It has been, dear reader, a fairly uneventful week in Greece. I have been able to spend a couple of hours a day doing English Center administrative work and I’ve largely been able to keep up with everything. In terms of teaching, it’s been fairly consistent. I’ve only had Shinwei and my Japanese client of my private clients and in terms of The English Center, it’s only been Alessandro with pronunciation. Heleen and Jean continue to be absent from my schedule and I cannot seem to pin them down for lessons. Heleen has been changing lessons and we will now be meeting on the 26th of April. As it is, the 26th is a change from the 20th of April which is a change from the 13th of April so as you can see Heleen tends to be quite flighty in her scheduling. I also have not seen the hide or hair of Jean as he is traveling. He has let me know that he would like some lessons this coming week but as of this writing I have not heard from him so I am not sure that I’m going to be able to give him a lesson when he wants.
In terms of the admin that I do for the English center, midweek was a little bit touch and go for me as I was not able to do anything right. I kept sending out emails with the wrong information. I hate when I do that. I hate that because someone will always catch the mistake before I will and send me a passive-aggressive email. It’s not a fun situation in which to work. But I have to put up with it because, of course, there’s money involved. Admittedly, it’s particularly bad because I know I am in the wrong and that makes it even more difficult. As much as I try to do everything perfectly there are simply some mistakes that I just don’t catch. It’s a very stressful situation when whatever you’re doing takes you twice as long because you’re worried that it’s not absolutely perfect. But I find the routine to be relaxing and so it gives me a bit of structure for the day.
I hadn’t heard anything from Flowently about the in-company lessons until late last week. It’s for a pharmaceutical company that has its headquarters just outside of Lelystad. It’s about a two-hour commute each way if I was to take public transport to the office. It turned out that the company wanted an hour and a half on a Monday afternoon. I told Flowently that I was not going to be able to work for just an hour and a half as I feel that an hour and a half is just not enough time to give a quality lesson. Instead, I told the owner that it would be better if it was two hours or more. She didn’t think that the company was going to do that. I told her to keep me in mind for anything else that came across, especially in Amsterdam. On Friday this past week, she got back to me and said that they were willing to do two hours and asked if I was willing to teach for them. She said that the price was going to be 60 euros an hour which is ten euros more than they normally pay. I have agreed. If you amortize the 120 euros it ends up being about 20 euros an hour. Which sucks. But I look at it this way, it is a new experience doing in-company lessons, which The English Center will never give me. So from the first of May until the 17th of July, I’ll be going to Lelystad and teaching business English to a group of eight people. It’ll be interesting to be in an in-person classroom group class again.
The other notable happening of the trip is that I met my student Odhran’s other Greek teacher. He lives in Chania and we met for a coffee yesterday. It was very difficult because he doesn’t know that I was actually the first Greek teacher Odhran had. He works at Elinopoula which is the school that I went to and got to meet the staff when I was in Athens in January. I played it like I was just a family friend who just did conversational Greek with Odhran but really we have proper lessons where I learned to teach him concepts, at least to the best of my ability in Greek given that my own Greek isn’t great. I’m grateful to know that Odhran is actually still doing at least the Greek platform even if he’s not with me at the moment. He is up keeping the language which I find gratifying.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there’s more to come.