(upbeat music)
- Hi everybody.
Ericka here from Calgary, Canada.
Just about to start class in like three minutes,
so I better get going,
but I teach for two hours and then I'll be back on
and then we can chat about all things online teaching,
all things career,
and all other things you guys wanna talk about.
All right, guys, I'm all done teaching for the day.
I apologize for the sound in the background.
That is my space heater.
Perks of living in the mountains,
it's freezing cold in the mornings.
So I just finished my two hours
and luckily today I don't have any reports I need to do
and I don't have any homework to do either.
Okay, this is where I get to talk about me.
So obviously, my name's Ericka.
I'm from Calgary, Canada,
and I am 30.
And I got TEFL certified in Nicaragua
at ITA's partner school
in the end of 2016.
And I stayed there for about five months or so,
didn't work because internet,
and then I came home and started teaching online
in spring of 2017.
Okay, so when I got home from Nicaragua,
I started working for ALO7.
I had applied to other companies,
but either with not being eligible
or a bunch of other things.
ALO7 worked out best for me as well as Cambly.
ALO7, at the time, paid fairly well,
and I liked their flexibility.
I didn't need to commit to a ton of classes,
a ton of hours.
I could kinda just do what I wanted.
And Cambly's very much the same.
You sign up for your priority hours and you work those
or you just log in and work however long you feel like.
The pay at Cambly, not great,
however their flexibility is so amazing,
it's kind of worth it.
So I taught with ALO7 and Cambly fairly consistently
from April until the beginning of August,
at which point I moved to South Korea.
I had done all my paperwork in the time that I was home,
and that was kind of my goal once I got my cert
that I wanted to go to China or South Korea
or Japan to teach English.
At the time, South Korea,
with all the benefits and stuff like that,
worked out for me.
I'm gonna try and keep this short and sweet,
but basically, I was in Korea
at Hagwon for one year
and then traveled a bunch,
came home, wasn't working, teaching online at all
except for the odd hour on Cambly.
And then June, 2020,
pandemic time,
I got hired at Whales English
and I have been teaching with them ever since.
I guess the last hundred and however many days
it's been since then
and it's pretty awesome.
So there's a ton of information online about Whales English
and Cambly and stuff.
If you have questions you wanna ask me,
feel free to message me here
or on my private account.
If you want really informative information
about Whales English,
there was a couple that did a takeover from Malaysia in May,
Stevie and Jess,
and they did an amazing job of explaining it.
They're actually kind of why I got hired at Whales
so shout out to those guys.
So probably the top reason I chose a singular country
instead of traveling,
was that I am on medications for psoriasis
and psoriatic arthritis.
So I wanted to be somewhere where I had access
to either the medications that I took with me
or could have access to the medication I was on in Canada.
It's incredibly expensive and here I'm lucky
that it's covered
with my private health insurance.
And then, in Korea,
I was able to find a dermatologist
and a dermatologist at one of the hospitals in Seoul
that were able to prescribe me my medication
with a pretty good copay.
And so I was super lucked out with that.
If you have any questions about traveling
with autoimmune disorders,
traveling with psoriasis,
traveling with arthritis,
please message me because I can help you out.
I prefer the hours for online.
I work two hours every day
and I do work significantly less than most people
because it's not my main income.
Whereas when I was in person,
I was working nine hours a day
plus having to grade homework and other things.
And on that note,
I really do prefer teaching in person.
You get a lot more out of the kids,
you get to learn more about them
and you see them every day.
So it's completely different than online.
With Whales, I do see the same kids every week,
so that helps.
But like on Cambly, for example,
I don't do regulars because I use it only
as a third source of income.
So I see people once for like five minutes
and you don't really get that personal connection
as quickly obviously.
But if I could do anything,
I would go back to in person,
but the time would have to be right,
the hours would have to be right.
And of course, the pay would have to be right.
Everyone loves a good price breakdown.
So I will post my income from Whales and Cambly
and then I will post an income sheet from South Korea.
Now, keep in mind,
I am pretty terrible at saving money.
So don't hate me.
Aloha.
So with Whales,
they have phonics built into every lesson.
So you'll either be teaching a new one or reviewing.
So it's super easy to correct that.
If there's other words you can just say,
"Oh, this is how I say it. Say it again."
And the kids are usually good.
So it's super easy.
You'll send in your documents and actually apply.
And then if that's successful,
they'll invite you to do a mock class with an interview.
And then if that's successful,
you sign your contract,
you get hired and then you start doing your training.
And then hopefully within a few days
you start teaching.
- [Ericka] So then I take you guys on a little tour
of how I get prepared for all my classes.
So for Whales, I log into my account.
There's my schedule.
So for tomorrow, this says,
obviously tomorrow night,
but for me, it's in the morning.
So once I click on my class,
I just scroll down a little bit
and I find I'm teaching a review class.
So on my 10th class it's review.
This is a pre-K class.
My kids are pretty low level for pre-K,
but we do our best.
Once the PowerPoint is downloaded,
I open it up in WPS.
I don't have a Mac anymore
so I use that because it's free
and then I don't have to pay for Office.
I don't know if I'm allowed to show you their slides,
I'll just show you that.
And then I go through the slides
and it tells you in the bottom corner here
how long you should be spending on.
Up here it'll tell you,
over there it'll tell you
any information they want from you,
and then all the information you need
is pretty much on the slides.
And then this is my organization binder.
My notes are a lot less comprehensive than other people's,
but I find this works really well for me.
So my review class,
so these are all the kinds of slides we get
and then the timers,
and then any key words,
high frequency words, anything like that.
If I need to write myself a note like don't get behind
or needs more than two minutes,
I do that.
I also do things like include my props
like use your American girl accessories for this.
I have this huge box here that we call my magic box.
The kids love it.
And it has all of my beanie babies in it
and they come very much in handy.
All right.
So you can see that my schedule isn't very full.
The blue spots are students that I see every week,
those are regular class students.
The green one would normally be filled
with a trial class.
It is not currently,
but I only opened it on Monday,
so I wasn't really expecting it to be booked.
I'm not interested in opening more hours
because when daylight savings hits
and I have to wake up at 3:30,
that is just not something I am into.
That is not my jam.
Just a hard no.
Also, there is a fair bit of homework and prep
you have to do with Whales.
Once you get used to doing it,
it's actually quite easy
and you can kind of do it quite quickly,
but the learning to do it quickly
took me a bit.
All right.
I'm headed to bed in about an hour,
so if you have any last minute questions,
go ahead, send them now.
And if not,
send them to my personal account,
that's totally fine.
And then I will get to them as soon as I can.
This question's a bit hard to answer
because I had got a bit mixed bag of everything.
So there was some things I absolutely loved
and there were some things made me wanna
pull my hair out.
My Hagwon was great until it wasn't.
And then there were some management staff changes
that I didn't,
so, yeah, the staff changed,
the management changed
and it just wasn't a very cohesive environment.
And then I had a huge psoriasis and arthritis flare up
and that was absolutely awful.
Could barely walk and stuff like that.
So it got kind of down
and that was not fun.
On the positive side,
things that I really did enjoy
was actually teaching the kids.
They're just so amazing
and they're so willing to learn, most of them.
And so teaching, transportation,
Oh my God, cheap, reliable public transportation.
I live in a city where those things don't exist,
well, exist, but it's not cheap nor reliable.
And also, I was able to find a dance studio in Seoul,
where I was able to take ballet and jazz
and then another where I took tap.
So if you're interested in that
I can help you with that.
And so that was awesome for me.
I grew up as a competitive dancer,
so that's my thing,
that's my jam.
And then--
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