Working Madrid

"Casi Cielo" ("Almost Heaven" in English) posted an article on Spainexpat about teaching private classes, which I comment on in the 4 Youtube.com videos below - the first part comes first. Note: You should watch one completely before you proceed with the next one as it will continue to download even as you watch the next one, deteriorating the download speed of the second one.

  

An Article on English Teaching in The Telegraph (UK)

Helen Bain of International House, Madrid, sheds light on some common misconceptions surrounding teaching English abroad here: The facts and the fiction. It's a good (though short) article about teaching English in academies. It would have been nice to have seen her say something about the money. In the first paragraph she basically says that you should be careful about working for more than 25 contact hours per week if you want a life. This is true, but it's hard to make it on the kind of money that you make in an academy. How do you do it Ms Bain?

In a later paragraph she states "Myth: As soon as you start your new job, you are on your own." Well, in my experience this is actually the general way of things in many of the smaller agencies and academies as the DOSes tend to have around as many contact hours as the teachers do. Don't expect to get much babying in top-paying agencies either. If they're paying you top rates, they'll expect top professionals and results as well.

An Update on the Madrid Market
Updated Feb. 18, 2006.

The Madrid market has changed somewhat since I started putting the MadridTeacher.com Newsletter out over a year ago and I thought it might be of interest to everyone to speculate a bit on how. (Some of these changes started much earlier and are just now becoming significant.)

1. The demand for teachers has been really high here in the past couple of months, but there haven’t been anywhere near enough teachers to meet that demand.

a. I’ve been seeing it first hand via the large number of jobs ads coming in. One agency in Madrid told me that they need more teachers, but they haven’t been finding them for months. Though this may have something to do with their offering barely-average or lower-than-average pay, you can also see lots more large “English Teachers Wanted” adverts in popular local English newspaper “In-Madrid” these days, which suggests that everyone’s having the same problem.

b. Less significant, I think, is the increasing demand from new European Multi-national corporations that are now making English their official language. (Their companies expand throughout Europe and suddenly find that their employees here need to communicate with their German, French and Italian, etc. colleagues.)

a. Immigration has made finding accommodations much more difficult and expensive (lower supply, higher demand). A room will cost you today as much as an entire apartment used to a few years back.

b. Safety has become a bigger issue than ever. There seems to be a lot more areas of the city now to avoid than before, especially at night. In fact, going out at night anywhere is a lot more dangerous than it used to be, even in the suburbs.

4. Many big and medium-sized corporations are moving out to the outskirts of the city for various reasons, usually having something to do with improving their infrastructure and/or transport system. (Traffic in Madrid is really bad.) One consequence of this is that a lot of the better paying English teaching jobs are moving out with them.

5. The internet has changed English teaching around the world and Madrid, Spain, may have been left behind. Years ago, there just wasn’t much reliable information on any location anywhere, which probably helped “safe” destinations like Madrid draw the most first-time teachers. Today, however, English teachers have instant online access to thousands of teaching jobs via international jobs’ sites in the most exotic of locations around the world, in places which may offer far better experiences and much higher pay, by the way.

6. Of course, it may just be that the internet is also making it possible for teachers in Madrid itself to fill their schedules much more quickly than ever, leaving other “late” clients out in the cold. My own schedule gets pretty packed by the first of September every year because of the internet and when I lose a class from time to time, all I have to do to replace it is send an email out to one or two prospective clients on a waiting list. The only other thing I can say about this is that I hope that this sort of thing will motivate a lot of the big corporations that are now having problems finding teachers, to extend their class seasons from October through June (8 months) to something a little better for all concerned.

7. A parallel development is that I can safely say that the internet and the in-English local newspaper "In Madrid" have replaced old stalwarts like the Spanish newspaper "El Pais" when it comes to serving up English teaching jobs. A few years ago the El Pais jobs' pages were packed with job offers. Today, that's changed altogether.

I wrote the article below a few years ago and updated it last summer:

A Teacher/Mercenary's Guide. I hope to be able to save you a lot of legwork and a few of the pitfalls in the Madrid English teaching jobs market, but I know next to nothing about the housing market for teachers, for example, and not nearly enough (for my taste) about work permits for American teachers or about how American or other "backpacker" teachers can work here illegally. However, when I got to Madrid in 1993, if somebody had told me what I would like to tell you about teaching, academies and such, it would have saved me years of maneuvering around for better pay and working conditions. (Upd. June 4, 2005)

I've worked here as a summer school teacher, an elementary school teacher, high school teacher, academy teacher, agency teacher, company class teacher, private class teacher, Director of Studies, Service Manager and freelance (Do you want to know more about how to become freelance or an official "autónomo" teacher or about why to become a "freelance teacher" in the first place?). I've touched a little on everything while I've been here and I've always tried to apply the analytical skills I picked up while working on my Sociology Major at Oklahoma State University.

I don't claim to possess the whole truth about what's going on in academies or in the jobs and teaching market in Madrid and I don't think that anyone can, but I've caught a lot of glimpses of it on my own roller coaster ride through Madrid in the last 12 years. I've had a lot of ups and downs and ins and outs and I've seen the best and the worst of it.
You can take whatever I say with a grain of salt if you like, but if you're interested in another point of view than what you'll get from establishment authorities and litigation-conscious internet sites (mine included), join us at one of our monthly English teachers' Meetups. I'll probably not give you the names and dates, but I'll give up all the gory details: "generally speaking," at least the ones I can recall.

Teaching English in Private Classes:

Teaching private English classes in Madrid can either supplement or substitute for academy work, especially if their jobs are low-paid. (There are a few academies and agencies that pay better than average or offer other benefits like extensive training like the British Language Centre, but they're the exception rather than the rule.) It's a huge, abundant jobs market here that'll allow for anything and everything. i.e. I may be an older and more experienced male English teacher, but rest assured that there is a big market for younger and more inexperienced female teachers of English, for example. Think of the all the women and families with children that want an English teacher who they're not going to be afraid of because he's a man. Whatever you think are going to be your handicaps, will probably also be your advantages when looked at from other perspectives. Learn to think this way and you'll find market niches that you can take advantage of in your marketing and find plenty of English teaching jobs and work.

If you're going to work teaching private English classes in Madrid (at least part of the time), check out the Internet first for new options in advertising private classes or sites like: http://madrid.loquo.com/spanish/cat/1000. Aside from looking for new English teachers' jobs, you can also place a free ad. I've gotten at least one private English class from these sites, for example.

I do all of my private English class teaching in my own home, but I live in the suburbs without any academies nearby, which might force me to change my strategy if there were. Still, I turn down plenty of jobs from students who call me and want me to come to their homes to do private English classes as it's much more efficient, time-and-money-wise, to stack them back-to-back because just a short walk up the street to an English class in somebody's home can take 15-20 minutes to do.

Do three or four of those and you've just lost an hour's pay which summed up over 9 months of class-time would add up to, at my private-English-class rate, to about 1,000 euros.

With a little work and luck, you can put together a full evening schedule of English teaching in private and conversation classes to complement a company class teaching schedule elsewhere. Even if you have English class jobs in academies elsewhere in the evenings, you can find plenty of these classes to teach in the mornings as not everyone works a 9 to 5 schedule at their jobs (i.e. students and workers who work evenings). Also, referring back to the male-female situation, if you're a woman teaching English and you get an apartment in a suburb that's academy-free, you might even put together an early evening English class teaching schedule for children in your home. An elementary school English teacher I used to work with claimed that she was earning more from her evening classes than from the school we were working at: about 1,300 euros per month 10 years ago. Put together some groups and charge about 6 – 10 euros per hour per student … and do the math yourself!