Corey

Online ESL teacher | Founder of Kapua | Helping independent online teachers spend less time on admin and more time teaching | 8 years experience

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

I’m an online ESL teacher with 8 years of experience working with learners of all levels in the United States, China and across Europe.

I’m also building Kapua, a calm local first desktop workspace for independent online teachers.

The idea is simple.

You teach. Kapua remembers the rest.

Kapua is being built to bring student history, teaching notes, schedules and admin into one place, so teachers can spend more time teaching and less time searching, rewriting and trying to remember.

I’m sharing the teaching journey and the building journey openly. I want to meet other online teachers, exchange ideas and understand the real problems that make this work harder than it needs to be.

If you teach online, what is the biggest admin headache you face each week? I’d genuinely like to hear it.

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

Best correction technique I know for online ESL: don't correct in the moment.

Note it. Keep the flow. Do a 90-second recast at the end.

Fluency stays intact and the correction actually sticks.

What's your go-to?

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

Eight years teaching online taught me one thing: the teaching is the easy part.

It's everything around it that makes people quit. The scheduling, the chasing, the admin that outlives the lesson.

That's the problem I'm building Kapua to solve for independent online teachers.

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

Teaching a beginner online? Cut your teacher talking time in half.

Then halve it again.

Most of us fill silence we should be handing to the learner. The lesson isn't a performance.

How much of your last lesson was you talking?

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

Independent online teachers: batch your admin into two windows a week and defend them like lessons.

Sunday evening. Wednesday morning. Everything else waits.

The scattered version of this job is what burns people out. Not the teaching.

When does your admin actually get done?

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

English teachers and learners, which apparently simple word creates the most confusion once you try to explain how people actually use it?

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

Filipino online teachers, which platform has treated you best lately, and what is one thing you wish overseas students understood about the work behind each class?

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

When AI saves a teacher time, where should that time go first: better feedback, better lesson planning, or simply finishing work earlier?

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

Parents teaching at home, what activity keeps a child engaged far longer than you expected without turning the lesson into chaos?

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

What is one education tool you still use every week because it genuinely saves time, not because your school paid for it?

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

Teachers heading back after the break, what is one classroom routine you refuse to skip because it saves your sanity later?

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

What is one piece of research you wish every teacher encountered before entering a classroom?

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

English learners, what is one word you understand perfectly when reading but never feel confident saying out loud?

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

@WeinsteinEdu My online classroom has a beautifully coordinated theme called whatever was already behind me at 4 AM. The coffee mug is the centrepiece.

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

@pitdesi A subscription for the toilet is where I draw the line. If the payment fails, does it enter read only mode?

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

@thatguybg A library can hold every tool. It still cannot replace the opinionated workflow that makes a product useful. Context is the moat.

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

@sattyyouneed Plenty are. The problem is that most automate the visible activity rather than the hard part, which is finding a message people actually care about. I would pay for clearer customer insight before I paid for another content generator.

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

@pcshipp Building gives immediate dopamine. Marketing asks you to repeat the same message long enough for strangers to care. The painful answer is probably to freeze features for a week and talk to users. Have you ever tried that?

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

@_chenglou Please do not approach the wild artwork. It may appear friendly, but it has already added six fingers and turned the moon into a chandelier. Report sightings to your nearest mood board.

[Corey @Sacredcorey]

@gdb Rich formatting sounds tiny until you have reformatted the same lesson plan for the tenth time. That may save me more irritation than the headline features. What is the most underrated change in this drop?