VIPKID: Five Month Update & Income Report

My fifth month working with VIPKID is now complete! I am happy to report back that after Chinese New Year ended, my bookings quickly returned back to normal. Phew! I was relieved to see my Sunday night booking frenzy numbers quickly balanced back to way they used to be prior to Chinese New Year in February.

Things have finally calmed back down in the VIPKID Facebook universe where mayhem broke lose last month when the VIPKID Teacher Community administrators all simultaneously stepped down leaving behind a community of nearly 20,000 teachers to crash and burn. Talk about a dramatic exit.

“There will no longer be rules”

Fortunately, a new moderator/admin was selected to step up and she has been doing an even better job of running our page. Why they didn’t just think to pass on their roles before publicly announcing the decision to abandon us, I couldn’t tell you…

Teaching has been going well! I am having a total blast with my classes now more than ever, with my recent shift in focus on connecting more with my students and having fun during class! I deal with enough stress outside of work that I want to make sure VIPKID is as playful and educational as possible. I take the material seriously but I have been spending more time incorporating props and praise. Check out my $1.00 guitar prop – some of my students are musicians and they love it! We play guitar together after class! <3

While what we do is fun, I don’t want to make you think our job is a piece of cake. We VIPKID teachers deal with a lot of less-than-glamorous situations in our day-to-day work. In early March, I had an extremely peculiar encounter with a student that I did not expect.

I entered a classroom and was met with a student looking rather upset with me. There was already text in the sidebar. As you can see from the screenshot below, once I copied and pasted it into Google Translate, I realized my student wrote, “Hurry up. Come to class quickly, I don’t have time to waste.” Guess he was hoping for an early start. Please note through my chain of red arrows that we were 8seconds into class. At which point he took it upon himself to reward himself all 5 stars on slide 1. As you can imagine, I was both overwhelmed and stunned hahaha. I thought it may have been done in a humorous light. I later discovered it was nothing more than a way to foreshadow what the rest of our class together would be like.

Flashbacks to screaming, “Kuai, kuai, kuai!” in China.

Despite the weird classes where things don’t go quite as planned, there are way more that bring me nothing but joy and laughter. Another one of my regulars, Annie, is hysterical. When I teach her, I almost feel like I’m teaching my little sister again. I told her I like birds so she drew me one! ❤

In March of 2018, my extra VIPKID earnings totaled over $1,000.00! With a 5 month streak, I think it is safe to consider this a safe minimum although there is definitely room to make more. My payment breakdown for my 5th month working for VIPKID is as follows:

$10 from New Student Sign Ups ($5 per Trial Student who joins VIPKID because of you!)

-$28 from the Additions/Deductions. (I had 2 $10 deductions for 2 classes I missed due to WiFi outages during a storm. They were excused so we they won’t impact my contract although I still had to pay the No Show penalty. I also had to cancel 4 classes incurring a $2 penalty per class due to a medical situation which was marked as a “medium cancellation” since I did not plan my emergency in over 24 hours. A doctor’s note was not sufficient to waive the penalty. Not going to lie, I’m a bit jaded over that whole situation.)

Total: I made an extra $1,510.00 in my fifth month working for VIPKID!

I taught for a total of 72 hours this month earning roughly $21/hour.
This is based on working less than 18 hours/week with VIPKID.

I highly recommend VIPKID to anyone who is looking to diversify your income! Give it a shot.

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Six years ago, I created The Rocky Safari to connect with people from all around the world who share a curiosity for learning more about long-term travel as a lifestyle. Today, I continue to share new stories about various aspects of life while wandering around the globe. The Rocky Safari chronicles these adventures.