It has been quite a busy week here at Inkreaable, dear reader. In the run-up to yesterday, I was quite busy trying to plan all of my lessons through the next couple of weeks. By which I mean through the first week of June. I am having cataract surgery on June 2nd and I’m not sure how much I will be able to be online planning lessons for that first week. It will be enough trying to remember all the drops that I will need to take once again. Teaching-wise, it was quite a busy week as my Polish client and I met for five hours last week. We are scheduled to meet for another five hours this week. One of those lessons will be in person at her office. And it’s not just her but also a friend of hers who would like a couple of hours of lessons and then she’s going to see if she wants to continue. I hope she continues because it’s worth it for me. But if not my Polish client and I have agreed to go online. My Japanese client headed off to Japan on Sunday and we had a lesson online yesterday morning. She’ll be away for a month and that means that we will only have a few lessons when she comes back at the end of June, in order to complete her package. I think she is done on the 11th of July unless something else happens. This past week she called out sick and so I had to push her lesson to the end of the package.
This week we also started an experiment at Inkreadable, whose concept has changed over time to include English language lessons. I concentrate both on general English and business English but have decided to add a third lesson type to the roster: lessons on the go. As the name suggests this will be a lesson at a location in Amsterdam like an art museum or other tourist attraction where we work on both functional language such as asking for tickets as well as vocabulary building using the exhibit around us. Eventually, the plan is to adapt that for children as well but only if there is interest over time. It was interesting trying to walk around the city and take a video at the same time. I did this with my student Shinwei, and Jasper, who acted as the cameraman for part of it. We went to an exhibition called Van Gogh meets Rembrandt which is a juxtaposition of Van Gogh’s paintings and Rembrandt’s paintings projected onto the walls of the Noorderkerk. Jasper himself was not impressed and let us know shortly after we exited the exhibition. But I did get some interesting videos and when I was doing the videography the sound quality was quite clear. We weren’t able to get as clear of quality with Jasper’s camera because he was probably picking up quite a few sounds around him as well as the fact that he was walking backward slowly and was about a foot and a half away from us. We came to the conclusion that we would probably need to buy a microphone package and a decent set of video editing software. Luckily my student from Japan is going to help me when she gets back. Anything has to be better than Jasper trying to walk backward and film at the same time. It’s going to be a complicated endeavor for me as I am not particularly tech-savvy and I don’t do very well in front of the camera. But I sent her some videos and maybe she will be able to splice them together or tell me how to splice them together so that we can make a reasonable film. It will be interesting to see if it works.
In a bit to get more clients from my website, I have been working on the content of my website to better fit the search parameters that will get me noticed by people. To that end, I spent Sunday trying to rewrite my content to give a better idea of what I am trying to achieve both for adults and kids. I spent about three hours editing the pages to a standard that WordPress will consider them “good”. Whether it has any effect on my business will be felt when we actually start advertising the website on Google. I sent a message to the translator to find out if she could give me another quote on the new website as there may be more words to translate and also the words that I was hoping to hit in the translation. As of this writing, I have not heard anything, but I did not expect to as she is involved in a big translation project that will take up most of her week. That means that the earliest I can expect to hear anything would be over the weekend at the earliest.
This week the writer’s group met at my house. We switched things up, quite literally, as we had drinks and conversation first and then writing. Over the weekend, several of the existing members of the group (some of which I’ve only ever seen once) splintered to form their own writer’s workshop group that will meet in-person and online. I will be intrigued to see how it turns out, but am not sure that I myself have the space to do another writing workshop. I will be living vicariously through the other members that’s for certain.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.