How Shae Helps Support Our Travel By Teaching With VIPKid

“You’d be great at this – you should try it.”

That’s what my friend Guillian from Enterprise, Alabama said in September. At the beginning of October I started working for VIPKid. VIPKid is an online platform that links Chinese children with English-speaking teachers. Lessons are 25 minutes each and one-on-one with the teacher and student. The pay varies from teacher to teacher based on degrees and experience, as well as other incentives.

Personally, I make $7.50 per class as my base pay, so that’s $18 per hour pre-tax. You can earn more (I was quoted $19.00 per hour when I was hired), but that’s if you meet the incentives such as teaching 45 classes in a month. I’ve chosen to work up to that level of teaching rather than opening that many sections at first and getting burnt out. You can also earn more by opening short-notice classes which can be booked up to 1 hour before it starts. For the amount of effort you have to put in compared to other online teaching, this is just fine with me.

Teaching with VIPKid, you’re expected to have a quiet space to work, a kid-friendly background, headset and good internet. I think I’d probably be a little happier if I had the cute “classrooms” that many other VIPKid teachers have in their offices or basements. But, I don’t – I travel full-time, so I have my little box of items that moves easily with me from my room to the hotel lobby and back.

Since I’m trying to build my brand as “The Traveling Teach”, I chose a fun travel cloth as my backdrop and use blu-tac to hold it up.

You have to use small rewards when you work with VIPKid. They have built-in stars, but you also need secondary rewards. I use frogs for my younger students and a choice of questions and activities for my older students.

The Good

Here’s what I love about teaching with VIPKid:

• The curriculum is pre-prepared. All you do is review it before your lesson to make sure you’re ready to teach it effectively.
• The classes are 1:1 and short, only 25 minutes each.
• You choose how many classes you teach, although there are incentives for teaching more each month.
• I can do it from anywhere. In my case, it’s usually a quiet hotel lobby or meeting room.
• Most of the kids are really fun to work with. There are some outliers as with all classrooms, but it’s pretty rare.
• There are a lot of financial incentives to teach more, teach better, train others and refer others.
• There’s a lot of additional support and training available through the website after you’re approved to teach.

The Bad

Here’s what I don’t love about teaching with VIPKid, although these aren’t enough to stop me:

• You don’t pick the ages of the kids. You just get certified for levels of English ability. Level 4 and 5 are typically older students, but occasionally they’re as young as 7 or 8. My sweet spot is middle school, so I prefer the older learners and as such I’ve created my VIPKid video to appeal more to older students.
• You teach really early or really late at night if you live in the US. The more westerly we move, the earlier I’m having to teach, with one class starting at 4:00am because I forgot about the time change when I opened the extra slots.

The Ugly

Here’s what almost stopped me from working with VIPKid.

The interview process is a bear. You’ll probably have to repeat your mock interview a few times. No shame in your game, I’ve been a teacher and youth worker for 15 years and still had to repeat one of my interviews. I almost quit after the first interview, but Guillian encouraged me and I made it. When you refer others, you support them. If you decide to teach with VIPKid from my referral, just reach out and I’ll help you through the process!

Questions

Do you have any questions about VIPKid? Let me know in the comments below or reach out via our contact form.