Overwork

I have a second job teaching ESL on Wednesday and Thursday nights. And yes, doing this in addition to the full-time job at the software company is every bit as exhausting as it sounds.
Early on, when I realized that the tech support job alone wouldn’t be enough to foot the bills, I looked around to see what other part-time employment I could get that would help me maintain my extravagant lifestyle of paying bills on time and not going deeper into credit card debt. I wanted to do something mindless and repetitive like data entry, but was unable to find anything part-time.

ESL also came to mind as it was something I had experience with, and I had, in the last year, supplemented my income by teaching online. But I was a little remiss to actively search for another ESL job since I would have to take the work home with me, plus I had left the ESL industry in Japan because I felt burnt out. But, necessity is a mother so I sucked it up and started scouring CraigsList where I soon came across a school that looked promising: Teikyo Heights Loretto University.

It seemed like a perfect fit-- part of a network of educational institutions associated with the Teikyo Group: a Japanese educational consortium comprised of universities in Japan, the US, Germany, China, Russia, the UK, and the Netherlands. I thought this should be easy since they would most likely promote studying abroad to the Japanese students at the sister campuses. Since I have experience teaching English to Japanese I figured I would be an obvious choice as part-time instructor.

It was not to be, unfortunately, when I went to the interview. Though there are a few Japanese students, the majority of the denizens that were traversing the halls of the old Sisters of Loretto building (which they’ll constantly remind you is at the highest point in Denver) are not Japanese. I found as well that their affiliation with the Teikyo Group was tenuous at best. I applied anyway, but the only positions that available were subs. They would add me to the call list and contact me if something came up. It never did.

My search pretty much stalled out after that. It’s kind of hard to believe, when compared to the prevalence of ESL jobs in countries abroad how difficult it is to find sustainable work teaching English (especially if you don’t have a Master’s Degree) in the US. I suppose this may be easier in places with greater international prominence, but surely there’s a large enough population, even in a cow town like Denver, of F-1 Visa students and other immigrants to find worthwhile employment.

Eventually I did come across a start-up language school that was sharing space at the Community College of Aurora at Lowry. I could work twice a week teaching four hours a night for 20 bucks an hour. Plus they’d pay me for an additional hour of planning for each day I worked. This was back in September, so I’ve been working there continuously (except for the semester break in early March when the company expanded into a new building) for the past nine months or so. Damn! Has it really been that long?

The new semester started in April, and after about eight weeks of class I’ve come to realize that I still don’t really know all that much about the countries that my students are from. The majority of the class is from Tajikstan, but I’ve got a very diverse group of students comprised of: Israel, Morocco, Costa Rica, Romania, Mongolia, Ukraine, and Bulgaria. So in the interest of not sounding like a moron by making sweeping, incorrect generalizations when talking to my pupils about their respective homelands, I plan to devote the next few entries of this blog to discussing language and culture.