Since 2017, I’ve developed the project Participatory Fluency on my own, and it’s been full of ups and downs. The development was the peak of my creative ability, where I focused on tasks and pushed myself to do the best I had learned in the years I spent teaching to update the curriculum and use real data to input in the study. The rest was marketing, and I basically got screwed.

A few years later, came the first client. Then a second, third and fourth. I searched for alternatives, because after I set the price, people must’ve taken notice. How come a Bachelor’s in the best University in South America charges 20 bucks an hour for something he’s been working on for years? And I’d heard advice from other independent professionals that not only should you work with a contract, but also go from one hundred to more.

I thought I would reach a modest amount of people and handle social media in my spare time. It was doable, but a lot of work anyway. I had to shift from formal to informal, from daily life to professional settings, and deal with demands from each area where clients were coming from. But basically, the old four skills were still something I could point to as improvements to aim for.

I learned some stuff with that work, social media included, and I’m going to share what sounds the most relevant as of today, November 2023. We saw Coursera, we saw Masterclass and we’ve been inundated with offers of workshops on Instagram that require us to click on the “learn more” button. A few of them don’t hurt to participate in, but it’s not for everyone, anytime.

Here’s what I think is the most crucial to consider in the ESL teaching area, working remotely:

1) We went through a pandemic

The dynamics of the world changed. Many people analyzed the shift from office to bedroom as something positive, but we were going to drug stores to buy masks all the time and washing everything, totally paranoid about blowing out noses and getting infected with tiny particles of dust from the construction downstairs, which might have had some toxic sand or minerals that we weren’t supposed to breathe. In fact, we didn’t see many constructions, but where I’m at, people still went out, myself included — because of a dating app.

The fact that we were forcibly isolated didn’t isolate us: it just changed where we focused on, and while we were living with family more often, most of us, we also consumed and produced more online than ever, something that a transforming social media landscape couldn’t handle: too many people, too many opinions. It became essential to transform that data into something easier to digest, to separate and label, and so came the rise of artificial intelligence. The workplace embraced it first with a little skepticism, especially from editorials who had dedicated writers who wouldn’t like to be replaced; then a little more enthusiasm over the possible end of stupid Google questions.

We naturalized liking posts of people seeking help, but I’m not sure if we actually helped anyone. Like today, there’s a lot of coaching out there, but none of that is going to make your problems go away and it’s absolutely not personal; these are generic posts made exclusively for vulnerable people, which you somehow should be happy to be. Exceling in your profession was the feat of the few; seeking out jobs desperately and everywhere was the hustle of the many, while a good part of us also kept an eye on news and an increasing death toll. May we never forget that was horrible, but the world adapted and we can now work in smarter ways, it seems, to embrace everyone’s routine as something as flexible as it can be, as long as the work gets done.

2) We created schedules

The goals of a company are always up for debate, because how you’re gonna get there depends on a series of things varying from budget to creativity and motivation, preparedness and expertise, diversity and getting along, but also having people skills to deal with outside potential clients and tech skills to manage workflow charts and process registration. The strategies are tested and improved. Doing it all yourself seems impossible, but you can try. And so many entrepreneurs rose to try to run a business for the first time, and it’s not everyone that used the internet for that: the face of commerce in the streets changed, a lot.

For teachers, newly established content creators (with all debates we can have around that), that meant organizational skills that people would envy and incomparable appeal. We had to learn how to edit, how to find good design choices, how to make a sketch and prepare for a basic format video and then a longer format. We learned about marketing. But we also learned that the most essential skill was to be on time.

When we offered our service, we asked for emails to send out notifications of meetings, in the new video-calling platforms, and we were always on time, while having a phone number to contact in case there would be a delay. We also learned that equipment mattered a lot, and invested in good webcams, microphones and the like, with an updatedness of security measures in place.

For those of us who ran websites, it was hard getting to know which plug ins to use, how to best present your socials and what parts should go first on a homepage; where we should introduce ourselves, how to explain the proposal, and finally, pitching the offer — with a price that might not be revealed until the contact was made. We all heard about funnels and leads. AI was dominant in mainstream social platforms, and we trusted it; some of us were unsuccessful. But we did this from time to time: reaching out to people, even if over pamphlets in the street.

3) We shaped our language

Since every student has a different need, we didn’t look at translation types too often, but eventually had to. We saw that Instagram was offering that, and based on big businesses that had decades of experience and accumulated profits, so it was only logical. Except some of us went to college and studied languages, not business administration. We focused on communication, not how to make money fast. And that’s what differentiates the teacher from the opportunist.

Personally, I looked at years of experience talking to people all over the world, saw where cultures were approximated, where they differed, and made an outline of what should be debated for a better discussion in society, which would integrate international cooperation standards as part of a plan for development. It was a socioeconomical approach, but actually sociolinguistic. I was just thinking about my 50 bucks. And of course, the success of my students.

We went from debating how good it was to live where we were to how things don’t always make sense on the internet, and people need to be more coherent, respectful, but also allow themselves to have some fun. We did that with caution. I asked tough questions to students. Every class has a 9 question warm up, and then we read a text, while later they’d have 10 multiple answer questions to complete. One student told me she took 2 hours every time. I must have pushed it a little, but the compliments I received made my whole year.

From TV language to social media standards to political activism and free speech to identity and participating in intercultural contexts, we exchanged ideas and had constructive debate, which later became a 300 page material to help students dive deeper into grammar and vocabulary. I learned, later, that some people had been thinking about the same things, but not quite. And so I changed jobs, but not quite.

The student profiles I was dealing with were suddenly very uninterested in debating social media, but industry workers who needed English to deal with things like building aircrafts, controlling retail, booking trips for business clients and dealing with citizenship visas. There was a shift, and I had to adapt my style and my vocabulary, seeing that I could no longer talk as much as I wanted to, but instead, guide debates according to materials that weren’t mine, and that is still a challenge.

4) We personalized classes

Whether on slides, over conversation or through links, we all thought about how our students would enrich their perspectives on a given topic through reading, listening and practicing. We made ourselves available, and sometimes, we saw that they were not. That happens. But how often? Regardless of that question which should probably be answered by whoever runs the relationship between business and client, we kept on doing our best to tailor everything we saw to the needs of those students, and while it’s true that we waited impatiently for the time to pass so we could get on the call and just do the thing, sometimes with little study of the materials we were teaching, we worked hard on getting the tone right and being some sort of coach.

We’re preparing students for a life of greater opportunities, and it’s not just a trip to Disney. Connections are a great part of the deal, and reviewing what they go through in a day might be the best way to personalize a class: asking how they’re currently being presented content and suggesting new stuff so they can make the connections they feel are right, at their own pace. We all have to deal with too much information; time is short; some business models are based on this idea — but we shouldn’t forget that our mission is not to optimize the time of the client: it is still to teach effective, passionate, empathetic communication about the topics that matter the most to us, as human beings.