Getting Paper

When you’re only working 12 hours a week, even when you have a super long commute, well, you have plenty of free time. Between traveling, going out with friends, watching way too much illegally-downloaded American television, and eating lots and lots of tapas, I’m also filling up my time with three side jobs, and they’ve been great so far.

First, for the past few weeks, I’ve been giving private English lessons twice a week with the mother of one of my 4-year-old students. She has a pretty high level of English, even though she’s mostly self-taught, so she’s fun to work with. I prepare some questions and we discuss a bit of grammar, but we mostly just have conversations. These conversations often cover interesting topics like cultural differences between the U.S. and Spain and town gossip, so getting paid almost feels like icing on the top of an already sweet job. And to continue with the sugary theme, she packaged up some of her delicious birthday cake for me, which is seriously calling my name right now. Sorry, blog post, you’re getting abandoned for a second.

Not an actual picture of the cake, but it looks pretty similar. My tutee needs to have more birthdays.

Second, I’ve scored a gig doing online marketing for a local tour company. Mmm this cake is so good. They have a new project that’s launching in January, so I’ve been in charge of creating the marketing strategy and executing it. Since online marketing is the field I’ve been getting into and the career I plan to pursue when I return to the “real world,” this is great experience. It’s also nice working from home on my own schedule.

Finally, this Monday I had my first day of after school classes at my school. I’ll be giving two separate English classes for an hour a week each to 19 students who want (or whose parents want, as I’m sure is the case with at least a few) a bit of extra English practice. That means planning activities, maintaining order in the classroom, and keeping the students entertained all by myself, which is definitely a challenge, but I think it went really well on Monday! A few people never showed, and it was difficult getting a few of the students to stop goofing off, but I think I gave two hours of pretty darn good classes on Monday, and I even had a few students tell me or a co-teacher that they really enjoyed the first week!

So, yeah, I’ve been keeping pretty busy and loving everything I do. This is the life.