I’m a pharmacist (or at least that’s what I tell people when they ask). That’s my part-time day job. My OTHER job is a little weird. Ok, it’s a lot weird, and I get the strangest looks when I tell people about it. I teach children in China how to speak English. The most common initial response I get is, “WOW! You speak Chinese?!” No, I don’t. Not even a little. But that’s ok! Because I’m not teaching them Chinese, I’m teaching them English. I don’t speak baby either, and I’m doing a decent job of teaching my kids English, too (though sometimes it’s a little questionable). But does it work? You bet! Imagine how much better you’d have learned a foreign language if you had been in a full immersion language course from the time you were 4 years old!
I work for this company called VIPKID. It’s at the top of pretty much every list that ranks the best “work from home” jobs. I’m a contractor, meaning that I set my own hours, and parents hire me to teach their child a 25 minute lesson. If they like me, they book me again later. It took a LONG time for me to get a good number of bookings, though. I only taught the occasional class for several months before I was “discovered” by a few parents who passed along my name to other parents. Now I’m hired by someone to teach during almost every time slot I open up. VIPKID provides the lesson materials, and it’s up to me how I choose to teach the information to each child in the way that’s best for them as an individual. Kids range in age quite a bit. I’ve taught a 3 year old (it didn’t go well – never try to teach a foreign language to a toddler right before bedtime), up through a 12 year old. The kids get older as the difficulty increases. I teach the two lowest levels because I like working with younger children more. VIPKID also handles the payment side of things. Parents pay the company, and the company pays me.
And the best part is I can work as much or as little as I want. Right now, because it’s summer break for them too, I usually work for an hour or two in the morning and an hour or two at night. During the school year, I usually only teach in the morning (their evening), and in the evening on weekends (my Friday and Saturday nights are their Saturday and Sunday mornings). Sure, it means that I get up at 5:45 every day now, but now I don’t worry so much about losing the income from dropping down to part-time in my pharmacist job. With just a few hours each day, during the times when my kids are eating breakfast and watching cartoons or sleeping, I’ve been making an extra $800-1100/month. Not too shabby.
Do you have to be a teacher already? NO! The requirements to be considered for hire include:
- a current resident of the US or Canada
- any “formal” or “informal” teaching experience such as mentoring, tutoring, coaching, or alternative education (and yes, being a parent DOES count)
- have a Bachelor’s degree in any field or at minimum an Associate’s degree in Early Childhood Education
- have a working desktop or laptop with high-speed internet that can handle both video and audio
If you’re interested in checking it out for yourself, click here! Since VIPKID doesn’t actually train teachers individually (they provide training materials and give you access to some online seminars, and then you “audition” one-on-one when you think you’re ready), they pay teachers like me $100 for each person they refer who gets hired. This means that THEY WILL PAY ME TO TRAIN YOU! So if you think that sounds like a fun way to earn a little extra pocket money, click the link and check it out.
