Not English in general — the English your own business runs on. The client call you dread, the handover nobody reads twice, the meeting you sit quiet in. Our expert teachers build every session around one of them.
Every teacher’s experience and qualification is verified before their profile goes live. Many of ours have spent years teaching English in China.
A stripe is one real situation from your working week — the vocabulary, register and confidence to handle it. You don’t learn English. You earn the next stripe.
We are not a content app and not a general marketplace. Everything below exists to get you in front of the right teacher and keep you moving.
You tell us the situations you keep getting stuck in and how you like to be taught. We score every available teacher on four inputs and send you a shortlist. You pick. The teacher reads your brief and can decline — both sides choose, so nobody starts a course they are wrong for.
Every session works towards a named stripe: a real situation from your week. The client progress call. The audit interview. The handover email nobody reads twice. Same teacher each week, so the context carries over instead of being re-explained.
Every teacher’s classroom experience and teaching qualification is verified before anyone can book them. Certificates are checked with the issuing body, not taken on trust from a PDF. If we cannot verify it, it does not appear on the profile.
Generic English lessons plateau, because nothing you learn ever gets used at work. We fix the second half of that sentence. Here is what it looks like next to how tutoring is usually sold.
Four inputs, published openly, adding to 100. Experience carries the most weight, but weight is not the same as importance — all four are scored on every teacher, and each one has a floor.
Verified years in a real classroom. Many of our teachers built theirs teaching English in China.
Pace, directness, and how much correction you actually want in the moment.
The specific workplace situations you want next, and whether they have taught them.
Teaching credential, confirmed directly with the body that issued it. Non-negotiable.
A low weight is still a gate, not a rounding error. Qualification is worth 10 and is also a pass-or-fail check — nobody unverified is shortlisted. A teacher with twenty years’ experience but the wrong working style for you does not make your shortlist.
Self-declared, unchecked, and worth nothing. You find out how experienced they are in lesson three.
Where they taught, at what level, for how long — verified before the profile is published, with the certificate confirmed at source.
Teachers give away hours to compete. The cost lands somewhere, usually in the quality of the paid lessons.
Teachers are paid for every hour they teach. You get the brief-and-choose step instead of the audition.
You are matched to a calendar slot. When it does not fit, you start again with someone new.
You pick from a scored shortlist. The teacher reads your brief first and can decline.
Grammar drills and topic vocabulary, disconnected from anything you will do on Monday morning.
Every session targets a named situation from your own working week, and it counts as earned once you have used it there.
You are told you are B1, then B1 again six months later, with no sense of what changed.
Progress is a list of workplace situations you can now handle. You know exactly which one is next.
One workplace situation you can handle in English — the vocabulary, the register and the confidence for it. Running a toolbox talk is a stripe. Handling a client escalation is a stripe. You and your teacher name them at the start, work through them in order, and mark one earned when you have used it in real life, not when you have practised it.
Probably not, and we would rather say that up front than imply otherwise. Our teachers are experienced English teachers, not people recruited out of your profession.
What they are good at is taking a situation from your working week and building the language for it — which is a teaching skill, not an industry one. You bring the context. They bring the years of knowing how to turn it into something you can actually say.
You tell us the situations you want to handle and how you like to be taught. We score every available teacher on four inputs — teaching experience 40, working style 30, your stripes 20, qualification 10 — and send you a shortlist with their scores shown.
You choose one. That teacher sees your brief and can accept or decline. If everyone on the shortlist declines, we widen the search and come back to you rather than putting you with someone who does not fit.
Qualified English teachers with years of classroom experience, many of them built teaching English in China. We verify the teaching history and confirm the qualification with the body that issued it before a profile goes live. What we do not do is foreground where a teacher is from — you are choosing on what they have taught and how they teach it.
$500 for eight sessions, usually run over about two months. That is the whole cost — one price, no membership fee, and nothing taken before you have chosen your teacher.
Eight is deliberate. It is enough to work through a handful of stripes properly and use them at work, rather than sample the idea and stop. When the eight are done you decide whether to carry on; there is no rolling subscription to cancel.
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. We do not promise exam results, job outcomes, visa outcomes or fluency timelines — nobody honestly can, and the ones who do are selling you something else.
What we do promise is what we can verify: your teacher’s classroom experience and their teaching qualification, both checked before you ever see the profile.
No. There is no minimum level and no test to get in. We match on the situations you need and how you like to work, not on where you are starting from. Your teacher has taught people at your level before — that is what the experience weighting is for.
Tell us and we rerun the match, with what we learned from the first attempt feeding into the next shortlist. You are not locked into a package or a term, so switching costs you a session, not a programme.
“People don’t plateau because they ran out of vocabulary. They plateau because nothing they learn ever gets used at work.” Founding note, 2026
You reach the point where you can hold a conversation, order lunch, get through a meeting — and then progress stops. Not because the lessons were bad, but because they were about English rather than about Thursday’s client call.
Bouncing Zebra matches working professionals with experienced English teachers and builds every session around one real situation from your week. Many of our teachers spent years in classrooms in China. All of them are verified before a learner ever sees the profile.
We are a small team, and we are deliberately narrow. We would rather match a hundred people to a teacher who suits them than a hundred thousand to the next one available.
Geoff teaches, and he owns how everyone else here teaches. The curriculum, the way a stripe is broken down into a lesson, and how teachers are trained and assessed are all his.
He spent years in classrooms in China before this, and that is where the method came from: lessons built around one real situation a learner had to handle, rather than a topic from a book.
Geoff’s teaching history and qualification are verified to the same standard we hold every teacher to. Nothing appears on this profile that we have not confirmed at source.
Two minutes of detail is enough for us to start scoring teachers. If we cannot match you well, we will say so rather than send you a shortlist of near misses.
Prefer email? admin@bouncingzebra.com