Thursday, September 08, 2011

first "full" day of the new/old schedule

We're back to the regular, non-summer schedule. Yesterday, I had to be at the office an hour early for a teachers' meeting, but immediately after that I had only four hours' work. Today, I've been told I've got a full six-hour day, starting at 3:30PM, so I can leave home a bit later. I'm going to miss those eight-hour-long summer days: that's a lot of income going poof.

My private tutoring rate charts are almost finished, so I'll be finalizing my TEF blog and putting myself on the market this week. The creation of the charts has been a long, tedious process; I've tried to strike a balance between heedlessly offering everyone a single rate, on the one hand, and creating nightmarishly Byzantine charts on the other. Once the charts have been uploaded (and some course write-ups have been revised), I'll point you readers to the end result. Since Skype-based tutoring is part of what I'm offering, feel free to hit me up if you've got a hankering to learn something I can teach you, or if you know someone (or someone with kids) who might benefit from a bit of tutoring.

Skype doesn't have its own stable white-board function, from what I've seen, so I've been looking at online white boards. The two most prominent ones seem to be Scriblink and Dabbleboard; of those two, Dabbleboard seems more stable for my computer and browser, but I still need to master the requisite tools. A white board is essential for online tutoring, unless you're willing to "rough it" and use a physical white board that you periodically place in front of the web cam; learning Dabbleboard strikes me as the better alternative.

So with the end of summer comes the end of a higher level of income, which means it's important for me to be searching for extra income pronto. I can't apply to MGRE until I know my latest GRE scores, and that won't happen until November. In the meantime, this boy needs work, and he's gonna make it happen himself.


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2 comments:

Charles said...

Not sure if this is the right place for comments on the TEF blog, but I had just hopped over there again and it occurred to me that it might be more natural to see your picture on the left of the montage, as opposed to the right. At least, from a Western audience's perspective. Or was that done on purpose, to put the students front and center?

(Come to think of it, I have no idea what that skeleton is doing in there, either...)

Kevin Kim said...

The skeleton is part of the picture featuring the left-most student; it was taken during the rehearsal of a Shakespeare-related skit. I think I had asked my girls to find something skull-related for the Hamlet part of the skit.

I see what you mean about tracking from left to right, but I think my face works well as a, uh, punchline. Ultimately, I plan to take John's advice to slap up photos of happy students doing student-like stuff, so the banner's going to undergo another change at some point.