Roused by the alarm at 2:15 a.m., Susan Jensen quickly dresses, starts the coffee and flips on the lights in the office of her Savage townhouse. By 2:30, she's applied coral lipstick, popped on a headset and positioned herself in front of a colorful bulletin board.
"Hello!" she says cheerily as she smiles and waves into her camera-equipped laptop. "What did you do today?"
Via a Skype-like video portal, Jensen begins a 25-minute session, teaching English to a child in Beijing, where it's 3:30 in the afternoon.
Jensen, 62, is part of an army of about 40,000 North American educators who are bringing the fundamentals of English into Chinese homes through an educational platform called VIPKid. It's among the largest of several platforms that beam English teachers into thousands of homes on the other side of the world.
"I've fallen in love with online teaching," said Jensen, who works most mornings and adds time slots some evenings as well, drilling phonics, initiating conversation and practicing intonation.
"You can cover a lot of concepts in 25 minutes. It's a very effective way for them to learn."
Based in Beijing, VIPKid was founded in 2013 by a Chinese teacher who operated an English tutoring center. Frustrated by a shortage of North American teachers, she decided to use technology to pair students and tutors.
It also gives retired teachers such as Jensen a way to keep working with kids and allows younger teachers to supplement their earnings without the testing pressures, parent conferences and after-hours paper grading that accompany a traditional classroom job.