Native English teachers are a commodity in Mexico City. You can get paid very well as a teacher depending on what type of teaching experience you are looking for. I currently make between $150-240 pesos per hour teaching English to business students. There are a around a dozen small businesses offering English classes to business students and I am contracted by a couple of them. The companies line me up with the students, arrange the payments and the evaluations. I just show up and teach. Well, at least I try to teach. Business students often cancel. Everyone still gets paid or does the paying but no classes actually happen. It's weird. Most of these students are one-on-one, intermediate to advanced levels. Just me and the one student. I have one class of 6 and that is my favourite. I like the interaction that happens when there is more than one student. I also teach privately.
Private clients are paying out of their own pocket and if you have strict rules for cancellation, then you can generally count on their attendance. My goal is to move towards all private clients. I think the issue here is you may not find clients who can pay as much as the big businesses or they might decide after a couple of classes that they really can't afford it after all. The drop-off rate can be quick.
i have looked into the option of working at an English School. You teach at a school - so one location the whole time. You don't have to travel around and you are not tempted to shop all the time.:-). (SHOPPING - that will be my next entry.) They will most likely help you get your FM3 - which is the legal way to work in Mexico City. If you want to work full-time then you will have to do split shifts. Morning shift and late afternoon-evening shift plus Saturdays. That really turned me off, but as it turns out, I am doing split shifts anyway.
The one school I looked into also provided a month of training before you teach. This is their way to test you out as well. The pay there was $50 pesos per hour which is a BIG difference in pay from the business students. Maybe you will be teaching students who really want to learn. Maybe the teaching experience is much more rewarding. Or maybe not. I'm tempted to find out. Here is a website with the list of all the possible English Schools in Mexico. I couldn't recommend one over another: http://www.eslbase.com/schools/mexico
Another experience I tried was working at a private secondary school teaching English to 13-15yr olds. Wow - I wasn't ready for that. I had some big vision of going in there and making lots of friends with the teachers and the students. Hanging out, feeling like these are my homies. Nope. I felt generally quite alone and isolated. I had no support and the kids were holy terrors in the classroom. I had no idea how to get them to shut-up, sit down and learn. Other teachers yelled a lot. I'm just not interested in that sort of stress level. I love kids though. I think it would be really rewarding outside of school. Teaching a small group of kids could possibly be the ideal experience, but I have not figured out how to arrange something like this.
I did tutor one 8 year old two times per week. I brought my paints and paint brushes with me. We told stories, drew pictures, made flash cards and watched short learning english videos. It was great and she learned a lot! I need more of those types of students.
Learning a new language is difficult and it can get frustrating very quickly. As a teacher, I need to be patient, calm, cool and collected. I can't take it personally when people quit or cancel. It is just part of the job as a teacher here in Mexico.
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