When is it time to move the business out of the living room?

The Bulletin (Issue 21)

For the first six years of teaching English in Japan, I was pretty happy working from the six-mat front room in our Showa-era family home. Before COVID-induced home offices became the norm, it was cool to have no commute time and virtually zero overheads for running a business, but these are the factors that pushed us to finally move our home-based teaching business into a “proper school” with a separate address, toilet and everything:

1. We couldn’t fit more than six students at a time in our six-mat room, and when we taught little kids and needed to sing and dance, we spilled out into the eight-mat living room and kitchen, meaning when I or my wife were teaching, nobody else in the house could cook, watch TV or have a bath.

2. We seriously considered extending the house into the front garden to create a (nearly) stand-alone school, but realised that wouldn’t solve more fundamental problems:

3. Our house was a stone’s throw from an elementary school which provided a steady flow of young students, but we were far from a train station, so our adult students and kids from further afield needed a place to park, and there were limited spaces on our street (but funnily enough, an unlimited number of grumpy neighbours).

4. We had sewn up the neighbourhood for English teaching. We were the place to go if you were within walking distance or didn’t mind parking the car in the 7-11 five-minute’s walk away. It felt like we had reached maximum capactity for where we were. If we ever wanted to have significantly more students, hire help or do something different with our lives, we had to find somewhere new.

How did we escape the gravitational pull of business as usual at home? Did we rent or buy? Where did we relocate the business to? How could we afford to do it? And how did we narrowly avoid disaster?

I’ll tell you all next week in part 2!

How about you? Do you teach, or plan to teach, exclusively from home? What would it take to make you move your business out of the family home? Leave a comment — I actually just enabled comments and likes last week (I’m a slow learner), so don’t be a stranger, drop us all a line.

All the best,

Patrick

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Teaching Tip

Try the 3-Hint Quiz Game as a warm-up, or a filler game if you find yourself with a group of kids and five to 10 minutes to kill. You can do this with a set of picture cards, objects in the room or just off the top of your head. Give clues of decreasing complexity until someone guesses the item.

Teacher: “I have four legs”
Student: “Are you a cat?”
Teacher: “No. I cannot move.”
Student: “Are you a turtle?”
Teacher: “No. You can sit on me.”
Student: “Are you a chair?”
Teacher: “Yes! You got it!”

Repeat, giving points or if the kids are of a high enough level, get them to give the clues. Works equally well online too.

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Recommended

Lincoln Michel writes a great substack with smart advice on the craft of fiction writing. And unlike many who offer advice, he can actually write well. See this recent post of his for example:

Write for Your Best Readers Instead of Your Worst Readers

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Get a free book

Available at any Amazon site for free over the next five days, is my latest (#23!) Hana Walker short story mystery for Japanese teens learning English. The full blub is here:

Hana receives an anonymous video plea for help: Someone has stolen a museum exhibit. Why? Who? And who sent the video? Hana must find the answers!

My name is Hana Walker. I am 14 years old. My Mum is Japanese, my Dad is English. Japanese call me “half”. But I am not 50/50. I am 100 percent me. My Mum got sick and died. I speak English, but I don’t speak Japanese. I go to a Japanese Junior High School. I solve mysteries by looking and thinking. Every day is a mystery to me…

This series of Hana Walker mystery short stories is designed to engage students of English as a foreign language who typically are in their second year of junior high school.

Every book features an engaging mystery with the same cast of characters, a vocabulary section and set of questions. The books can be used as a focus of a reading and discussion lesson or given as homework for students to work on by themselves.

Word Count: 2,506

Tenses: Simple present, simple past, present perfect

Target language: Use of past tense, bird vocabulary

Download the story for free (for the next five days) from the Amazon Japan store here, the .com store here or the .co.uk store here. I’d be really grateful if you left a kind review (and/or some stars if you find the book useful) to help get the word out. Thanks!