Hi. I was in education for 13 years and I had to leave in-person teaching last year due to a psychological collapse that actually broke something in me to the point that my doctors have suggested that I won't ever be capable of doing more than working from home.
I've done my best to find online teaching jobs, all of which have been shittier than shit… contract based, no benefits, trying to squeeze as much out of you for as little pay as possible. But I've hung in there because at this time, this is my only experience and skillset.
Recently an email went out that a third party company was contracting with my organization for tutoring positions. You only need to commit to an hour and a half for three days a week of your choosing! All lesson plans and material are provided! $30 an hour!
Shit, okay, Sounds good. I'm teaching three classes during the day, but I've got that much time. Sign me up.
Well, immediately upon accepting the offer we were told that the time commitment was a little more…. four additional hours each week but we'd be compensated for it at $20 an hour. Oh yeah and if you're ELA, they're gonna need an additional hour for data aggregation um…excuse me what the fuck?
But I thought, okay. I'll squeeze that in. But if lesson plans are material are provided and all we have to do is run the script, what in the fuck is this 4-6 extra hours all about?
I soon found out. 17 mother fucking asynchronous hours of training later. Yeah that little three evening a week hour and a half tutoring job dumped out I am not joking five different digital platforms we had to learn how to operate and implement which included all of this data aggregation shit and differentiation based on it and… there was just about to be three times the work for this little “great way to earn some extra cash for the holidays!” side hustle that seemed to be getting more and more soul-sucking with each step further in that I went.
And tonight during the “mandatory one hour of synchronous training” we were told that the lesson plans weren't actually pre-written. We had to make our own. They were based on the pre-written ones, but we were NOT to copy and paste. We had to aggregate and study our own data, run reports, make decisions based on student data, we were given a goddamn near Master's degree level amount of content in the Reading Specialist certification that we were supposed to study, learn, and implement.
And the best part? Of course, people were all completely going, what the fuck have I gotten myself into? These women running this meeting were so computer illiterate that they didn't even know how to use the function to cut off the mics of the meeting participants and kept interrupting each other snapping, You need to mute! Right now! We have already made this clear–mute yourself! And I just thought about suggesting to them a very simple solution for this, but i held back.
So they said, feel free to put your questions in the chat. And you better believe the questions started coming in on the chat and they were all ignored as these women kept pushing through what I now understand was a fucking script they were reading off of even though they were supposedly literally in place to manage this whole shit. They ignored everything. Acronyms, do this, do that, connected to nothing, people were asking, what does that mean? How do I know if I've got that handled? Finally, the only thing they said was, You need to direct these questions to your Program Manager.
Ah, yeah? Okay. So we all had to ask: WHO EVEN IS OUR FUCKING PROGRAM MANAGER?!
And what do you know. They ignored this query as well and just kept on plugging.
I noped the fuck out but I am pissed. My family is so strapped for cash right now trying to make it through the holidays and we are still contending with the loss of my income and trying to get back on our feet. The hope and promise of additional money I could have earned for my family based on a time commitment I was given and lack of having to plan and prep was so desperately needed and how crushed my husband is like when I had to say, I literally the fuck cannot even remotely begin to do this. I was baited and switched. They want full time no fuck that overtime work based on all these absurd unreasonable demands that they can't even being to support you in understanding yet demand that you do all of this to perfection. I'm just really down right now because we really got our hopes up and I had to let him down and I feel like a failure even though I know I didn't fail, I was basically about to get fucking played for a fool.
Is this bait and switch shit happening in other industries/places/jobs and shit? I'm just so damn bummed right now. Why does everything fucking suck? Why is anyone with even the slightest modicum of power over another tier of human workers so gleeful to exploit and misuse and shit all over them?