Thursday, July 22, 2010

Keeping Money on My Mind in Tokyo

Money has been in my thoughts a lot recently. To be more exact, I been thinking about how to make more money. Living in Tokyo is damn expensive. Having enough money to pay the bills,put food on the table, and have a good time regularly can be a challenge at times. It seems like if I could just earn a little more yen things would be a lot easier. I have still been able to keep my full time gig my some unseen miracle(English teaching in Japan can be cut throat at times). Yet, I am gonna have to get a part time gig on the side. I just need a little extra money. An extra 20,000 or 30,000 yen a month would really mean a lot to me. How the hell am I gonna pull this off?

Well, I have been talking to a few folks and there does seem to be options. More than one person has mentioned to me that doing some corporate English teaching part time is a good way to make extra yen. I have never done it before but I am sure I can handle it. I have been teaching English for several years now so I should be able to handle just about every kind of English lesson. I am not saying that I can walk into a class and hit a home run from day one but I am sure I can adjust pretty quickly. I guess the added flexibility of doing corporate lessons would be nice. I like the flexibility I have with my private students. I can pretty much put together a lesson using my own method while at the same time customizing the material to meet the needs of the student.  Making my own lessons is always fun. The drawbacks with corporate lessons might be stability. If a company does not need me anymore or they want to change teachers for what ever reason I might find myself in a tough position to be assigned another corporate gig.

Another thing to think about is which kind of company to try and get hired by to do corporate teaching. Currently, it looks like I can try to get on with a dispatch company or try to get hired on the corporate side of an eikaiwa company. Both kinds of companies could be alright to work part time for as well as be a foot in the door for a full time contract down the road if I so choose. As long as they got a place for me and I fit in well where they assign me either kind of company could be alright. The thing about dispatch is that I might end up doing ALT work and I would rather not do that right now. Corporate English teaching is what I am most interested in doing part time for now.  Doing my full time gig and then turing around and pulling a day or two at a jr. or senior high school would a bit of a drain on me energy wise. So I guess I will focus on trying to get a part time gig working on the corp. end of a ekiaiwa company(hence avioding branch work for two different companies) while holding onto my full time gig.

From this point all I got to do is update my resume and apply to a company or two and see how it goes. No matter what, I really need something on the side. I don`t have enough private student yet to rely just on that alone to pad my monthly income. Well yall, welcome to the life of a English teacher in Japan.