15 minutes demo

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
1

I have 3 interviews next week and all the schools mentioned that I will have to do a 15-mins demo lesson.
I thought I would make up my own one, but they said that they will give me about half an hour to review the teaching material, right before the demo. I only know the age of the kids and - in one case - that I will teach on material to prepare the final exam for summer camp class.

Any advice / experience with this?

Thanks

2

All three schools said the same thing? Are they all kindergartens? 30 minutes preparation is probably the maximum they are used to.

Get the kids’ chairs into a horseshoe and make sure you engage each of them while drilling. Be careful about legality depending upon your work rights.

3

Isn’t teaching kindy illegal for expats on work visas here? 15 mins does seem short for a demo.

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If there are actual children present, @OP, be aware that you’ll be working and if you don’t have a work visa, you’re breaking the law.

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5

Be careful about legality depending upon your work rights.

6

Yes, and 15 minutes is standard for that and buxibans. It usually is an interruption on the actual teacher’s class time. Once a school asked me to do an hour and I ended up walking out after the “evaluator” left for awhile and I decided that, while there was probably and actual job, they really wanted to say they’d had a foreign teacher in that day.

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7

You could do a lesson about the legality of teaching demos. That might be fun for the kids.

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8

No, kid’s age will be 8-9 at one school and 10-11 at the other two.

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How could a non-paid demo be considered working? Seriously.

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For one thing, usually you get paid after you finish a job, so if you said “its just an unpaid demo”, theres be no evidence of your lying or not. “This foreigner is just doing a demo” is a classic line by cram schools that are getting busted for long-term illegal employment of foreigners that dont have work permits. There are too many other discussions on this subject on this site for me to go into further detail.

But actually, im pretty sure that any work, paid or not, requires a work permit. So that time I grabbed some trash bags with some friends and we cleaned up the beach (before I had an APRC) was “working without a permit” and therefore technically illegal. Obviously immigration has better things to do, but if we’d posted all over social media about it and someone was having a bad day, we could have gotten in huge trouble (based on “the letter of the law”)

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Do cram schools have to apply for permission to arrange foreigners to work as probationers, to do a trial teaching, to make an off-the-cuff speech, or to do a teaching demonstration and guidance?

If a foreigner provides labor services or works, even if it is free of charge, it is also considered to be work

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12

Thank you Tando for the links, and can anyone translate the following in English:

"… Unless, the “teaching” behaviors of the foreign teachers without students on site, otherwise all are read as “the provision of the labor services”,

and cram schools shall follow the rule in Article 43 in the Employment Service Act to apply for the work permit for the foreign teachers first."

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Seems you can do a demo if there are no students

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Any unpaid work performed by foreigners is illegal, even if agreed upon by both parties.

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15

I’m no lawyer, but I can attempt to translate the pidgin English into more colloquial and hopefully grammatically-correct English, while simultaneously attempting to preserve the original sentence structure and word order as much as possible.

“With the exception of those ‘teaching’ activities that are conducted by foreign teachers without students on site, all other such ‘teaching’ activities are considered as ‘provision of labor services’, and as such, cram schools shall follow the rule in Article 43 in the Employment Service A.”

In other words,

As an aside, was the original quoted text really that difficult to understand? I would imagine that, as an English teacher, you would be required to understand and interpret poorly-written English texts from students, whose English level would probably be far below that of the above-quoted text…

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16

Why do you fail to understand such a basic concept of working? Even a demo in a classroom with students is “working” and if you do not have an APRC or JFRV or student ARC with work rights then working without a work permit is a risk. It does not matter whether your are paid or not.

A person on a tourist visa is not allowed to work, paid or unpaid.

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17

Yup, in basically any country on earth.

18

[deleted to avoid further confusing an already-confusing issue]

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Yeah, dunno. Could be the room or could be the building :man_shrugging:

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This one tried to use a tourist visa to enter the USA for work. Yes she was to be paid. Same for some Australian journalists who flew to the USA to cover an event and tried same thing. Tourist visa instead of getting proper visas.

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