I am a teacher and despite the recent pay increment, I still looking to leave to do private tutoring by the end of the year.

As a teacher, I typically work 12 hour shift a day. Usually, I am in school before 7 am and I will leave the earliest at 5 pm.

Only on rare days am I able to leave before 4 pm. Classes end by early afternoon, but the end of classes is the only time that we have to start our real work of marking students work, meetings, lesson planning and coaching weaker students.

So you can imagine that on days we have CCAs or remedial lessons, we will have a backlog that we will need to clear the next day. As you all know in government jobs, you will surely get arrowed to do some event planning or some other bo liao things once in a while which eats into more of your work time.

At night would be the time when concerned parents would start asking you questions about their child’s development in school and will highlight to you any problems that their child will have. So when is the time that we teachers can have for our family or ourselves?

Weekends you might say. But no, weekends are the only time that you have to catch up on your backlog over the past week before a new week dumps you with a new load of shit.

I have been asked by a few students’ parents so far to teach their children privately; some are willing to pay me up to $150 per hour. In 2 hours, that’s $300, more than what I earn in a day for working 12 hours and that’s just from 1 student.

I have calculated in a month, I could easily earn $7k to $8k with an average of $100 – $120 per hour with 8 students, a salary range that I could only achieve if I stay in the teaching career for 10 years or more. If I were to push harder, I can possibly even earn $10k or more. I dont even get OT pay for working extra hard as a teacher.

So the 10% pay increment frankly, is not enticing for me at all. By being a private tutor, I do not have to mark 40 student papers, I do not have CCA or event planning committments, lesson plans are so much easier and best of all, I am paid by the hour. So why not make the jump?

The advantages of being a private tutor is so clear.