving of feedback straightforward. Generally speaking, they took most of the pressure and prep out of teaching classes online and it was very straightforward. And comfortable.

During this year and a half I have been working on my own class material, my own course ideas, and my own content creation. I have been working on my website, and trying to figure out exactly how to build it, how to stop changing the design of it, and how to make it somewhere that people will often visit to read or watch some content I have added or written relating to some idea or notion I have worked through that week. With my schedule for Whales pretty full, I have been able to go about this planning with something of a relaxed mind set. I knew that I couldn’t relax, knew that these things needed to be pushed on as I wanted a greater and more independent income than that I was getting from Whales English. But it was a constant schedule that was reliable.

Not any more. The rug has been pulled away and it has been revealed that you should never, can never nor ever, ever, ever get comfortable. Though we all do. The rug was pulled away incredibally quickly and following a month of being told that teaching would continue until the courses children have already paid for have been taught. This always seemed like a ‘too good to be true’ scenario. Other huge companies had already folded. Had already thrown in the towel and conceded a defeat that the new regulations made impossible to ignore. So why would Whales English be any different? Well, it turns out the way they were different was in how they where not different.

So I find myself in a sticky position. I need to build up classes of my own. I need to charge ahead with content creation. I need to find teaching work. Over the next few weeks I will try to blog everyday about how that goes and what sort of obstacles I meet on the way.