A former work colleague, whose native language was not English, was telling me once about her frustration with a family member and how she was dealing with something, and Colleague said to her family member ‘are you stupid???’.
I do love non-native English.
Hi, PalFishers.
How you doing? Y’ok?
So teacher pay was cut on PalFish by let’s-call-it 40% (there’s a lot of variation in this because of tiers etc). Before we get to the other hoo-ha, let’s pause here for a moment.
Parent class fees went up and teacher pay rates went down because (something like) private investors bailed because they were told they couldn’t operate for profit. Or something. Whatever. The point is, money from outside the company that allowed it to operate as it was, with the staffing levels it had, charging parents what it did and paying teachers what it did — disappeared more or less overnight. And in order to attempt to keep operating, the company got rid of a lot of staff, at least doubled the workload of the (presumably cheaper) replacements for that staff, and committed apparent suicide by charging customers more for the same product while paying contractors less to deliver that product.
And your takeaway from this is … greed?
If they have to charge customers more for the same product *while cutting their costs by 50 percent* — baby, someone else was paying the shortfall before, and they stopped.
Why was someone else paying for millions (billions?) of hours of hundreds of thousands of adults of different ages and physiognomies and millions of children as they age over months and years on video talking in English in a vast array of accents and skill levels, expressing a vast array of emotions and varying levels of self control, in various states of exhaustion or energy, in situations ranging from calmly sitting at a desk to riding on a motorcycle, demonstrating different vocabulary using TPR and being super expressive to make meaning as clear as possible?
Think about how facebook and google etc. make money off your data—the whole ‘if you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product’ thing. The ostensible customers of online English classes taught by native English speakers to Chinese children (the parents) were not actually covering the cost of the English teaching. The Chinese children’s online English teaching market paid double what online English teaching was paying in other places, even wealthy places. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the English classes were a loss-leader for a different product. At least one of those products is a massive amount of data for machine learning—and not random, anonymous data, either — data linked to specific, known individuals with attached PII.
Emotion AI in face detection measures the facial expressions using any optical sensor like a standard web/ smartphone camera, detecting a human face in real-time, in a pre-recorded video or images. Computer vision algorithms identify the main points of an individual’s face: eyes, the tip of the nose, eyebrows, corners of the mouth, etc., and track their movement to decode emotions. By comparing this gathered data to a vast library of template images, facial expression detection software can determine the person’s feelings based on the combination of facial expressions. Advanced emotion AI solutions like those provided by Affectiva or Kairos can measure the following emotion metrics: joy, sadness, anger, contempt, disgust, fear, and surprise. Additional software features may include facial identification and verification, age and gender detection, ethnicity and multi-face detection, and much more.
Anyway, all that’s old news, and yeah, we’re now surplus to requirements. And the memory of all the ‘If the US doesn’t value its teachers enough to pay them fairly, China will’ news articles and facebook posts etc., all the Cindy Mi ‘invest in Chinese online education companies because it’s an infinite market with 16 million or whatever new customers/products born every year’ is blending in my (mental) ears with ‘this is below minimum wage!!!’ and similar outrage and the subsequent confused silence at everyone being summarily ‘fired’.
Funnily enough, I actually think it’s a good call, the pulling the plug on all this. Kids and families were being over-stretched in many ways. I do hope that overall this is better for the people of China seen in the aggregate.
I hope.
But what I *think* is that the CCP is teetering on the brink of losing the mandate of heaven.
More changes at PalFish, Inc. I’m not going to get this right, because there has been no announcement on the platform, but someone shared screenshots from fb in an admin group—they’re now opening up hiring to people with more passports (any passport?) and the pay range has shifted from 5 tiers with a low of ¥50 per class (¥55 with on-time bonus) and a high of ¥70 per class (¥75 with on-time bonus) to range of ¥40-55. At this time, current teachers’ pay will not be affected, but hahahahahahahahahaha.
So I’m obviously ignorant and know nothing about anything, but this seems to be in line with my theory that these platforms were subsidised by the Chinese government for some time and no longer are, and they’ve hit the wall of reality and need to make the columns in the account books come out right. They’ve advertised for bilingual speakers (Spanish-English and Indonesian-English? I think?) for their reading app, so they’re obviously expanding into those markets, but nothing in the online English teaching world ever paid anything like what the Chinese kid-ESL companies did, and if that’s going away (or reverting to comparable levels of pay to the rest of the world pre-VIPKid), belts are going to be worn tighter this winter for a lot of North American, British, Irish, and antipodean (etc.) families. Except summer for those down under. But anyway.
I’ve been lying low and keeping my head down for a year because there is very little one can say that isn’t contentious at best and dangerous at worst. I’m a coward.
PalFish pootled along very nicely for a long time. I still love it ferociously, and whenever something about VIPKid grabs my attention, I once again have a moment of awe at how much better I like PalFish and how much less stressed I am, etc. So much less friction and stress. I know it’s different for everyone, but that just makes me extra grateful that I found a good fit for me.
I was hitting Level 4 and getting heartbreakingly close to Level 5 sometimes in summer 2020, but I don’t teach as much during the winter, and the times, they are a-changing in the online-ESL-Chinese-kid sphere, it seems.
The writing seemed to be slowly appearing on the wall by maybe this time last year that relying on this sort of gig was not a good plan (it’s never a good plan, obv, but the ice was getting thinner), but I was late to the Outschool bandwagon and slow once I got on it. Teaching online is still something that works well for me, and my longer-term plans are moving more slowly than anticipated for reasons of the world as we knew it ending.
Scuttlebutt has it that learning English online from foreign teachers is perhaps less desirable than previously in China, from a government perspective. PalFish appears to be undergoing some seismic shifts—at least two long-time, experienced admins left the company at very nearly the same time, and only one of them was replaced, leaving a new admin doing the job of two previous ones. Obv I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes, so maybe the new person’s duties are different such that responsibilities have been shifted and she doesn’t have twice the workload in reality.
Lots of teachers are reporting a massive reduction in bookings—experienced teachers with many years and thousands of hours at PalFish and perfect ratings—talking about being at 50% of their normal bookings levels, for example. I’ve lost a small number of regulars, some of whom seem to have run out their contract, others just normal drift. More of an issue for me is regulars cancelling fixed classes left, right, and centre. Some within the 3-hour window (where I get points and a courtesy compensation of ¥25), but mostly not. Just a few months ago, I had people jumping into fixed slots where the regular had cancelled—not trials, just people trying to get on my schedule. Nothing like that now. The regulars are still regulars, and I see them on other days, and the classes stay fixed, and they’re not always cancelling the same time slot—it’s all musical chairs, but it all adds up to me being at about 60% of my winter schedule capacity, 50% of what I’ve got open, and 40% of my full summer capacity from last year. Not comfortable.
It seems to have started at the May Labour Day holiday. They had a longer holiday for it, loads of people took advantage of it to travel or whatever, and there were cancellations as expected, and then it just never went back to normal after that.
And to tread on slightly more dangerous ground? So, so many kids have cold or allergy symptoms, fevers, have made trips to the hospital and/or have had IVs (or a sibling has) and sometimes a sudden reappearance of masks in class (online class, while in one’s own bedroom, to be clear), and now I’m hearing that they’re doing mass PCR testing again (of young kids, to be clear).
Also, the anti-Japanese feeling amongst the students was slightly terrifying for a while, but that seems less of a focus now.
Anyway, interesting times.
The water’s getting warm, so you might as well swim.
These appear in your profile and students can search by them. You choose them in the ‘Me’ tab of the app, in the ‘Profile’ section, scroll way down to the bottom to see the ‘Tags’ section. You can choose from 29 tags, and ‘Native Speaker’ will be added for you automatically if you qualify for that in terms of passport or something. They’re most helpful for original-flavour teachers, not OKC teachers. (although obviously many people do both.) Freetalk students looking for someone they can talk about sports with, or movies, or do exam prep, or whatever, can use these tags to filter teachers they might want to follow or call or buy a freetalk/lesson package from.
Welcome, friend! I’m assuming you mean Official Kids’ Course appointments—apologies if not.
As near as I can tell (with no information about you, specifically), you’re not getting any OKC appointments for any one or more of the following reasons:
1. You didn’t particularly impress anyone during your mock class/interview.
Your performance was good enough to get hired, but not good enough to make someone think “I’m going to make an effort to bring this teacher to the attention of students because they will instil confidence in the PalFish brand and make parents want to buy a package”.
Is it possible that you’re not very kid-friendly? One of the criticisms of online English teaching to kids is that it’s edutainment and we have to act like circus performers. I get where that criticism is coming from, but it’s not the case for me.
As with teaching anyone one-to-one, making a connection is crucial. You don’t have to make a connection with every kid you have a class with, but if you’re not making a connection with any of them? That’s a problem.
You’re not just presenting, and you’re not just performing, you’re establishing a relationship and helping and encouraging someone young to learn something difficult over a long time using the framework provided. On an electronic rectangle.
Some teachers seem to think that they’re doing the parents and/or kids a favour and they should be treated with respect/reverence as authority figures. I’m not sure how they explain what their misunderstood genius ass is doing on PalFish, in that case, but whatever.
Teaching an adult one-to-one, the adult will assess your competence and the value they can get from lessons with you, and they might not need to like you or feel a connection in order to want to book classes with you. With a kid—especially the young ones—they need to feel a connection, they need to like you, and they need to feel (not just be told) that you like them. Or at the very least, they need to find you entertaining enough to want to show up to English class.*
(and you still need to be competent and impress the parents sufficiently.)
2. You screwed up—maybe more than once.
Someone in my admin group was moaning about how bad PalFish was to work with, and the admin apologetically but clearly explained that this person had left their first trial class early and subsequently no-showed seven appointments and was removed from the kids’ course. If this is you, you can stop reading here.
3. Your profile is in some way not appealing enough to cause people to want to book you.
This could be that you look unprofessional, or you have spelling or grammatical errors, or that there’s not enough information about you to make someone take a chance on you in particular instead of another teacher.
I see a lot of teacher profiles that don’t convey anything more than a) I’m available to teach you/your kid, b) I speak English, and c) I’m fun/friendly/awesome.
This is like old-style personal ads that say things like ‘I like having fun with my friends, walking on the beach, having a glass of (beverage) in front of the fire…’. Right. Clearly distinguishes you from every other featherless biped on the planet.
Posting loads of worksheets or educational stuff in your moments doesn’t tell us anything about you, either, other than maybe you don’t think the OKC curriculum is adequate? (Or that you are unfamiliar with it?) If you want someone to pick you out of a sea of options, they need to know what ‘you’ is.
And it needs to be appealing, so maybe consider doing some research into what appeals to Chinese students and parents by looking at the profiles and behaviour of successful teachers on the platform, either in the teacher app or in the student app (the normal one, not the kids’ one).
Also, sweet mother of pearl, stop advertising that you have zero bookings. How in the name of all that is holy is a solid wall of ‘no one has booked any classes with me’ going to make people want to invest time and money in a class with you?
4. COVID-19 related massive influx of new teachers on the platform
Ok, I’m burying the lede, here, but it’s way down here in the list because I’ve seen a lot of new teachers in the past few days/weeks onboard and take off like rockets immediately. You can’t blame ‘too many teachers’. And it is certainly not the case that there are more teachers than students, as one new teacher was bizarrely spouting recently. You’re not getting any bookings or pop-ups? No, it’s not slow, it’s you.
There are always new teachers, and PalFish are always recruiting, but the closing of schools and teaching centres in east and southeast Asia has forced a lot of native-speaking digital nomad bricks-and-mortar EFL teachers to scramble for a way to get some income all at once (relatively speaking).
PalFish is used to onboarding new teachers all the time, but there’s a spike in numbers now, and the sales team have however many trials they have to distribute amongst manymany more new teachers than normal. Their income depends on selling packages. It’s normal practice to give priority for trial bookings to new teachers for the first few days/weeks, but if trials are scarce and I have to choose between a new teacher who is highly recommended by their interviewer and one who’s meh? Sorry.
You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Add to that the fact that many people apply to PalFish without doing a lot of research, and perhaps get caught out by having their schedule opened automatically at the moment they’re hired, which may be while they’re sleeping, and they wake up one morning to notifications that they are now official kids’ course teachers AND they’ve been fined for no-showing a handful of classes, and some people start off their PalFish career in a pissed-off, confused, resentful hole. It’s possible to recover from that, but you’d better be very good, very amiable, and very motivated.
Yeah but now what
So, here we are, and none of this solves the problem of how to stop getting no appointments.
Fish or cut bait?
If you want to fish, you need to work hard and aggressively: educate yourself, explore the platform, find and join groups, read the FAQ and the handbook a few times, find and do some training (there are good training lives for new teachers—ask in your mentor group about this), read, watch lives, start marketing yourself and maybe doing freetalk to get some reviews on your profile. What would you do if you had a business in your hometown but you weren’t getting any customers? Think in those terms.
But maybe cut bait. This is a hard time to start with PalFish if you’re not someone who took off within the first few days. If you’ve got other options, maybe pause PalFish for now—message your admin to say you’ll be taking some time away from teaching for a while, but that you’d like to come back. If you screwed something up, this would be a good time to acknowledge that and apologise. When you come back, things may have gone back to normal, and you might have a better chance for a fresh start.
*This is not strictly true. One of my regulars hates class with me. Hates it. “Hi, StudentName! I’m happy to see you today!” “I’m not. I’m sad to see you.” True story. I love her to bits, and she tolerates me fairly well at this point, but part of my job is getting the kid to tolerate English classes. And then maybe to like them.
My admin was recently asking her teachers if we could think of anything the app could do to support teachers in supporting kids during the quarantine. Apparently some kids are climbing the walls with boredom (understandably) and it’s hard for some of them to stay on track during classes. Some teachers were asking for more AR stickers. I haven’t had any issues with kids going off the rails (or possibly I’m always happy to go off the rails with them, so I haven’t noticed it), but the question about feature requests stayed simmering for a while, and a few things eventually floated to the top of my mind.
1. The whiteboard
I’d like the whiteboard to be the last slide in the actual deck. Currently, you can access the whiteboard from anywhere in the lesson by pulling up the gallery, from where you can select any slide in the deck, the whiteboard, or photos on your device. This is a great system (other than when it causes the app to freeze, and I have to quit the app and restart it and re-enter the classroom, which it was doing a lot for a while—for other teachers as well). However, it takes a lot of time to load the gallery, and when there are issues that cause me to avoid going into the gallery out of fear of freezing, I just don’t use the feature. If the whiteboard was an actual slide in the deck, you could scroll to it in addition to navigating to it through the gallery. In addition, if it was the last slide, it would make it easy to jump to it from the goodbye slide with a simple page-turn at a time when you might most need it—when you find you have a little extra time at the end of class.
2. Technical stats
I’m not positive about this one, but if it’s possible, I’d like to have our connectivity stats available to view in class (ping, at least). It would be an excellent barometer to get a sense of what’s behind any issues we’re experiencing in class. I wouldn’t mind something letting me know how much CPU the app is using, either, and some way to clear app cache—anything to help teachers who are willing to educate themselves about the technical side of things so we can take some action to ameliorate issues would be nice. Also, there’s an option when clicking the student’s photo that says something like “allow student to re-enter the classroom” or something—I’m guessing that’s something akin to VIPKid’s switching lines, and it would be good to have a little more information about that and what it does and when to use it, etc. (maybe this exists in the app faqs or other training/documentation and I just haven’t seen it yet).
3. Social stuff
This one’s a bit convoluted.
When I first started on the app, I was an original-flavour teacher (I hadn’t applied to be an OKC teacher yet). When I went into moments, I’d see student moments and I could interact with students easily. These were all adults (or at least not little kids—maybe some were high school students, idk). It was similar to HelloTalk, but one-way (instead of language exchange)—mostly Chinese people wanting to practice and learn English (and other learners as well as fluent English-speaking Chinese people and foreigners interacting with them). English-learning Chinese speakers would often post moments in English, and—coming as I just had from HelloTalk—I would like and comment and reply and chat with people in English, just in a social and interested and friendly way. (Cute cat! Yummy food! Sorry you had a bad day :(. No, it doesn’t make your bum look big. Etc.)
Sometimes people would post questions about grammar or vocabulary, and people would answer—both native Chinese speakers and native English speakers. The difference was that most of the native English speakers replied with sales-pitchy, pushy “come take a class with me and I can tell you about it!” type comments. Which skeeved me out so much I went and asked on HelloTalk about how people felt about PalFish. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with people understanding that the English speakers were, yes, trying to sell classes/free talk sessions, and it wasn’t as friendly and collaborative an atmosphere as HelloTalk, but still (in at least some cases) their top choice for English study apps.
But the pushy desperate (incompetent) used-car-salesman vibe made me stop using PalFish because it was so desperately gross and unpleasant and off-putting, like getting off a ferry in Greece and being swarmed by touts urgently trying to take you and your luggage to their taxi/hotel/restaurant/tour. The one that pushed me over the edge was someone asking something like “can someone tell me how to pronounce ‘of’ and ‘the’ in a sentence?” and ‘teachers’ chiming in with helpful shit like an audio of the standalone pronunciations of the words, not understanding the fact that sometimes we say these words differently depending on the words around them. The students often know more about English than the “teachers” (which is reflected in some of the reviews of the student app on the app store). And then there were the inevitable replies of “Of course! Come pay me and I’ll answer your question!”
When I applied to be an Official Kids’ Course teacher six months later, I don’t think I spent much time looking at moments, and I was only active for about a month before dropping it again. But when I came back full time ten months after that, I spent some time looking at and for moments, and I couldn’t see any student moments anymore. Just the moments of other OKC teachers. And the only responses I was getting to my moments were from other OKC teachers. Which seemed a bit of a circle jerk.
I have no idea if non-kids-app students can see the moments of OKC teachers. Some (many?) OKC teachers also do free talk and offer lessons for adults. I’ve heard from at least one non-OKC teacher that he also was no longer getting student moments in his feed (like new ones, in the “recommended” feed, not the “following” one). So something definitely changed, and it isn’t just affecting OKC teachers.
I wish there was some way for teachers to see the profiles and/or moments of non-kids-app students, but I guess that might make the app unpleasant for the students because they’d get spammed all the time by (incompetent) sales-pitchy teachers? Almost all the OKC teacher moments I see in my feed (which I often avoid) are teachers posting books and talking about having classes available and exhorting people to book with them or posting some educational stuff or worksheets or whatever. It’s very little interesting stuff like you’d post to instagram or facebook. And that’s actually what PalFish was aiming to be—like instagram or facebook but with the focal point being English learners doing social media in English in a supportive environment—helping Chinese speakers learn English in a social media framework or context. I remember seeing something about “come be a social media star on PalFish and get lots of students!”
I don’t post moments much anymore, because most of my followers are teachers, and what is even the point? If there was any evidence that students on the original or the kids’ app who were not already following me could see my posts and interact with them, I’d post in spite of having mostly teachers as followers, because there would be some chance that learners might comment and I’d have a chance to connect with learners in English, which I enjoy and which enriches us both (as well as enriching other people who might be reading but not participating in the conversation). But that doesn’t seem to be happening anymore.
Maybe it would be possible to have some more advanced options on the social media side of things, where (for example) all users could choose whom to share moments with? Like maybe teachers could choose to share moments with a) students only, b) teachers only, c) all users. And original-flavour student app users could choose to share moments with a) other registered users of the original-flavour student app, b) users of the teacher app, c) both—and maybe also they could control who gets to comment on their moments? And maybe teachers could filter moments in their feed so that we can choose to only look at student moments or only teacher moments or all?
4. Text correction
Another HelloTalk comparison. One of the things I loved about HelloTalk was the ability to edit someone’s text to make corrections. This is an awesome feature, and it was really rich in options. It essentially copied the text as it was written, and when you corrected it, it was like the Track Changes feature in Microsoft Word, with the original version and the corrected version included in the reply:
This would be awesome to have on PalFish. My experience with Chinese friends, students, and their families has been that they want errors corrected. If we had an easy way to correct errors while chatting casually, it would be so awesome.
I confess, I wish HelloTalk would marry PalFish and I could have the best of both of them.
PalFish is different from other Chinese online English teaching platforms like VIPKid or MagicEars. Think of it more like facebook for learning and teaching English. Teachers and students of all kinds mingle on this social media platform. All users (students and teachers and some staff members) can follow any other user (student or teacher or staff member), post moments, look at other users’ moments, like and comment on moments. Everyone can create and consume content (for fee or free). People can charge for content or pay for content. People can charge for classes and pay for classes. Students and teachers can do their own thing a-la-carte or interact through a formal curriculum provided by the company.
So it’s complicated.
If you’ve come from something like VIPKid, there’s a lot to wrap your head around.
If this is your first foray into online teaching, you’re in for a really, really rough ride.
Teachers (native speakers or not, from anywhere in the world) can create a profile, post content in the form of “moments” that contain text, images, audio, and video, create lesson packages on any subject they want, aimed at any level or type of student, or just offer free talk/conversation practice either casually (by opening the app and clicking the “start tutoring” button on your home screen and waiting for a call) or by opening your schedule and offering free talk or more structured lesson packages. Teachers set their own free talk and lesson package rates. PalFish takes 20% of your earnings when you do this. They archive all conversations, and these are available for playback by the student and the teacher. You can take calls audio-only or audio+video. Only the audio is available for playback, even if the lesson was a video call.
You can also offer “seminars”—classes for 2-6 students to share. This can make classes more affordable for students as well as offering more opportunities for conversation and improvement.
You can also create “lives”—which are like a streamed video that all platform users (teachers, students, and staff) can enrol in. You can set many options for lives: You choose how long they are, what the subject is, you can make them free or set an admission fee, you can make them a one-time thing or allow them to be replayed in perpetuity (which, if you charge for it, that means that any time anyone in the future watches it, they pay, whenever that is), you can allow anyone to comment or ask questions (by typing—the audio and video are one-way—they can see and hear you, but you can’t see or hear them) or you can make it so people have to pay to ask a question. If you charge for a live, PalFish takes 20% of your earnings. Attendees can also send you money during the live. PalFish does not take a cut of your gift money, you keep it all.
There are probably tens of thousands of this sort of PalFish teacher. It’s important to understand that this sort of teacher can be anywhere in the world, and can be any nationality or level of English or dialect of English or type of English training or whatever. It’s not limited to western European/northern-north-American/antipodean native accents. So there are a lot of Chinese people teaching English on PalFish. There are a lot of Filipino people teaching English on PalFish. There are people teaching English from regions where the cost of living is much, much lower than in the US or Canada or Ireland or Australia or NZ or the UK.
I’m mentioning this because I see a lot of teachers complaining bitterly about other teachers setting their free talk rates extremely low, as if they’re playing dirty by undercutting their competition and creating an unfair environment for other teachers to try to earn money in, in addition to some concern-trolling about why someone would set their rates to less than the cost of a can of coke per hour. So a) welcome to the invisible hand of the free market, capitalist! and b) this is a global platform (free trade in action!), and people from different regions with radically different costs of living may price their services very differently while each charging what is locally reasonable to them. Also c) when any money is better than zero money and you’re in a precarious situation, yes, YES, you will charge whatever will guarantee that you will be earning something rather than nothing at any given moment. The world does not end at your living-room walls, lady/dude.
In addition, the vast majority of students on the app are Chinese, and the cost of living in China is much much lower than in most places in the US, Canada, Éire, Aus, NZ, the UK… Meaning that it’s not even a little surprising that someone studying English would be hesitant to pay the equivalent of a buffet lunch for 5 people for an hour of conversation practice with an unknown foreigner, even though that hour of “work” on the part of the foreigner might only net them enough for a single meal at McDonalds, depending on where they live.
And if you’re a native-English-speaking teacher with limited or no knowledge of Chinese, you’ll only appeal to a student who is comfortable speaking to a native speaker with no Chinese. That’s a subset of the overall user base. Personally, I’d rather learn a language from someone I was comfortable I could communicate with in my native language, at least until I was fairly fluent in my target language. I don’t think I’m alone in this. If you don’t speak Chinese and you’re you’re trying to make a US/Canada/western Europe/Aus/NZ living as a (non-formal-curriculum) freelance teacher on PalFish (with freetalk, conversation practice, or your own lesson packages), you might struggle unless you’ve got a lot going for you in terms of qualifications, experience/offerings, and marketing ability.
Level 2: Official Kids’ Course
Here is where it gets simpler and weirder. PalFish Official Kids’ Course (OKC) looks a lot like VIPKid, GoGoKid, MagicEars, 51Talk, DaDa, SayABC, etc. And it is. You have to apply and pass a mock class, you’re teaching a set curriculum to kids between 3 (ish) and 12 (ish). You don’t have to come up with anything on your own, you do have to deliver the content that’s in front of you. This is the official landing page for the PalFish Official Kids’ Course teacher recruitment.
The complexity of the original-flavour PalFish app confuses people coming in as a VIPKid-style OKC teacher. It doesn’t have to. OKC teachers can, if they wish, ignore everything but the OKC stuff. You don’t have to do lives or offer free talk or lesson packages on your own. You don’t have to post moments. You could, in theory, just create your basic profile and open your schedule and take what comes, treating it just like VIPKid.
You might not get any bookings, though, which is no different from the other platforms. People talk in terms of “working for” VIPKid or PalFish, being hired by them, etc., and I’ve seen people get upset and confused (as I did myself, initially, with VIPKid) by a company “hiring” them and then not giving them any work. But teachers don’t “work for” these companies in that way, and we aren’t “hired” by them in that way.
Even at the OKC level, this is a freelance platform for independent teachers to make themselves available for selection by parents (and students). The only difference at the OKC level is that teachers have access to the proprietary formal kids’ curriculum and have passed additional screening and receive extra scrutiny and have different rules.
The sales team members of online teaching platforms are evaluated and paid based on how many packages they sell. They want to sell as many packages as possible. Their success depends on how satisfied parents are with teachers. The sales team has a vested interest in funnelling prospective customers to teachers they think will be a good fit for a family. So part of your success or failure rests on the impression you make on the one person who sees your application mock class, because that person can bring you to the attention of members of the sales team if they think you’re likely to impress parents and clinch sales.
The follow-on from that is your performance in each of the trials you get at the very beginning—you’ll be observed (even in a no-show, while you’re twiddling your thumbs), and if you look appealing, you’ll continue to get trials and students pushed to you. If not, you’ll probably sink from view as far as the sales team goes.
If you haven’t managed to catch fire within the first few weeks—or even if you’ve gone a few (non-holiday, non-crisis) weekdays with zero classes or maybe 1 or 2—your only hope is really to work on self-promotion in any of the many ways described above (and also below).
This is where the contrast between PalFish and VIPKid-style platforms shows most clearly.
When I started with VIPKid, I had zero bookings for 50 days. There was nothing I could do about it. Some people go longer. There is nothing they can do about it. They can submit a ticket and be told to be patient or change their profile or get more certifications or open more slots. That’s it. The teacher profiles are limited and controlled by VIPKid (and have been altered by VIPKid staff without notification on some documented occasions—although probably not for the worse, because the goal for the sales team is sales, after all, and they know their market). Teachers can’t see what their profiles look like on the parent side unless a parent (or staff member) sends them screenshots. There are things like “tags” on the teacher profiles that the teacher doesn’t know about unless they ask. Teachers have no way to market themselves directly to parents.
With PalFish, teachers have loads of ways to market themselves directly to students and parents. We can see our profiles and edit them any time, and we can post moments to them as often as we like. If you’re not getting booked (or not getting booked as much as you’d like), there’s a lot you can do about it.
It’s also super nice to have other options for earning money on the platform and ways to interact with your students/parents outside the classroom but still in the app.
Secret sauce: the reading app
Both original-flavour and OKC teachers can download the PalFish kids reading app, log in as a teacher, and participate by recording books and publishing them to their moments, liking and commenting on other peoples books, and participating in groups or other activities. This gets teachers noticed by students, and allows students and parents to get to know teachers’ personalities and styles before booking a class with them.
For many/most teachers, marketing is an ongoing process, but each person finds their own level. Some people don’t do anything, while others spend time every day in the reading app and posting moments and responding to moments. Some people do lives regularly.
Unless you’re very lucky and very appealing, getting fully booked with PalFish OKC will require some time and effort, at least initially. Some people really dig the control, transparency, and options, but for others the faff is a deal-killer.
Me, I love it. The longer I’m with them, the more I like and respect the company and the staff members. Totally unexpected. Very pleasant. Doesn’t prevent impending burnout from no time off and lack of sleep, but it’s still nice. YMMV. Enter as often as you like, no purchase required. Ask your doctor for details.
I applied for (and was accepted by) TomABC last summer. I was drawn to them because it looked like a facilitated game-type platform (similar to Qkids), requiring less prep than other platforms and no feedback for teachers to write. Plus they don’t require teachers to be located in the US or Canada like Qkids does. Super appealing, even at a lower hourly rate than VIPKid.
They kept sending out emails saying “we’re testing and developing and testing and stuff, we’ll be ready to start teacher training real soon!” and then in December 2019 they sent out a “computer configuration” survey indicating the following requirements:
TomABC’s equipment requirements for teachers, December 2019
So that’s me out, not having a Windows anything.
January and February 2020 updates said they were still testing, which was slowed down by the coronavirus outbreak and its effects. Most recent update is that they’ve had to lower teacher pay from $8 per 25-minute class to $5 per 25-minute class—again, in response to the virus and its effects on Chinese… infrastructure? Society? Life? They said:
Originally our plan was to target children from higher-income households to take our course. However, because of the Coronavirus outbreak in China most schools have been closed and all classes cancelled. Due to the great number of students staying home we decided to instead target our course to children from the majority of households in China, regardless of their income level.
This shift has caused us to optimize our course to be simpler and easier to teach so teachers have fewer requirements during class. The decision by our leadership team to decrease the price of our courses makes them accessible to more students. In return, we have to decrease costs, which will come in the form of a reduction of the standard teacher wage from $8 USD to $5 USD per 25 minutes class.
email from the TomABC teacher team, 2020-02-19
They seem so lovely, and they seemed so disheartened by all this. The email closed with “Please, understand we did the best we can.”
I feel really bad for them. They’ve been working so hard for so long.
They did follow up again with a reminder of their bonuses:
Attendance bonus: Foreign teachers that have 60 or more classes in one month will be awarded an additional $1 for each class in that month. (An extra $2 per hour)
Holiday class bonus: An additional $3 is applied to each class falling on an American or Canadian approved holiday, example: New Year, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Labor Day, etc. (An extra $6 per hour)
Referral rewards: When you successfully refer a new teacher and that teacher attends 40 or more classes, you will be rewarded with $80.
And they’re ready to start training teachers now, because of the decision to simplify their offerings. Which is cool.
If I had a Windows machine, I’d be inclined to give them a shot—not sure what hours they offer, though. I wouldn’t take time away from PalFish during peak times, but if they had BJT morning classes, I might be tempted to try those—I might be able to handle that at the end of my day, whereas anything more involved is a bit more of a challenge. It would pay at least as much as Cambly but (from my perspective, which I know is not common) it would be less draining and stressful.
I love Carli Mitch, and now I love her even more after I watched her video on why not to teach English online. She nails it. She articulates everything so, so much better than I ever could, far better than anything I’ve seen. The point is not “don’t teach English online” or “you shouldn’t teach English online” but “here is the reality of teaching English online that you should know about so you can go into it with your eyes open and protect/prepare yourself”.
I’ve talked before about trying to spread my risk by teaching for more than one company, and it’s just not not worth the hassle for me—but that point is still valid. That’s one reason I like using the PalFish platform—I get all the options of different platforms (combining VIPKid-like teaching with Cambly-type options and italki-type options—plus extras) all under one roof.
At the moment, I’m sorry to say, it’s looking like ‘no’.
I’m puzzled about this.
I’ve been a little under the weather recently and spending semi-brain-dead time on the PalFish app in various groups and noodling around looking at the profiles of some newer teachers.
It’s very normal in any online English teaching gig for new teachers to come onto whatever message groups and howl about not getting bookings. I have no idea what percentage of new teachers get booked quickly versus slowly versus never. Some people do their research and/or have an experienced referrer whom they’re actually in contact with, while others seem to just click on the app and push buttons and don’t seem capable of or inclined to lift much of a finger on their own behalf to explore or think or google shit. I’m not saying it’s as easy as reading the faq, because boy howdy it is not, but most questions can be answered by PUSHING EVERY DAMN BUTTON ON THE APP AND CLICKING EVERY DAMN LINK plus also watching a lot of youtube videos.
(It is super not-straightforward.)
Notwithstanding all that, it feels like there are more new teachers at the moment, particularly given my rank drop given the same amount of booked classes—I went from something around 500th to something around 900th while teaching the same number of classes this month as last month. Some of that is undoubtedly attributable to existing teachers taking on more classes in response to increased demand because of the quarantine, but I think there’s also maybe a higher number of new teachers than normal as a result of expat teachers in Asia needing to find a way to earn money under quarantine.
But I’ve looked at some of the profiles of some newer teachers who are asking about slowness and how to get bookings and all, and some of them are shit-hot—loads of experience and excellent qualifications, profiles look beautiful, they’re posting moments and using the reading app, they have slots open at peak and peak-peak times… and getting maybe a trial? A few trials? And then nothing?
There’s a chance that some of them somehow missed the honeymoon period where new teachers are given priority for trial bookings, but my (comically uninformed and ignorant wild-ass) guess is that the quarantine is also affecting the sales staff and they somehow aren’t able to do things the way they did before COVID-19 came down like the wolf on the fold. New teachers really rely on the sales team to get them set up with at least a skeleton crew of students. If the sales team are not able to do things normally because of teleworking or because of an increased or different workload, new teachers will definitely suffer as a result.
The demand is definitely there, especially during Chinese daytime hours which are normally not in high demand—European and east-cost North Americans tend not to teach those hours, but they’d be very pleasant for expat teachers in Asia. I’ve been getting multiple popups per hour starting around 10am BJT and lasting until peak times every day for at least the past week. But from what I’ve been reading, it looks like the existing supply of new teachers is not quite managing to be matched up with the existing demand for classes.
So I’m sorry, new friends, that PalFish is not currently operating up to its normal standards as far as getting new (qualified, appealing-looking) teachers up and running and booked within a decent amount of time.
Advice?
The usual—
Educate yourself. It’s a pain, I know. But if you’re a locked-in teacher in Asia at the moment, what else are you doing with your time? Noodle through the app. Press things that don’t look like links—not all links look clickable. Go into the Live Hall and skim—enrol for an archived free live that’s got high enrolment numbers and see how it works and try to see what’s appealing about it, what people like. Watch lives that look like the sort of thing you might be interested in doing. Learn from what’s already there. Click on the profiles of teachers you see in lives and in groups. Follow them. Click on the profiles of students you see in lives and follow them. Look at moments. Like and comment on them. Click on the profiles of other commenters in the moments and look at them. Click on the FAQ at the top of the home screen and the “Official Handbook” icon in the middle of it. Click on the Training icon and click everything in it. Read what other people are posting in the groups you’re automatically a member of, and if someone posts an invite to another group that looks useful, join that group and read comments there as well. Go to youtube and search “palfish” and watch anything that looks interesting or useful. I’ll post some new links in the sidebar soon, but I know you can manage fine on your own.
Download the reading app if possible. The apps often disappear from the google play store, but they’re all relatively easy to find on the app store, and there are links to the reading app and the normal (non-OKC) student app at the bottom of my iOS app homescreen, and maybe yours as well. Teachers and mentors have posted vids on youtube to explain how to get the android app when it’s not in the play store and how to use the reading app. There are discussion/help groups on the PalFish teacher app dedicated to the reading app. Poke around and learn about it BEFORE DOWNLOADING IT AND ATTEMPTING TO LOG IN. You log in using the same credentials, but you have to log in as a teacher, and that requires finding the ‘Log in as teacher’ link FIRST. This is the primary way most new teachers find new students. Read and post books, listen to kids reading books, like and comment on their books, follow them, click on their followers and follow other students that you find there and like and comment on their books and moments, too.
Download the normal (non-OKC) student app (orange with white fish, the opposite of the teacher app icon). Log in with the same credentials as the teacher app. Look at your own profile and those of other teachers. See how it works from the (free talk) student side. See how much other teachers are charging, what kinds of packages they offer, how much they charge for those, and how popular they are (how many packages have sold). Learn from this.
Schedule a live, and maybe plan to schedule one or more per week until you’re booked. Read FAQs and watch videos and watch lives and play around with your own test live in your app to figure out what this is all about.
If you’re a dude, consider presenting as a shirt-and-tie-wearing sort of dude rather than an ‘I love to travel, call me maybe’ sort of dude.
Scroll through moments, follow all students you find moments for, comment and like, and look through their followers for yet more students to follow (and comment and like).
TAKE ALL THE POPUPS GOD SENDS YOU. You have to be ready to teach at all times, and staring at your app with it open in the foreground, and you have to be quick to NOT-READ THE DISCLAIMER BLURB but instead very quickly tick the tick-box and hit ‘ACCEPT’ and just take whatever the consequences are—but if you’re desperate, it might be worth doing this. And again—if you’re in Asia, you’re in the right time zone to pick up daytime classes this way without losing sleep. Obviously if you have other commitments, you will actually have to read the disclaimer and think about your schedule, but otherwise, fly like the wind!
One of the things I think is best about PalFish is the access you have to students and the myriad options you have to market yourself to them. There is a lot within your control on PalFish, which is very very different from any of the other platforms I’m familiar with. Yes, it’s a lot of effort to figure it all out. I think it’s worth it. Not everyone does.
I’ve written a fair amount before about PalFish, sometimes giving more detail about things that might be helpful to new teachers—check out the tag cloud in the sidebar or click here for all the posts with the PalFish tag.
Diary of an Online EFL Teacher 