Coronashift: working (and earning) through a pandemic

It's that time of year when I sit down to do my accounts - the UK tax year ends at the start of April so I usually get round to totting everything up to submit my tax return around now. Before I get down to the serious book-keeping though, I just spent a couple of hours making myself some graphs to see how work's panned out over the past year.

Most years, I make a graph for myself to see how my different sources of income break down. It's partly just out of curiosity, but it's also useful for tracking where the main focus of my work has been and assessing whether it's the kind of balance I'm after. This year, of course, has been a bit different with the coronavirus pandemic breaking out just before the start of the 2020-21 tax year.

So, below are the graphs for April 2019-2020 - to give a pre-pandemic comparison - and then for April 2020-2021:

The main points to come out seem to be:

Grants: I had a long patch of 4-5 months last summer with almost no work at all as publishers cancelled or paused projects. I was luckily able to claim government grants for the self-employed. So these made up nearly a quarter of the year's overall income.

Talks & training: Around 10% of my income in an average year is generally made up of talks and training in some form; at conferences, events, workshops, etc. This year, for obvious reasons, that dropped off a cliff and made up less than 1% of my income (for a single paid webinar). 

Royalties: These were down both as a percentage of my income and in real terms. With everything going on, some teaching cancelled and the rest shifting online, people haven't been buying new ELT books. Publishers' reps haven't been able to get out to chat to teachers and schools, bookshops have been closed, some publishers have even struggled at points to get books printed or moved around the world. So, royalties for writers have dropped and because they're paid in arrears, I suspect they'll continue to go down before they start to recover.

Writing vs. consulting: In terms of the kind of projects I worked on, it looks like there was quite a big shift from lots of consulting to more writing. 'Consulting' is a bit of a 'miscellaneous' category for work I do for publishers which isn't really materials writing. It might involve reviewing, giving input on syllabus or word lists or the like. One project that slightly skewed the 2019-20 figures was my work on the Oxford 3000 word list and the position paper I wrote for OUP. I've lumped it all in as consulting, even though the final bit involved writing the paper for publication, just because it was all part of one project. Over the past year or so, the extra writing has come from four main writing projects - creating writing workshops for the Oxford Discover Futures students books (levels 5 and 6), plus two forthcoming projects which I'll post more about when they're published.

The first couple of months of 2021-2022 tax year have been very quiet so far with only a few odd bits and pieces of work; a couple of online talks, some blog posts and quite a bit of (unpaid) work in my role with the Hornby Trust.  Fingers crossed though there's a new project in the pipeline which might see a whole new category added to next year's chart and hopefully, a bounce back in the talks and training category whether that's online or maybe even in-person.

Coronaversaries: rollouts and re-entry

It's a year ago this week that the UK went into its first coronavirus lockdown and I've spotted quite a few #coronaversary (coronavirus + anniversary) posts across social media as people share what they were doing a year ago and reflect on the past twelve months. So, it seemed like a good time to reflect on the language – or coronavocab – that's developed to describe life in an unprecedented year.

Looking back at my coronavocab posts from last summer, much of the language I highlighted has remained with us and become an all-too-familiar part of our everyday vocabularies; face masks, social distancing, hand sanitizer, lockdown, homeschooling. Some of the more light-hearted coinages also still float about in articles and blog posts; coronacoaster, covidiots, quarantinis, isobaking. But how has our language changed to reflect developments so far in 2021?

For a start, what we call the virus has gradually changed. It started off as coronavirus, but then got renamed (in Feb 2020, for the sake of accuracy) to Covid-19 and has, over time, just come to be known as Covid. Looking at some stats from the Coronavirus Corpus (which collects texts about the pandemic from across the internet), Covid on its own still seems to lag behind, but that's probably down to the fact that it's a corpus of written texts including a number of sources that likely prefer the full form. If you were able to look at spoken usage, I suspect Covid would shoot up the rankings.

Probably the most significant event to influence the way we're talking about the pandemic in recent months though has been the vaccine rollout. Much like lockdown/lock down and the other phrasal verbs in one of my earlier posts, rollout (noun) and it's accompanying phrasal verb, roll out, are not completely new words, but they have increased massively in frequency in a very short time and shifted slightly in usage. Previously, rollouts were predominantly business-related and to do with new products being launched (the rollout of the new iPhone). However, since Covid vaccines started being approved for use late in 2020, governments around the world have been setting up vaccine program(me)s to roll out the vaccine and offer as many people as possible a Covid jab (especially in the UK) or a Covid shot (more in the US).

The language around vaccines includes the everyday language we all use to talk about getting our jabs (in red), the language relating to getting vaccines out to people (in green) as well as still some discussion about their development and production (in blue). It will be interesting to see how the collocations in the red group shift and get added to over the coming months as the implications and effects of more people being vaccinated play out.

Looking forward, in the UK at least, there's starting to be lots talk of easing (of restrictions) and a flurry of re- words such as re-entry and readjustment both from a practical and a psychological perspective:

What are you looking forward to re-entering or concerned about readjusting to in the coming months?

RSI Day 2021: pain in a pandemic

Yesterday, 28 February, was RSI Awareness Day. This year, even for those of us used to working from home, our work routines have been thrown up in the air and healthy working habits have gone a bit awry.  It's also been a fairly reflective sort of year, so I thought it might be time to talk about some of my pain-related ups and downs. To explain the past year though, I’m going to have to take you back a bit …apologies to those who’ve heard some bits of this story before.

1989:
I broke my right collarbone in a car accident. I was told it'd healed and was sent off to live fairly unbothered by it for the next 10 years or so.

1999:
After spending my 20s teaching abroad, I’d just switched to a desk-based job as a lexicographer when I suddenly started getting severe pains in my right hand, arm, shoulder and neck. I was initially diagnosed with RSI and after lots of appointments, discovered that my collarbone had never fixed properly but was wobbling around causing a generally unstable wonky top right corner and putting all kinds of stresses and strains on the nerves, tendons and muscles around it.

2000 onwards:
Having had lots of doctors more-or-less shrug their shoulders, I spent the following 20 years doing my best to live with increasingly debilitating chronic pain that affected my whole upper body. It limited my professional life significantly. Having gone freelance early-on to give me the flexibility to work how and when I could, I worked part-time hours, was careful not to take on too much and avoided jobs that would be too fiddly and computer-heavy. I tried various workstation set-ups, took lots of regular breaks, tried various forms of exercise and therapy.

Late twenty-teens:
By about 2018 though, things seemed to have hit a real low-point. The pain was getting worse and dominating my life more and more. I was taking bigger chunks of time off work between projects to recover and my personal life was getting narrower as I avoided more and more everyday situations that would cause me pain.

June 2019:
A chance comment on a Facebook thread about mindfulness apps led to a suggestion from Rachael Roberts that I take a look at Curable, an app aimed specifically at chronic pain sufferers. The results were pretty dramatic. It feels a bit silly to say that an app managed to ‘cure’ 20 years of pain in just a couple of weeks, but I think it was just the right thing at the right time and brought together a lot of ideas I’d been aware of for a while but hadn’t known how to act on. I won't go into the details, because we’d be here all day, but it basically centred around mindset and my attitude to pain. It didn’t fix my wonky shoulder, but I learnt how to turn the volume down on the pain that had started bouncing round my brain’s wiring out-of-control. I went from taking strong painkillers pretty much daily to maybe 3 or 4 times in 18 months.

Coronatimes: 
Despite everything goin on in the world, 2020 on the whole was actually okay in terms of both my physical and mental health. After a fairly busy few months in the spring, work dropped off a cliff through the summer and I had 4 months with pretty much no work at all. Of course, it was all a bit worrying, but thankfully, I got government grants that kept me going financially and the weather was fabulous! My partner was out of work and being cooped up at home together wasn’t great, but with the good weather, we could use the garden as an extra room, there was lots of walking and gardening and we rubbed along fine.

Come the autumn, my work picked up again and I’ve been more-or-less flat-out since October – which is great, but maybe not so healthy. As the weather got worse, the days got shorter and my partner got more bored and despondent, I found myself spending longer stretches at my desk, avoiding leaving my office for my usual regular breaks because I didn’t want to be disturbed. By mid-December, I was getting tweaks in my shoulder. I partly put it down to the cold damp weather, but I knew that too much desk-time and increasing tension (mental tension leading to physical tension) were to blame too. By the end of the year, I was exhausted and at the end of my tether with no reserves of energy to draw on to do the clever, pain-subduing mind trick.

2021:
So far this year has been a tough slog; ploughing on with work, going out for fewer walks because I’m really feeling the cold in my joints, and feeling generally resentful and low. Thankfully, I know that I’ve always struggled with winter and I also know that I usually start perking up in March, so I’m hopeful that the advent of spring, along with the gradual easing of lockdown here in the UK will signal an upturn. I’m also just coming to the end of one work project and it looks like the next project I have pencilled in might be a bit delayed. So, I’m planning a much-needed week off. Of course, I won’t be able to go anywhere or do very much, but a bit more walking, perhaps a bit of pottering in the garden. If I can relax and recharge just a bit, then I think I can get my priorities back in perspective - even in these weirdly out-of-perspective times - and get my health back on track.

My coronacoaster II: underemployed and restless

Back at the end of May, I wrote about coming to the end of a stretch of work and not having anything more lined up as publishers froze projects and pulled work in-house. Since then, things have been kind of mixed.

Ups: On the plus side, I seem to have a number of projects lined up for the autumn. If everything comes off (which admittedly is far from guaranteed!) I should have a fairly steady stream of work from the end of Sept through into next spring. There’s a nice mix of projects; some corpus research and some writing, some vocab-focused materials and some more general English. It’s a relief to know there’s work coming up, although I’ll be happier when I get some more definite confirmations, schedules and contracts in place. As ever with freelancing, a lot of initial offers are tentative and it can seem to take an age before they’re confirmed, leaving you in an awkward planning limbo.

Downs: On the downside, it’s been a very quiet summer. Since the end of May, I had a few odd hours in July and August on one on-going project. Which was good – and a nice project to work on – but only added up to something like 25% of my usual working hours through June-Aug. That project’s had a (planned) pause since the middle of August and was due to start up again last week, but has now been delayed.

Restlessness: Like most freelancers, I’m not good at being underemployed. I can cope with the odd quiet patch if I know I’ve got something coming up, but especially with not much else to do at the moment (because Covid), I soon get restless and grouchy. Thankfully, the UK’s had a surprisingly good summer this year which has made things a bit easier. When the weather’s warm and sunny, it’s easier to potter in and out of the garden, go for nice long walks and as things have eased up, meet friends for socially-distanced, outdoor coffees. Last week was tough though. First, I had the let-down of expecting work to restart then finding out it wasn’t. Plus the weather was rubbish – grey and rainy and positively autumnal. I’m generally pretty good at keeping myself occupied, but after more than 6 months at home, I admit to getting distinctly bored. I’ve done plenty of walking, but as I don’t have a car, I’m tied to only walking from home and having done the same routes a thousand times, I’m really starting to crave a change of scene now.

Time for a break: Thankfully, this week, the sun’s back out and on Friday, we’re heading off for a week away – woo hoo! - our first holiday for a year and my first night away from home since February. We’re not going very far, just a week in a holiday cottage on the Isle of Wight, but it’s right by the sea and I’m sooo looking forward to just being somewhere different.

So I just have a handful of days to get through feeling restless, unsure whether there’ll be any work this week or not, and not 100% confident that the projects I have pencilled in for when I get back will pan out as I’m hoping. It feels a bit odd to be taking a holiday after doing so little work over the past few months, but boy, am I ready for it and the chance to properly switch off.

10 ways to tackle coronavocab: #10 My Corona

Over the past nine posts, I've been exploring some of the ways the coronavirus pandemic has changed not just our lives, but our language. I've looked at new coinages, new uses of existing words and phrases, and words that have suddenly spiked in use.  If you've missed any of the posts, click on the links below to see what we've covered:

#1 Coronacoinages: coronacoaster, isolife, infodemic 
#2 Trending terms: isolation, hand sanitizer, face masks 
#3 The Science: pandemic, PPE, herd immunity 
#4 New compounds and contexts: social distancing, lockdown, shielding 
#5 Learning and teaching: homeschooling, remote learning, asynchronous
 #6 Metaphors: the unseen enemy, perfect storm, spread like wildfire 
#7 The Stats: flatten the curve, pass the peak, second wave 
#8 Phrasal verbs: lock down, ramp up, ease off 
#9 Work:  WFH, remote working, furlough

As I said at the outset, not all students will want to spend their ELT classes talking about the pandemic. Some may want to switch off from it completely, others may be happy to dip into coronavocab for 10 minutes here and there but not get too bogged down in it. Hopefully, the tips and angles I've suggested have provided ideas for those occasional dips. I've tried to deal with the new vocab along with general language points too where possible so that it isn't just a throwaway activity focused on a bunch of potentially transient buzzwords, but it helps reinforce more generally transferrable knowledge.

Many of the activities I've suggested involve students talking about their own experiences of the times we've been living through, whether that's studying or working from home, or the practicalities of day-to-day life in lockdown. So I wanted to finish off with a set of vocabulary that isn't new and isn't unique to the current situation, but is, nonetheless, really important. To digress for a moment, a couple of years ago, I wrote a unit for a vocab book about health. It was B2 level and some of the target vocab went a bit beyond trivial coughs and colds, with items like cancer and mental health. As I started putting the material together, I realized that if learners were going to talk about these things, it was important that they had not just the key words, but the language to talk about the way those things affect people too. And after some discussion with my editor, I included words like experience and support as equally important target vocab. Which is a slightly long-winded way of introducing some vocabulary to wrap around the other topics to help students express the way everything that's happened and is still going on has affected them, to talk about their own experiences, feelings, hopes and expectations for the future.

ELT publishers are always keen to emphasize the positives, to avoid topics (and language) with negative connotations and to make their materials 'aspirational' … but life isn't all about the positive stuff and I think learners need to be equipped with the linguistic tools to deal with the downs as well as the ups. That's not to say you want a lesson that's all doom and gloom or that you feel equipped with the skills to deal with a topic that turns into a counselling session! With that in mind, the suggestions below are a mix of language to acknowledge the challenges but also express the positives. Which language you choose to focus on will, of course, come down to a judgement call about your individual students, their age, context, etc., but I think some of these could provide a springboard from some great language work and mixing some of them in with the previous vocab sets will give learners the tools to really express the realities of their own coronaverse.

Examples in context:

I do really miss going out and being with lots of people.

Many of us have found lockdown frustrating.

Even though everyone's experiencing things in different ways, there is so much overlap.

Some people are still wary of returning to campus

Customers who are struggling with the impacts of COVID-19 will be allowed to defer loan payments.

Teachers reported working long hours to support these students during remote learning.

I can't wait to get back to playing football.

If anything, being without baseball has made us appreciate it more.

One local fitness instructor decided to make the most of the outdoors to help her neighbours keep fit.

We have a deeper appreciation for social activities that may have been taken for granted in a pre-lockdown world.

The pandemic has changed the way we work almost overnight.

We're all adapting and adjusting to the new normals.

Activities:

• There are lots of possible quickie activities here: 5 things you miss(ed), hate(d), find/found frustrating during lockdown, 5 things you're looking forward to when things get back to normal, 5 things you've appreciated more, etc.
• Many of these verbs and phrases are followed by particular colligational patterns (look forward to + ing, can't wait + to do, be bored of + ing, help sb do), so start off with an activity matching sentence halves where students have to think about both meaning and grammar. Then get them to take the first parts of the sentences and add their own personalized endings.

1 I do really miss … 
2 Some people are still wary … 
3 I can't wait …
a of returning to campus. 

b to get back to playing football.
c going out and being with lots of people.

• If you want to deal with some of the negatives without getting bogged down, get students to use the vocab to create pairs of things they've found difficult or missed and things they've appreciated more or are looking forward to doing again. They could just be simple sentences or you could get creative and get students to make them into social media posts.

• The new normal is a term that you hear a lot at the moment, but what will it be like? If you've been dealing with the language of future predictions (will, modal verbs and adverbs), then there's plenty of scope here for students to make their own predictions about how we'll probably all have to adapt and adjust and change the ways we do things.

 

This series of posts was prompted, in part, by the work I did on ETpedia Vocabulary which is also grouped into sets of 10 tips about different areas of vocabulary teaching. So if you're looking for more ideas …