When Brazilians first saw a content creator producing materials for teaching based on common phrases, false cognates, pronunciation tips and vocabulary expansion, everyone had a negative opinion about it. You see, you don’t do this with the classroom. Teachers who had spent decades in the profession had to realize that someone was taking their most trivial comments and basing entire pages on them, offering fragmented advice with such a lack of needs assessment concern and structural thinking that you couldn’t believe that was getting so popular.

A lot of other people noticed, but had a different perspective: what if I can apply the same model and make my “classes” shorter, like little informational bits? To mention the phrase coined by a famous influencer, the “English tips” were born. Countless of these started to invade social media, and the native speakers also took notice and started to produce content of their own. It was a mess. It still is. Do these people have actual pedagogical material? Few of them have a link to their courses. But they all started with these tips.

The English schools understood the need to create pedagogical materials which were up-to-date and generated good participation rates and results from student production which could provide teachers with a good bulk of information to sort out what was relevant to comment on, what the typical problems were, what goals needed to be reinforced, which categories of words seemed to be hard to grasp, along with verb tense reviews, smart choices to explain grammar, tip of the tongue examples, and a lot of personal input to show people how language was actually used. Individual effort was not compensated, though: that’s probably why some of these teachers decided to work independently, and start their own thing — and so a fracture in the ESL institution became evident, but little was done to remediate that, other than proposals that set the teacher as an “independent”, but the companies as mere facilitators (nobody knew how the marketing worked; policies were not debated; data collection, in the digital classroom, was not even mentioned; students would need to remain distant to their teachers, even though they might discuss very personal topics; there was an undeniable accumulation of tasks, or job creep, a term used to describe work situations where the job description doesn’t mention all the responsibilities of employees and often suppresses information in order to explore workers; among other factors like identity and social media having to be separate from the company’s image, but required to be thought of as one).

It’s easy to say that someone’s content isn’t getting visibility because it’s not innovative enough; it’s another to take the time to look into everything a creator has done to contribute with discussions, whatever they may be — keeping in mind that some of them should be private, and a good deal is supposed to be made between parts that understand and agree upon the responsibilities and freedoms that the employee has in relation to the company; but what about independents? Suddenly, someone’s teaching video multiplied by a hundred different videos, and they kept them coming, realizing that there needed to be a page to organize the content, and another on a different platform… and how many platforms is it necessary or interesting to be on? We’re not talking about Instagram reels anymore, but YouTube lives, weekly blogs, engaging stories with games and polls, picture campaigns, interviews, podcasts, charts, not to mention the entire creation of materials that need to cater for each student’s needs — an impossible task, unless you set out to produce one material for all, and you end up selling a “product”, and a whole methodology: you’ve become a school!

When you’re responsible for all this, marketing comes on top of it, and starts to determine your actions: everything you do is thought of in terms of the conversion rates, and you spread the word as much as you can about the product and services, all of the course’s features and the values that you promote. There’s a need to update yourself that’s not every two or four years anymore, like a traditional ESL school would think of before social media came to shake things up (and spoil everything), but the debates needed to be informed by the daily trends, in a smart campaign, involving copywriting skills and a lot of empathy when recording in front of the camera. The materials you needed to perform your job grew to an infinite list: you might have started with your phone, but then you noticed someone else’s camera quality was better, so now you needed a better phone; then you decided to get a professional camera, for your recordings, and went ahead and got a tripod and lights; but you had to write a sketch of what you were going to say, until you could interact with virtual audiences in a professional way, while also engaging them; you needed to organize your materials in files, including pictures that you’d edit, videos that you’d input subtitles and make cuts on, with special effects; you’d need a logo; you’d need a website; you’d have to fill out the Google questions for your business to be seen on Search; you’d have to think about how to monetize the page with ads, and verify code on your hosting platform; not to mention the work in captions, and the creativity to pick good themes, good catchphrases and relevant topics, all the while promoting student participation and thinking about sales, often having to assess your conversations in order to optimize the process of convincing people to get your course, and not the infinite amount of other options — and you’d have to set a price!

They said that video conferencing came for the better, but now you didn’t stand in front of everybody with the board behind you. You had to think about ways of using your voice as the most efficient communicator and guide, and visual elements that you’d have to always bring with you to give a sense of continuity to your classes, different for every subject and person. You’d have to schedule meetings and work with links for them. The webcam quality would need to be good enough, as well as audio capture — otherwise, you weren’t serious! And you’d have to create separate documents to edit notes with students, now writing on their own notebooks (you see, even the process of thinking on their own was now your responsibility, because you were responsible for all the notes too!)

How much do you think you’d need to charge for all that work? Count the tasks mentioned, and think of anything else you’d add to the responsibilities (maybe the hardship of finding a neutral tone in order to address sensitive topics in an appropriate manner, without avoiding necessary debates?) and add to that the experience and overall resume highlights that you’d want to be considered before you can accept a certain amount, for the quality of your work, for the efforts taken as a whole, and for the personal intake and what you’re contributing with in your own unique way.

If you guess somewhere around 6 dollars an hour, you’d be absolutely cynic. You’d have to be accepting of the factor of supply and demand, but totally forget about the list of things that an individual teacher puts into the whole enterprise of teaching in this day and age. But you’d have market awareness, from a point of view that doesn’t value education and labels information in general as a given in order to exploit, like the average internet user, teachers who work on the internet, with the means of technological tools. The teachers can request for more, but they’ll be looked upon as snobs. There will be people laughing at you and saying “how dare you?” — and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The thing is that, when I described myself, with all my qualifications, to ChatGPT and asked how much a person like me should charge hourly for an English class, the program answered from $50 to $100. That is not what you see on different sections of this website as a proposal, and that is not what I’m currently doing with my freelance job (for lack of a better word). It’s time we ask around, and have a serious conversation about remote work as a teacher on international scale. Are we really offering more of the same or do people think we’re supposed to treat their ignorance with a smile and quit trying to pretend our jobs are more important than theirs, or rather, that the fact we chose to invest in our education doesn’t mean that we can charge a reasonable amount if we’re to pass on that knowledge? We know the corporate answers. It’s time we ask who’s actually dealing with these issues, and get the money we freaking deserve.