March 2020 was just the start…

At least the badly-exploited Glovo guys on their bikes get together in the public square. They can have a chat or a moan with each other between deliveries.

Unlike them, the average Business English teacher here in Spain is now more than likely to be sitting solo at a desk (or a kitchen table) facing the computer screen, doing their class on Zoom.

Working remotely, it’s called here and the word remote doesn’t just mean physically.

The days of having a fixed place, an office desk and real-life human colleagues in the same building? That’s all fading fast, gone for many of us already.

This month marks 5 years since the COVID 19 pandemic suddenly meant that traditional face to face language classes were impossible.

Teachers and our students needed to automatically know how to be experts at language lessons online. After a few months of it, usually doing around 5 hours a day of intense 1 to 1 with equally exhausted in-company employees, I remember seriously asking myself if I was real.

It felt distinctly as if I were just a one dimensional talking head, like s1mone, the virtual actress in that wrongly-neglected Al Pacino film I’d shown my secondary school students back in 2005 in England.

Fortunately for me, I had, and still have, a wife who teaches (Maths to teenagers) and that makes all the difference​, giving me someone to vent to.​ And it’s mutual.

We both remember when I started in mid-1990s Australia (in Canberra) when trade union membership was compulsory for government teachers.

If you had a problem you could take it to a union rep. That, without the fear of reprisal or disciplinary “revenge” from management.

Teachers largely helped one another in a collegiate style. You had comrades.

The kids were hard but your workmates understood. As frazzled as they were too, there was a shared mentality: we were​ side-by-side in the trenches, so to speak.

Fast forward to 2025 and most of my teaching is still online but today, for the main company I work for, my students can book me at 6 hours notice.

They can also cancel me in the same time frame. Just last year the industry standard was 24 hours notice to cancel and you were paid for the session if it was scrubbed by the student inside that 24 hours.

This week, I had students cancelling 45 minutes before the class and as little as 25 minutes​ before.

OK, at least I get paid for those two but any semblance of a predictable timetable has gone with the 21st century​ titanium-tainted ​wind.

[This article was first published on Substack here.]