First post about teaching!

I’ve been periodically told that there are certain things I would be good at. Public speaking, selling things, “leaving this party because no one invited you”, and even teaching. While a couple of them have interested me, teaching is the one I’ve most recently landed on.

Jenna and I discovered that teaching English as a Foreign Language (heretofore referred to as TEFL) would be the easiest way for us to live abroad and feed the travel bug which bit us pretty hard in early 2014. We signed up for classes at the International TEFL Academy and started in May, graduated in August, and moved to Milan in the first week of September, hoping blindly to find work.

We’d been told that the best way to go about this would be to simply show up in learning centers or schools and say “hi, I’m here to work for you because I’m an American and speak proper English.” Supposedly this works. I’m not crazy about continual face-to-face rejection, so we took the high road and consulted the TEFL Academy’s list of learning and language centers and began steadily and continually emailing them. We also looked at lots and lots of websites, ads, flyers, and more to try finding work in the TEFL world.

We’d also heard that Italy was one of the countries that most desperately is looking for English teachers and native English speakers, primarily for adults in “business English” settings, so that’s what we were more or less expecting, but the main goal was to make enough money to survive in an expensive city.

Here’s what has transpired since then:

After upwards of 30 emails to schools and a fair amount of non-responses, we started hearing back from a few language centers and had a couple of interviews. At the outset, we have been without work visas. We’ve been continually told that we can’t get a work visa unless we have a job offer on the table, but we can’t get a job offer unless we’re in Italy to interview in person, so you can see it’s a bit of a catch 22. Most of the places we heard back from said we can’t even bother with an interview until we have a work visa, but none of them offered any insight as to how to get one (and some even mentioned that in order to get one you would have to go back to the states for at least three weeks for the paperwork to go through).

Of the places we interviewed, there were mixed results. One was a temp agency, which was familiar to me because my last job in Chicago was at a company where I’d originally been a temporary employee and they’d been a temp agency for 20+ years. However, I know my own qualifications and know that I was not exactly what they were looking for and we pressed on with a few meetings at places that specialized in private lessons for kids. The downside to these agencies would be that all of their lessons were between about 3:00 and 7:00 p.m. so we couldn’t possibly work more than four or five hours per day. But if we could both manage that many hours, we would probably be ok.

We started with some trepidation. What happens is that the families contact these schools and ask for English lessons. The schools then contact the teachers and see who is available to teach these lessons. The school, however, doesn’t know how many people are going to call and request lessons, so the initial statement is basically “we’ll get you work” but all of the requests have not arrived. So after the first week, we each had about four hours per week of lessons and were completely terrified.

But things picked up. The revolving door started spinning, and more lessons would come in – seemingly always at times we’d already agreed to lessons, but that’s not something we could control. We’d also put up fliers around universities and such saying “English lessons from American citizens with certifications to teach English. First lesson free” and waited for the contacts to roll in. Believe it or not, it worked.

My best piece of advice if you’re reading this and considering teaching English abroad is to post your own fliers and post them often. In Italy, the places where you can post them are pretty sporadic. We ended up posting them all over sign-boards outside one of the biggest Universities in the country, but there are no sign-boards inside the buildings – they’re all outside. This means that if you put up your ad on Tuesday and Wednesday is a rainy day, you’ll have to put up a new one on Thursday.

We had read an article shortly before our arrival that suggested this “first lesson free” program and that it would do wonders for your scheduling abilities, but we didn’t know how it would work in a different country. Our first round of advertising basically got us nothing, but a second round resulted in a couple of lesson-requests, one of which stuck around for a paid lesson before disappearing into the night.

We kept at it though, and now my schedule has quite literally been filled. I have a 3x per week private lesson for two hours each (which by itself would cover the majority of my rent), another private lesson, and at least one more I’ve passed along to Jenna because I don’t have any more evenings free.

Early evenings are all seemingly booked from the various courses and lessons we’ve been given by our schools, which are anything from homework help for elementary schoolers to full lessons for kids who don’t have English in school anymore but their parents recognize its importance.

There is only one constant thus far in my lessons that I’ve gotten from the schools: families who can afford to get their young children private English lessons can basically afford whatever they want.