Your first reaction to reading the headline may well be, “Where have you been hiding for the last two months?”. No, I am not still in the third, or maybe fourth, stage of grief. This isn’t some pipe dream, a result of some particularly strong cheese consumed too close to bedtime. Now is it wishful thinking.

Well, OK, it may be a little bit of wishful thinking. But there have been rumors coming out of China that should there be a regime change in the not too distant future, the old order would be reintroduced and the big online ESL companies would be back up and running before the ink had dried on the reversal document.

I am waiting for firmer confirmation before I go too public on this, but don’t be surprised if we don’t see these big Chinese firms returning to providing the full services that they were doing before the regulations came into play. Stay tuned.

There can be something remarkably ghoulish about coincidence. Not only ghoulish but also straight up bizarre. How a number of things can conflate and coalesce at the same time to be not only devastating but also fortunate. This is the situation I find myself in. Leading up to the great Whales English Black Thursday event, I was trying to work out how I was going to fit in teaching my classes everyday and finding time to move house.

I was considering how I could do it without taking any time off. It was doable, but a lot of threads would need to come together in a fortunate marriage of coincidence. The online teaching gig gives you the elastic trousers that a lot of other jobs just can’t offer. So you can do your classes from any location that has an internet connection. Great. As long as I can travel during the time in between the classes then, as long as I have an internet connection where I am going to Bob’s your aunties live in lover.

However, it was causing quite a bit of consternation. Should I take some time off to allow me to get everything sorted in the new house. More specifically, could I get the internet connection sorted in the new house so that I wouldn’t miss any classes should I try and do it without taking any holiday. All these considerations where taking their toll. It was going to be difficult to arrange for sure.

Then the whole Whales cancelling classes thing happened. All of a sudden, I wasn’t tied to the class schedule. Hell, I didn’t have a class schedule anymore. Obviously this wasn’t a complete success. It meant I had no job. I had no money coming in. I was screwed. The timing of these things is remarkable. As the tenants move out of my house meaning I can move back in, my source of income disappears. Just like that. Shit. But it could all be for the best. New horizons and new beginnings. Lot’s to learn and lot’s to teach. Fingers crossed.

Well what a week that was. It has been the longest week I can remember for some time. The abrupt nature of the cessation of my classes with Whales English has been proceeded by a hard working and intensely feverish search for fresh opportunities. I had been looking at other teaching platforms over the last few months, though at a leisurely pace as you do when you think you have a dependable source of income chuntering through the gate. Oh how trusting and stupid we are. Well, trusting anyway.

So, after looking at and building profiles in Cambly, Italki and Preply, I came across another teaching platform that I had not heard of before. Amazing Talker is the website platformy thing. It looked wholesome, it looked clean and efficient. More than that, from the filling out of my profile I received instant support and contact. This seemed like a welcome arm around a slightly unloved shoulder. Obviously it is a platform looking to get as much out of teachers and students as it can. But you can do that in a cooperative way. So let’s hope they can.

Never trust a snake to make you dinner.

Never trust a snake to make your dinner.

Frank Bruno- 1948

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.

So it has happened. It has gone through. It’s been announced with fanfare and great foreboding. And it pretty much turns the industry upside down whilst pulling it’s pants down and displaying the photographic evidence on the town hall notice board. After a year and a half, more actually, where the whole world has been kicked and scratched from the excessive Covid19 reaction, the Chinese government thinks nothing of announcing a new set of restrictions that make it increasingly impossible for a billion dollar industry to continue in it’s current guise.

A lot has been written over the last few days on many different EFL websites trying to tie down the specifics of these new restrictions. What we do know is they affect all the major China based companies providing weekend and holiday classes and a native UK teacher to front the class. As always with the CCP, there were many leaks over the months leading up to the official announcement. Small droppings of possible changes that made the industry sit up and shake, and also made a large, worldwide group of online teachers start twitching like a rabbit’s nose.

Over the last week it has been hard to take in. Hard to understand how a country can deliberately sabotage one of it’s most successful industries. Still that is what we have come to expect from the CCP and they never fail in there execution of this level of destruction. They’re doing this for the kids, however. Won’t someone please think of the kids. It’s to take the pressure off the over worked kids. Or it’s to encourage more parents to have more children. I am sure it is. Though, the parents who pay for extra hobby classes for the kids are often parents with enough disposable income that they have already had + 2 children, and still have enough left over for English and piano lessons. So I am not sure how this makes a different to the majority of kids who will miss out on there extra hour of English a week now.

What it will do is make the industry regroup and relocate. It will lead to a flood of available online teachers drifting into the private tutor sites that seem like they are already bursting at the seems with teachers anyway. What is going to happen? Who knows. I may wake up tomorrow and find it’s all been a fevered cheese dream. Or not.

When you see the President of the United States come out and state that a section of society is responsible for the deaths of fellow citizens you know there is something very strange going on. Ignoring the usual Biden pause and eye flicker, waiting for a message to come in to his ear/eye/brain so he knows what to say. This message was stark. He delivered verbatim and the whole world should be very nervous.

In my last blog I talked about the instability of the online marketplace for anyone using, trading or reading it. When the President of the United States can come out and brand his own citizens killers then there is a big move towards the setting of a narrative that only has benefits for a minute few. The sad thing is that this is meant to be a teaching website. I platform to develop and to help students from all over the world to learn to speak English better, progress quicker, become fluent.But with all that is going on in the world now it is nearly impossible to concentrate on building a business or creating anything. Pessimism has always been my strong point, but that was in a world where there were opportunities and hope and freedom.

In this world, over the last eighteen months, all the hope, freedom and optimism has slowly been drained and taken away. What started out as a seemingly real pandemic has become a drawn out and stage managed power grab. There is no other explanation. It is impossible to remain naive and trusting of the people in power when we have seen som many governments follow the same flawed responses to this killer virus.

In these worrying and troubling times it is unclear whether there is a future in the Chinese EFL industry. Be it online or in the classroom, there seems to be some changes afoot. For language centres and online companies in China, there are whisperings of limiting the extra curricular learning hours of certain sections of the school going community. Or kids to be more precise. On top of that, and more worrying in many ways, is the increasing uncertainty around the increasing policing of the internet, and the over reach of many of the tech social media giants.

For anyone, company or organisation switching to a mainly online presence following the massive restrictions in the name of Covid 19, that route to salvation may be about to be curtailed as well. It seems that maybe the online comunity that has been created will control and trap people more than they ever knew. What once seemed like a limitless and endless theme park seems now to be undergoing a massive security operation. Global governments want to control it, and who is controling the global governments? For anyone with kids it is a frightening and worrying time for sure.

“A man without an internet connection is a man without hope”

Bob Carolgees-1986

This is not a guide of ‘how to teach online’. It’s not a helpful go-to guide to list the things you need, the way to do it, the way you need to talk. No no no. It isn’t meant to be helpful to people who are thinking about, currently doing it, or any such position in between. It may have some elements of a guide, people may find it useful in some aspects. It is more of an observation and a critique of how teaching online is so different than teaching in the classroom. There are some ways that it is better than the classroom. For the teacher, mainly, it has to be said. You can sit on yer bum online and no one bats an eyelid. In a classroom, if you do that you may well get a rather damning critique from some sort of superior who may well put your name forward for re-evaluation training. Or worse, a classroom observation.

So, for the teacher, online teaching is a dream. You don’t use half as much energy as you do in the classroom. And therein lies the trace of the reason why online teaching is not as effective as the classroom kind. The saved energy from not being in the classroom cannot be used fully online. This means that the level of engagement and scope that a teacher has in the classroom environment cannot be reached online. As much as people think that their ‘big’ personality is gonna make up for all that missing energy, so much effort and energy is gonna be wasted in the communication process of two computers talking to each other. An online teacher always needs to remember that the student is probably viewing the class on a smartphone. In a room in a small flat that is not specific or cordial to participating in an online class. These considerations are vital to consider before planning a class.

So, what do I want to say about online teaching? Well, compared to the classroom it is a quiet place. It is quiet not only because of a lack of noise but also the lack of control of the noise coming from the location of the student. At best, that student may be in an empty room. With no talking coming from another room, and the student is sat, attentive, constantly, in front of the computer. The student is maintaining eye and ear contact so that the lesson is running smoothly and the aims of the class are being achieved. This is, of course, dreamland. It does have it’s classroom relation. I am basically describing a perfect class. Whether it is online or in the classroom, there is always a scenario where the students and the teacher combine in a perfect symmetry. The main difference is that in the classroom you have more control of the situation.

Control. What a wonderful word that is. When you consider how much control the parent of the student, or the student should it be an adult student, has it is astonishing how often a situation develops online where it is as if the student did not have any pre knowledge of the class, and is left in a flappery of no suitable place to sit, noisy family gathering ongoing, unable to locate any learning material, participating in an ongoing conflab with his/her mum/Dad/Wife/Grandma etc. Or, and this is the lowest scenario an online teacher can find him/herself in. The student is not even at home. The student is in a restaurant with more family than you can shake a stick at. Families who don’t stop talking to the student, who don’t stop talking to each other. Who actually talk more while the class is on than I think they would if the class wasn’t happening.

So what can I say about online teaching? Not a lot. It’s like teaching in the back of a taxi most of the time. The student is driving the taxi and is constantly being distracted by the road ahead. The journey ends when the student says it does, and you leave the taxi/class usually disoriented hoping that you have reached your destination and the driver is happy with the ride. If that is a confusing analogy it is because most classes online are exactly that. A ride in the dark. It is not all bad. In the next instalment I will paint a prettier picture of the online teaching experience.

I have been an online English second language teacher for just over a year. What have I noticed in that time that differentiates the online teaching classroom from the live classroom? There is one word that sums this up better than any other. Atmosphere. This relates to the fact that the teacher is not in the same room as the students. So the student can walk off, can eat their dinner, can spin on a chair. And there aint much you can do about it. This is all related to different students learning capabilities.

In the live classroom you would still get the students who couldn’t sit still. But the desk is a great controller of movement. Once a student is sat at a desk there is an unconscious submission to the power and control of the desk. No such control exists in the online virtual classroom. This causes issues of control. The main difference is the atmosphere. There is something very disconnected about the online classroom. In the classes I am doing for the company I am working for there is a real dearth of songs, videos and injections of interesting material that creates and maintains an atmosphere in the class.

It seems that the TEFL industry’s future is going to be online. Not just the TEFL industry but most functioning industries will have to find an online presence that may or may not be functional for that industry. It is true that the TEFL teaching world does fit in somewhat to the riggers and restraints of online teaching. It is a language, and instruction around oral skill development. Though being online leads to a less expansive learning opportunity, it still facilitates an environment to progress.

Imagine trying to learn bricklaying online. Or brain surgery. Or hairdressing. You see, these industries are not very conducive to distance screen learning. They require the presence of teacher and student in close proximity so that a technical skill can be learned. Should the world not fully return to the position it was in pre Covid 19 then the learning schools industry is going to be decimated and in the ashes there will be a lesser industry trying to keep it’s head above water and continue to breathe.