I have been struggling to know what to say for the last two and half years since we opened. Teaching is a vocation for me and I absolutely love it but at the same time, I found myself getting a bit lost and bottlenecked in the whole thing. It’s only now that I’ve settled into everything a bit more that I’m now treating this business as a business and not just as a brainchild of years of learning about language learning and putting it into practice.

It’s tough finding the balance between what is “scientifically proven” and what is practicable in classes of teenagers who only need to pass their school exams and have very little real interst in actually learning the langauge.

My favourite classes to teach will always be 1-1s and 2-1s because generally speaking they’re the classes where the most progress can be tracked and the little wins can be celebrated the most. I find that in bigger classes the level of intimacy and comfort to make mistakes can be lost and thus the embarassment takes over what should be learning moments. Of course this can be managed and mitigated in larger classes, however for the most shy and for those who like to ask the most quesitions, it’s effect is rarely reduced to zero.

I have done little aside from manage this business these last two and a half years except for getting a masters in Applied Linguistics (a dream of mine for a very long time that I had talked myself out of for a wide variety of stupid reasons). It’s all been about work work work and little about doing the things that I love the most.

It’s true what they say about starting businesses that for the first few years you will not really see much by means of profit – but I’m very happy with where we are at the moment and where myself and my mother are about to take this project next.

We might swing completely in the next few months, focus on larger scale langauge teaching, teaching companies and taking on all of those who teach without vocation, making language learning something people loath.