The head office wrote me (and, I presume, everyone else on the TOEFL team) to say that, due to the low volume of student output for the current round of essay topics, my/our schedule on Monday is being cut down to a half day. Because this is happening right after last week's cancellation of two whole days of work, I'm beginning to get the uneasy feeling that this job isn't quite as stable as it was originally made out to be. After going over my budget for the next several months, I'm starting to sweat: with this little income, I'll be cutting it close for at least the next two months: December 2010 and January 2011.
I was so nervous, after my budget review, that I actually took a quick drive down the street to the local high school. It's got an impressive campus, and probably services most or all of the entire county. If I do start teaching high school students again, I'd rather do it privately, for a decent hourly rate, and only for very small groups. But it may be that, if things start looking tough, I'll have to think about plunging back into full-time secondary-level teaching. Here's hoping things don't get that desperate. As I've mentioned before, I've got other projects I'm working on, and I'll do whatever I can to avoid teaching that age group again.
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Monday, December 06, 2010
nuts
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Kevin, I'm curious: are there any IELTS rating centers close by you? Perhaps you could do both. Where I teach (until the end of the month, when I'll be laid off again), most of our students take IELTS. A few years ago, it was TOEFL-this, TOEFL-that: all students took the TOEFL iBT. It's now very rare for me to hear a student say they want to take the iBT. In my opinion, there's been a real backlash against the artificialness of the iBT encounter in terms of the speaking responses. Our students prefer face-to-face oral testing, and several of our instructors (I'll admit to having done this myself for a few years now) actually counsel them to go this route.
On the other hand, IELTS is a Cambridge thing, so perhaps students wanting to study in the US prefer the iBT? In any case, I hope that your numbers go back up and you get some work. And I hope that I'll have more work, too!
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