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.

…a year makes.

Holy. Crow.

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.

Good luck, everybody. We’re all counting on you.