Last month, I celebrated one year of working with VIPKID! 13 months in, I still feel like I landed my dream job! Below, you will find a quick explanation of what our company is, a series of highlights from my job, and why you, too, should join VIPKID.
VIPKID is a Chinese company that hires teachers to teach ESL to students. Though it originally started in China, we employ teachers all over the world (more than 40,000 presently!). We also have young participants from other countries. Most of us work part-time, earning anywhere between $14-$22 an hour with added incentives (for showing up on time and ending class on time, etc).
Though I was originally hired to teach one-on-one, the other opportunities I was given were nothing short of life-changing! Through our company, I applied for the Jack Ma Project, a sister organization that helps bring educational resources to the rural areas of China. With VIPKID, most of our students live in large cities and have access to technological resources. Some of the pupils in our rural projects live in mountainous areas and walk a couple of hours to get to school (see video of my precious Jack Ma students below).
Our community and leaders are constantly working to improve the experience on both ends, for the educators and the educated. Occasionally we are sent updates that include new ways to work for the company. I seized one months into being employed, and my husband and I went on to make a series of educational videos for VIPKID. I enjoy teaching, my husband likes filming, and we were paid to boot!
The bonds I have formed with my students and their parents is a pleasant surprise. I was not sure how that was going to work with the distance. As it turns out, certain themes, like love, are universal. Bonuses have included: international friendships for my children, my multitalented students making great connections, and the use of fun props (see photos). If you are interested in applying for VIPKID, please click here (requirements are a 4-year degree in any field and teaching experience). I have successfully referred 7 other teachers and would love to add you to the list! Come help us, “change lives without uprooting your own.”
I soared through academics throughout my elementary and middle school years, and seldom had to try hard to get straight A’s. That is, until I met Geometry my freshman year of high school. Naturally, it was an AP (Advanced Placement) class. My teacher was Mr. Zuniga, a man in his mid-forties with a salt and pepper flat top. Thin-framed, he wore glasses, slacks and a tie most days.
An intelligent man, he loved math and all things numbers. He also loved the sound of his own voice. It sounded factual, with an air of, “I’m God’s gift to integers.” Something would happen when he began his lectures (which usually lasted the whole class period). My mind was magically transported to a place where I knew and recognized nothing. He literally sounded like he was speaking a foreign language.
This continued for the rest of the semester. Each week, I stayed after school for tutoring (also led by him) at least three times. I took notes diligently and missed nothing that came out of his mouth. My grade fluctuated every marking period from passing to not, and it tormented me. I didn’t get it. The end of the year arrived and I eagerly anticipated what my final Geometry average was.
Progress report in hand, I glanced over all the numbers solely searching for one. And there it was. 69. My end of the year average is a 69?! Indignant, I never understood why he didn’t give me the last point I needed. “Can’t he see I’ve worked my tail off?!” I fumed.
Ultimately, Mr. Zuniga and I ended on good terms. I wrote him a reflective letter on how I was thankful for having been in his class, and the invaluable lessons I learned through failing. Which, looking back, was quite mature for my 14-year-old self. My attempt at turning the other cheek.
Thus began my mental block with math. I would go on to take courses up through Pre-Calculus in high school and do fine, but things were never the same. I loathed mathematics, and I would never be good at it.
The Christmas Piano Recital is an event my students and their parents look forward to all year. It is also one of my highlights. I get especially excited for my four and five-year-old students to play a song by memory in front of an audience for the very first time. It is not an easy feat.
My students and I were all smiles at the end of our 2016 Christmas Piano Recital.
The fall semester of 2016 was going along like most, except that I now had three young children under the age of 5. Between keeping up with all of them, my husband, and our home; teaching piano sometimes felt overwhelming. Still, I powered through because I love my students and appreciate the extra income.
For the big show, we found a venue that already had a baby grand, and I jumped at the chance to book it! Most years we find a recital hall and rent the instrument separately. This was more cost efficient for our families and easier for us, too.
The afternoon of the performance arrived and everyone was looking and playing their best. And then it happened. One of my precious, most hardworking little girls choked at the piano. I watched her from a small distance as she began to cry. I went to sit next to her on the bench, solely for comfort, and placed my hand gently on her back. Choking back tears, she finished her songs and finished them well. But she was crushed, and my heart hurt for her.
The four students that followed also had trouble playing, even towards the beginning of their songs, with difficulty finding their hand positions—concepts we had covered time and time again—something they had never struggled with at recitals before. I kept my composure on the outside, but on the inside, my heart raced. 5 of my 15 students had made major mistakes, and I was baffled as to why.
During these annual presentations, I often feel like a chicken with its head cut off. I try my best to be a gracious hostess, doting piano teacher and mother (because I also teach my own children), and master of ceremonies. It was not until the end of our time together that I realized there were stickers on keys C, D, E, F, and G on the baby grand, exactly one octave lower than where Middle C is located. I keep one sticker to mark Middle C on my piano for the younger children. For all you non-musicians reading this, some of the students placed their hands where the stickers were on the instrument the day of the performance, instead of where they belonged. Confusion ensued, and thus, the results.
I felt like a complete failure. Nothing anyone said (or didn’t say) consoled me. As an educator of many years, I have always felt that my students’ success was my success, and their failure, my failure. I had overcommitted myself once again, and it was painfully apparent (to me).
As an ambitious firstborn, I did not like the idea of doing anything I wasn’t good at for a prolonged amount of time. As I have grown older, and hopefully wiser, I realize that failure is a necessary part of life and an excellent teacher.
My mathematical mental block lasted for many years. It remained so until the second semester of my senior year of college when I took Teaching Mathematics for Elementary School Students.“How hard can it be?” I thought. While it was certainly not Rocket Science, it was also not as easy as I anticipated. I found myself attending every tutoring session offered, constantly practicing and reviewing my notes. I would pass the class with a hard-earned high C.
Numbers and I are friends now. Thanks to my husband’s influence, I enjoy creating a budget and sticking to it. I have been contacted twice in the last couple of years to write for financial institutions (read those entries here and here) as a result of crunching figures.
I often see myself in my students, too. I remember the little girl and adolescent that feared failure, and did her best to avoid it. Recognizing it is inevitable has helped me fail forward—the idea that our perception and response to failure is key to success (a concept made popular by John C. Maxwell).
Remembering the little feet and eyes that follow closely behind has also inspired me to shift my perspective. Here’s to fully embracing future inadequacies, learning from them and moving forward.
It was the 2006-2007 school year that I taught one of my greatest literary lessons. As a 5th grade teacher, I had the task of picking out class sets of books for the children to read. When I taught in Iowa, there was much freedom in planning and helping my students make text-to-self and text-to-world connections. Some of my favorite memories include reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Bridge to Terabithia and taking my pupils on field trips to watch the movies in the theaters.
In our library that year, I stumbled across a modified version of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. It contained photos and plenty of excerpts and passages from her book. In my years of being in the classroom, I often saw that my scholars struggled with reading nonfiction. They were certainly capable; they were simply not interested. Thus, I set out to inspire them with this real story I knew most had heard about.
2 June 2017
My husband and I stood in line for an hour. We made friends with the people standing beside us; two young Latinos on a European adventure in front of us, and a Chinese-American family behind us. From the outside, the Anne Frank House and Museum stands five stories high and looks like a typical flat. I chatter away and glance at it on occasion, unsure of how I will react once inside.
We pay the fee at the entrance and immediately see the sign: No photography or video recordings of any kind. I quickly stuff my Nikon in my backpack and proceed.
I refer to the two years I taught at McKinley Elementary in Des Moines as the “honeymoon period” in my educational career. This next story is the icing on that cake. The 5th graders thoroughly enjoyed reading The Diary of a Young Girl, and participated in great class discussions and activities. Thanks to visiting a local Holocaust Remembrance event held at one of the synagogues, we dug even deeper into the issues of social injustice.
As I was researching on the internet one evening, I came across a newspaper article that mentioned a former World War II soldier that served in the Liberation Army would be in town. He was going to pick one school within the Des Moines Public School System to share his story. Interested parties need only apply. I quickly got to work and presented our case. This would be the capstone on our most recent literary lesson; history would come to life before our very eyes!
The whole day my husband and I spent in Amsterdam, the line for the Anne Frank museum extended outside, wrapped around the building and continued for a few more blocks. Once inside, it was completely quiet, save for the audio tour we listened to on headphones. We walked through slowly, taking every part in. Black and white familiar photos and quotes lined the walls. In each room, there was a video recording of those who knew Annelies best. Close friends, neighbors and a video recording of her father, Otto Frank, the only familial survivor of the Holocaust, at the very end.
About 3/4 of the way through the tour, the audio recording turned off completely, because we would walk behind the bookshelf to what was the Frank family’s (along with two other families) hiding place for two years. Up until that point, I had a mix of emotions: wonder, awe, heaviness, acute awareness. As soon as I took the steps up to the hiding place, everything in me went silent. The dark rooms with the wooden floors and scantily decorated walls proved too much to bear. My vision blurred as I began brushing tears off my cheeks. They would not stop falling…
The children were fully attentive while the WWII soldier that helped liberate a couple of the concentration camps told his story. “I’ll never forget that smell. It was the smell of burned flesh because so many people had been killed,” he shared through tearstained eyes. “It was pure evil, and I will never forget what I saw,” he said.
My pupils listened, eyes wide with understanding. They knew the evils he spoke of. They had read about them and seen photos. One by one, we shook hands with the hero, and thanked him for his service, and for coming to share his story with us. As he, his wife and son left our room, his wife leaned over and whispered, “We picked your class because we knew it would mean the most to you all.” It was a literary lesson none of us would ever forget.
As we made our way through the secret annex, I envisioned my three children living there, being forced to be quiet, and not allowed to go outside or use running water during the day, for fear of being caught. I thought of my husband, and what would have become of him, had he tried everything in his power to protect us and not been able to. My heart literally ached at the end of the story I already knew.
To conclude our journey, we sat in a room where Anne’s surviving friends, and current authors, diplomats and celebrities, thanked her in recorded messages. Hers was not ultimately a story of despair, but of triumph and hope. You left feeling, much like after you’ve read her book, like you knew her, like she was your friend, or daughter, or sister.
While my family and I vacationed overseas, there was another act of terror committed in London, the city we had just frequented one week prior. Loved ones messaged us (we were in Germany at the time) to make sure we were safe. We did not envision taking our children on an overseas trip at such young ages, but when the opportunity presented itself, we could not turn it down.
We had good, hard discussions with them about how the world contains much beauty and is meant to be explored. We were also honest about how there are people who do evil, and might want to hurt us because of the country we live in, our faith, or any other reason they might find. We want them, like us, to be cautious and aware at all times, but unafraid.
I am incredibly thankful for the opportunity we had to visit Anne Frank’s house. I am still processing and wrapping my mind around all that it means for me personally. Presently, I am greatly inspired and will continue to write, teach and travel when I can. And I think of Anne. She gave me the best text-to-self and text-to-world connections I could ever hope to have.
Last month, I celebrated one year of working with VIPKID! 13 months in, I still feel like I landed my dream job! Below, you will find a quick explanation of what our company is, a series of highlights from my job, and why you, too, should join VIPKID.
VIPKID is a Chinese company that hires teachers to teach ESL to students. Though it originally started in China, we employ teachers all over the world (more than 40,000 presently!). We also have young participants from other countries. Most of us work part-time, earning anywhere between $14-$22 an hour with added incentives (for showing up on time and ending class on time, etc).
Our community and leaders are constantly working to improve the experience on both ends, for the educators and the educated. Occasionally we are sent updates that include new ways to work for the company. I seized one months into being employed, and my husband and I went on to make a series of educational videos for VIPKID. I enjoy teaching, my husband likes filming, and we were paid to boot!
The bonds I have formed with my students and their parents is a pleasant surprise. I was not sure how that was going to work with the distance. As it turns out, certain themes, like love, are universal. Bonuses have included: international friendships for my children, my multitalented students making great connections, and the use of fun props (see photos).
If you are interested in applying for VIPKID, please click here (requirements are a 4-year degree in any field and teaching experience). I have successfully referred 7 other teachers and would love to add you to the list! Come help us, “change lives without uprooting your own.”
