A Typical Week of an English Teacher in Ukraine

Created: Jan. 22, 2010

This page presents a composite picture of native English teachers in Ukraine and what their work week may look like after they have spent a while in the country and have maximized their teaching load (24 hours a week).

Monday
You wake up at 6 am to make it to your 8 am class. At 7:20 you leave the apartment in the thick of rush hour to get to your corporate class, which is within walking distance of a central metro stop. At the front desk you trade your passport for a visitor's pass. Today 7 people attend your intermediate-level class (2 are late) with an average age of 26 years. The class goes nicely and you say goodbye till Wednesday morning. You are now free for the rest of the day, since your next class is at 5 pm. You return back home, spend some time online, and putz around till 4, when you grab your coursebook and head off to your 5:00 class, preparing the lesson along the way. The class is called "intermediate" but is really lower intermediate, and your 6 students have a hard time participating at the level you'd like them to. There are a lot of pauses during class, and you wonder if your lessons are helping them at all. Good thing you alternate with a local teacher, so you don't feel wholly responsible for their lack of progress. After class you head to a nearby cafeteria-style restaurant for dinner. Sometimes one or two of your students join you for dinner, but not today. You arrive home at 8 pm. You've taught 3 hours today.

Tuesday
You wake up at 6:45 am to make your 8:30 class at another company. This group is upper intermediate and consists of 3 people on the roll, one of which has attended only once in 3 months. Your class has little structure and consists of discussion various business topics with excursions into personal experiences and interests. It's interesting for everyone and requires almost no preparation on your part. Class ends at 10:00, and with your next at 1 pm, it doesn't make sense to return home, so you take a one-hour walk through the center before stopping at a cafe to get online with your laptop. At 1 pm you have a class with new clients that just started the previous week. You don't know them well yet and so prepare carefully for class. There are just four people, and they seem to have quite different skill levels. One lady seems to do almost all the talking. That will be something to try to correct in the future... At 3:30 you go to a different part of town to tutor a private student -- the 14-year-old son of one of your corporate students. He speaks well enough, but is a bit lazy and doesn't want to burden himself with grammar studies. It is a challenge to keep him away from his cell phone long enough to focus on the lesson. At 7 pm you go to the language school office for an intermediate-level speaking class. Everyone is 10 minutes late, but otherwise the class goes very well. You are home at 9:30 pm after buying a few groceries. With 6 hours of class today, this is your busiest day of the week.

Wednesday
You get up at 6 am again to teach the class that met on Monday. You're rather tired from not getting enough sleep, and you were rushed in the morning because you were searching for a text online to help with the lesson. 6 people attend, including two that you hadn't seen in nearly a month. Spotty attendance prevents you from building too heavily upon previous lessons. Instead, each lesson must stand alone. You have no more classes for the rest of the day, so just 1.5 hours of teaching.

Thursday
You get up at 6:30 am to teach the class that met on Tuesday again. Like always, the 8:30 class is a breeze and everyone seems satisfied. You're supposed to meet with two private students today, but both text you to cancel. At 5 pm you meet with an individual corporate client -- a mid-level manager -- who had been away on a business trip for the past week. He is an advanced speaker and continually goes off on tangents during lessons, which is okay, but the two of you are supposed to be moving through a business English coursebook. Trying to get the student to focus on the book is a thankless task, but that is what his company agreed to. You get out of there 15 minutes late and arrive home at 7:30 pm. You have had 3 hours of teaching today.

Friday
You have no morning classes today, so you sleep in till 8 am. During the morning you text with one of your private students and agree to meet at 3 pm today at her home. She is quite demanding and needs English for a possible business promotion, so you prepare your lesson well, printing out a couple things online and xeroxing a Kyiv Post business article. Your student pays you as always in cash at the end of the lesson. She found you through a friend who was once in one of your classes. At 7 pm you substitute for another teacher. You've never met the students before, so you create a kind of game that pretty much flops for inexplicable reasons. In the end you spend much of the class time talking about why you're in Ukraine and what you think of it, especially compared to your home country. 3 hours of teaching today.

Saturday
You have two conversation clubs at two different language schools -- at 11 am and 1 pm. 13 people come to the first one, which is too large to be really effective. Two participants speak a lot, and half of the class listens attentively but doesn't say anything. The second club is much easier and has just 5 people. You pick any topic you want and people happily discuss it. At 3 and 5 pm you have two private students whom you visit at their homes. By this time you're very hungry and tired. 6 hours of teaching today.

Sunday
Normally your "rest day," this Sunday you agree to meet the 14-year-old student around noon. When you get there, he's outside walking, and his mother feeds you some nice food while you're waiting for her son to get home. The lesson is mediocre and interrupted by cell phone calls and SMS. 1.5 hours of teaching, 24 hours for the entire week. That's $360-480 a week -- not shabby at all! But quite exhausting. About 15 hours was spent getting to and from classes, and 6 hours were spent on preparation, making for a 45 hour work week with most of the evenings taken up with classes. This limits your social life a bit, but it's hard to turn down offers to teach more classes and earn more money.