If you are advertising your classes on the internet do be aware of the tutor scam. As usual they are after your money so don't be caught out. See also: http://bobservant.com/radio.html

Some details may change but in essence it works like this:

• You are asked to quote for providing tuition do a vistor to this country (sometimes a minor)
• They may ask for your teaching experience and address
• They ask for your bank details (sometimes only after you reply) 
• They pay you in advance but overpay
• They ask you for the extra money to be repaid to someone and because the original payment has cleared you think it is OK. (I gather that it needs to be given value rather than simply cleared)
• The original payment is then reversed by the bank.

 

 

What do intructors need bring along to classes I wonder? Remember the old days when you had to bring along a bunch of CDs and a ghetto blaster to play them on?

I decided to try and reduce the about of 'stuff' I take to classes this week. I thought about going cold turkey on the music but my students weren't keen on that idea so I did the next best thing.

I loaded up the mobile phone with a few albums of tai chi music (licensed for teaching purposes), bought the cutest little speaker for the princely sum of £13, popped it in my pocket and turned up to class feeling a bit naked without my sound system.

Everyone loved the little speaker and one of my students said they had one at home that they had bought for taking abroad as it weighs so little and takes up hardly any space in the luggage. For a small hall with around twenty students just the one speaker was enough and two was sufficient to fill a much larger space  (you can just daisy chain them).

As things start to wind down for the Christmas break I hope you were able to look back on the year with some satisfaction. it is worth spending a bit of time considering how to make sure 2011 is an even better year.

Taking a look at some of the top tools for tai chi teachers I thought of Twitter and Facebook. Yes they are certainly popular but are they going to save you time and effort or are they turning out to be big time wasters. Only you can decide. Now I am assuming that as you are reading this,  you already have your classes listed on Tai Chi Finder so we'll take that as a given.

1. Join the Tai Chi Union (UK/ Ireland) They do a great job organising events like training sessions and arranging instructor insurance. Not forgetting of course the excellent magazine they publish several times a year www.taichiunion.com
2. Travel Light - Loading  your music onto your mobile or ipod means one less thing to carry to class unless you are one of the lucky few to have your own studio. The cute X-Mini speaker, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand packs quite a punch and can happily come with supplying music to a group to 30 student in a small hall.
3. Groupspaces - Stay in touch with your students with a free website from www.Groupspaces.com. They come with built-in features to simplify club admin, such as multiple mailing lists, a forum, calendar, web pages and even a wiki to leak information about your club! ThiMailchimp.com this up and coming resource has already become very popular with university clubs where it started and is expanding rapidly both in the UK and the USA.
4. If you have over 250 members and just want a mailing list application then consider instead using the free option at Mailchimp.com
5. Why not kit out your club members with Feiyue shoes. We offer a 25% discount on our already competitive prices for orders of 10 or more pairs and can ship to most places in the UK and Europe.

You may have noticed the new social media login option.

We thought it might make things easier (as logins can be easily forgotten) if we gave everyone the option of signing in through their Facebook account. Then having noticed that many of you have hotmail and gmail accounts we thought it might be usefuly to add Windows Live and Google. Once there we added a couple of others for good measure. Anyway we have used it and found it quite convenient but do let us know how you get on.