learning my lessons

As of now, I have fourteen clients. That’s twenty-six students. In a good week, I teach approximately twenty hours. Of those twenty hours, there are two I absolutely dread.

The first is two eight year old boys. They want to play the English game, then they don’t. They want to learn new vocabulary, then they don’t. They get out all the English books, but they don’t want to read them. Pokemon cards beckon from a nearby chair, and no amount of really cool English can compare. An hour seems like three days.

The second is a scientist who loves to construct run on sentences involving chemical reactions. He has the crazy notion that I can help him write a patent application, despite the fact that I told him several times how important it is to get a patent lawyer to do it. If I have to read another sentence involving “thermodynamic fluid irraditing microwaves by magnetic field energy, mixed content metals put in Argon gas, temperature getting bigger and energy getting bigger, cooling water by water cooling from the outside” I am going to scream.

My housemate was right: for all the trouble teaching English is, I need to charge more.