March of 2020 impacted the entire world. No one was an exception. Some found themselves in awful situations, some didn’t. But no matter what things changed for everyone.

Here is the story of how a global pandemic led to a language program getting started.

I found myself unexpectedly stuck at my parents' house in the US with no way to return to my home in Costa Rica. I was about to graduate from a Masters program, and had no job. *Insert panic here*. So what did everyone do during that time? They spent hours on social media. Again, I was no exception. The instagram algorithms knew I was an English teacher and suddenly I started to see so much content related to grammar, vocabulary and general ESL topics. However, to my surprise - I hated basically everything I saw. Everything seemed off - either the content was too boring, made only for kids, way too long, or way too fast, too detailed, or too simple. Oftentimes it was simply incorrect altogether. So I wiped my jobless tears and said, “I can do better than that.”

So, I started a silly Instagram page. It was far from perfect, and I suddenly realized why all the other content was bad - this was hard!! But, I kept doing it. Suddenly an old friend from Costa Rica contacted me and he, Juan, became my first student! From there I found a few other people and a few other people found me. I had no idea how to do everything. I literally taught for an entire month and didn’t get paid because I didn’t even know how to request money from people. But again, I kept going!

Everything was fun and new but soon I was in over my head. I don’t remember how I made the original connection, but somehow I started talking to a former coworker and friend that I knew from Costa Rica. Her name is Kourtney, and we started talking and then she got in on the Speak More teaching fun too. That’s when the name change happened. It was out with the “Molly” in the title and in with the more generic “Me”. After that, Zsuzsi came on as a kids teacher and for about a year we functioned like that, all three of us working together to create content, but teaching our own private students under the Speak More umbrella. Then the exciting day came where Zsuzsi had a baby and Kourtney moved to Korea - so they were off on their own adventures! Luckily Molly had people right around the corner to join the team and keep things moving. Ale, who is Tica, started teaching kids Spanish classes. Kristen joined and started teaching English private lessons and created and led Business English courses for groups. Later Erica joined to teach private adult lessons.

We are small but we are mighty! We love our students and we love what we do.

Read Molly's Bio

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