Just a bit of a rant from a teacher!

Hi everyone, I'm just venting really, and in a real school I'd do it in the staff room so here I am...

***Severity Level 5!***

I've had one of these warning emails to tell me that I'm at 'severity level 5', and at first I was confused because I have not cancelled or missed any lessons... but when I logged into the platform to see what was going on, I saw that I got some lesson requests from a current students on Friday evening and it was because I hadn't accepted them and now they'd expired (on Sunday evening). I tend to switch off after work on Fridays so I think it's undersandable I missed them. Anyway, fair enough, that's their policy on accepting lesson requests.

What I'm pissed off about is the language they use and how devalued it makes you feel as a teacher - 'severity level'; 'unprofessional' etc. It wasn't a big deal to my student, I just sent him a message to say 'Sorry, I missed those requests you sent on Friday - would you like to put them in again so I can accept them?' and he was fine with it. iTalki completely ignores the fact that you might have a good working relationship with your students and actually communicate with them about these things. They make you feel totally disposable.

I'm already at the point where I feel very demotivated by online teaching, the lack of security, fluctuating workload (I had a steady 4-6 hours per week of teaching last month, now I'm down to one student), the race to the bottom in what you can charge so you end up on the equivalent of less than minimum wage even as a qualified teacher with decades of experience... this was really the last straw today that's got me regretting not choosing literally any other career path...

Words of encouragement/solidarity anyone?

I hope that if anyone who works for iTalki and has any influence over these things is reading this, they consider changing the way they interact with teachers. I had to cancel some lessons a couple of months ago due to my partner going into hospital and when I got the severity level warning emails I wrote to them to explain what had happened and I still got the 'It's because of unprofessional behaviour' response - I'm sorry but WTF is unprofessional about telling my students I'm going to have to take some days off because my boyfriend has been rushed into hospital?

They literally don't care about us.