Not at all. But open up an unlicensed kids school in my building and you’ll get a visit right quick! 
You can teach onsite at businesses (I d0) but when you bill the big ones they won’t pay you unless your bill is from a registered company with a license number. Think about it. All the big companies that provide a teaching allowance for employees will, for pretty obvious reasons, only sign this off with licensed bushibans. You may well be able to get students from smaller businesses, but they won’t get a teaching allowance so it’s effectively the same as getting any adult student.
Apologies for the curt response regarding advertising and accounting. I was a little annoyed with some of the posts I was reading.
We employ an accountant who cost us 10,000NT last year. Hardly worth worrying about as a cost, and big peace of mind. Tax is negligible anyway (this is a very good country to do business).
We don’t spend too much on advertising. I think around 100k or so last year on brochures, a couple of advertising hoardings at 30k. You aren’t going to get many students through advertising in my opinion, it’s about selling. Standing outside schools talking to parents, handing our brochures, visiting companies, building relationships, word of mouth. If you can’t sell, don’t bother.
This is a repsponse to Guy in Taiwan and Okami by the way.
[quote=“Loretta”]I
If you want to be a great teacher who really makes a difference to people’s lives then you have to educate the parents.
[/quote]
Agreed. But why go through the hassle? Remember, it is all about the money. If you want to make a difference in peoples’ lives then go volunteer to teach in shithole anywhere. I respect the hell out of you but you seem to want the best of both worlds…
You see it as a “problem” whereas I would see it as an opportunity.
[quote]Everybody is so focused on pushing little precious to the top of the heap that they don’t notice that all of little precious’ friends are also scrabbling to get there, with the result that the whole heap moves slightly but the same kids are at the top. Little precious is now forced to work fourteen hours a day just to be mediocre.
[/quote]
That is the whole truth.
One of my students, this year was the number one student at Jian Guo Boys’ Senior High School.
He never studied very hard. He just never forgot anything he was told and enjoyed everything he did. He was simply intelligent. The only bushiban class he went to was my English class. I take no credit for his success at school, though his parents laud me all the time. In fact, it is them. They are both doctors at Academia Sinica and great tutors, obviously. I’m sure the same is true for all the also runs at Jian Guo.
He also got a fairly rounded education as a result of not spending all his free time studying.
On the other hand, most of my students have to grind it out and work much harder than is fair. If it weren’t called education it would be listed as a human rights crime.
To me the problem is actually in the reliance on bushibans. I can kind of understand it for English, but not math, science, and Chinese. What are they doing spending all those hours in the classroom at their regular schools?
The problem lies in the social contract. There is a fundamental lack of trust between schools, families, and the government.
Nicely put!
I have an American friend, we went to high school together, who has a Taiwanese daughter who is 10 months older than the house kitten. They’re here in Arkansas now for a month, but she’s making her daugher study Mandarin while she’s here. I think she’s being rediculus. She admited that part of the reason for this is so that she can show off her daughter’s language skills. My friend doesn’t speak Mandarin herself.
Until her daugher started studying in the Taiwanese schools, my friend talked about how the Taiwanese kids didn’t get to have a childhood and how sad that was. Her daughter didn’t speak any Mandarin before she starte school, so she struggled at first and had to deal with being made fun of by classmates and teachers when she didn’t do well on school work because of the lack of language. It’s been three years and she’s all caught up now, but my friend has become just like all the Taiwanese parents who push their children relentlessly. I guess the pressure gets to everyone.
But you are the worst teacher in the world!
If you ask any of your students what they do in their Junior High School bushibans, or their anxinbans, they’ll invariably just say that the teachers help them with their homework. Isn’t this the job of the parents? I appreciate that often both parents work, but even families where one of the parents (OK, mum) doesn’t work the children will still be sent to additional classes pretty much all day. I guess there’s a lot of cultural pressure to do this; you’re failing your child if they don’t go.
Teach a child English up to the age of 12 and their English is incredible. Compare it to the level of French amongst British teenagers. When you think about how different Mandarin and English are I think it’s amazing how good these kids get. However, after 12 the kids stop going to English bushiban, move to a JHS bushiban where they get prepared for the JHS cloze tests, and watch their English ability fall off a cliff.
It’s very sad.
That’s my method. Provide a totally shit program where only the brightest and most intelligent can shine through. It’s a tough row to hoe for the lesser lights whose hopes are dashed by my endless incompetence. But for those one or two who survive, who stick it out, there is a faint glimmer of possibility like that which exists in the imaginal cells of the DNA soup inside the chrysalis on a Monarch butterfly that sparks the clues to their own metamorphism–a rare and beautiful thing on the human level, yet so common place for insects.
Here’s a simple question no one asked. How many students did your school have and how much profit did you make monthly? How many hours per week did you work and what percentage of the net profit came to you, partners, etc.
Simple question, really. Most people open schools so that they can make more money for every hour they work as oppose to just teach for someone else. How much money went directly into your pocket and for how many hours worked, plus, how many students did you need to have to achieve these numbers.
Someone I know has a student base of 100. He doesn’t work in the school. He hires managers and they do everything. He spends half the year running a bed and breakfast on Borocay meawhile the school operates without him. He told me that if he worked there the money would be a lot better, but as it stands, he makes about 25k a month in net profit. That’s it! So he could let go of his manager, and even teach a class or two and the coins saved on payroll translates into additional profit.
In other words, if he worked there full time, he would be making a tad more than the average buxiban teacher on 30hrs/week. That’s with 100 students.
How about you? How did it work out for you? Spill the beans, already.
marboulette
It’s actually a very easy equation. If you have a very basic school with rent of 40,000 and you are a competent teacher with full classes you can very well teach 75 students every week by yourself.
If the fee is a mid-range 10000/48hrs, you can make 250,000/month. Deducting the rent and minimal running costs, you should be able to make 200,000 minus tax. If you ran another classroom or got your rent down you can bank all that. The issue is the start up fee is high. It makes much more sense to buy a failing school with a license and build it up. In the end, rent is the most important thing to keep under control. That is about your only fixed cost. Admin. for a 75 student school is minimal, but unless your Chinese is good you’ll need a contact person and even then parents often just like to deal with a Taiwanese.
Going to a larger scale is difficult and not easy to make profitable.
I don’t understand the point that you need to educate the parents. If you do a good job then results are observable by outcome. I recall the C class at HHHS out performing the B class, and being asked if I had helped the students to cheat in their test. “No. I just did my job better then you.” This kind of reply gets you fired, which is the real lunacy. Oh wait, the real lunacy was that they they curved the grades so that the B class walked out with higher grades than the C class to make things look right.
Loretta: Great post. I liked the following in particular:
Like anything, there’s such an incredible law of diminishing returns at work. I see kids at school, 7:30 in the morning, but also throughout the day, asleep on their desks. It seems like a waste of time pushing a kid to stay up studying until midnight if the following day is going to be a write off.
Indeed, though I think you’d have to be an exceptional salesman to break through the mantra of “my English sucks because I don’t know enough vocabulary” enough of the time.
This is a fascinating insight that I’d only barely thought about before. I think you’re right that in some ways, being a licensed operation with premises could very well be hindrance in a strange psychological way, if you’re talking about differentiation that is. There’s some mystique about being a “consultant”.
This is precisely my point about consumer choice. These people have obviously realised or believe, for whatever reason, that they need a certain thing, no more, no less. Why force them to pay for anything other than what they want? The most successful guy I know here, someone who is literally beating off job offers with a stick, never went to university and has been here illegally for two years. He’s really ballsy and a great salesman, and he obviously knows how to provide people with what they want. The more I think about him, the more I think I should ask him if I can observe him in action one day.
I think they are apples and oranges though. Don’t British teenagers start to learn French once they’re about 12 or so? The Taiwanese kids I know who are not good at it by that age (who probably struggled by doing only elementary school classes and no buxiban classes), yet still have to grind through it, absolutely hate it and actively resist it in ways quite similar to the ways kids in the West do. I suspect that if you impose anything new and difficult on adolescents anywhere you’ll get the same results. I suspect that if you took a whole bunch of British kids who had been learning a language quite intensely for several years before they hit adolescence, you’d see a similar thing to those kind of kids here.
Fox: Your numbers seem to make sense, at least on paper. On paper, yeah, sure, it looks like you could bank 200,000NT/month. I’m sure that is quite possible. However, you’re saying with 75 students, and I think that’s the kicker. It depends upon how good a salesman you are, and it depends upon your competition. Those big chain schools have a few hundred kids, but they spend a considerable amount on putting their name out there. The smaller schools I really wonder about. The start up costs are high, for sure, but even if you spent 1,000,000NT in startup costs (and you could do it for a lot less, I’m sure), and it took you six months to build up to only making 100,000NT profit per month, you’d still have made your money back in less than one and a half years. By the time you take out the opportunity costs of wages that you would have had somewhere else, you might say that you’d be way in front after two years. I’m sure Taiwanese could achieve a much faster return on their investment. If that were the case though, everyone would be running a buxiban, really. I suspect that in most cases, the competition makes the outlook a lot less optimistic. I really can’t see that it’s that easy to make 200,000NT/month.
How is the outcome measured though? Most buxibans do all their assessment internally, perhaps so they can bamboozle the parents. I certainly saw that when I worked at Hess. Little Johnny may have got a 98% on his test, but what did that mean?
So you assess them externally, like a junior high school exam, right? Then the teaching becomes geared to achievement on those tests, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with English fluency. There’s also the possibility that a lot of it may come down how much the kids do outside your lesson. I know from experience that I did have some really great music teachers in my time, but I was a slack bastard and didn’t practise enough (or at least the stuff they wanted me to practise) outside of the lessons. Now you might just say that they didn’t motivate me to want to practise, but I’d just say that it was because it was mostly my own, lazy fault. I do think this whole thing of outcomes is quite nebulus, especially when you’ve got the parents on your back about giving the kid more vocabulary (whether he can use it or not) and passing a junior high school test.
12 is the ‘optimum’ age, learning-wise. They fail because they only do it for three hours a week, and are allowed to stop when they are 14, not because they stop too late. It’s all about quantity and quality of input and motivation. 6-yrolds at Taiwanese buxibans succeed because they have more classes and because peole don’t care if they are motivated, they simply force them to do it.
I know dozens of adults in Taiwan who learned Chinese so that they became literate as adults in a few years. I’ve seen adults go from poor, error-ridden Chinglish to good B2 levels within a year simply through persistance and motivation. Children cannot do this because they don’t have the cognitive skill. Why not leave them to develop that cognitive skill and then let them choose language if they want to?
Time and again, people on this forum complain that ‘they’ have ‘no critical thinking skills’, etc, etc. Yet presumably ‘you’ do. That’s all because they are all stuck doing poor quality, pointless, time-wasting English lessons, instead of being educated. The majority will not succeed because they are too young.
‘British teenagers don’t speak French’? I do. Most don’t. It’s a stupid fallacy that firstly everyone needs to learn a difficult foreign language, and that’s not to sound elitist; I wasn’t rich or special and my parents didn’t send me to extra classes. Secondly, it’s idiotic and is not borne out by common sense, experience or research that east Asian native language speakers learning in shitty cheapo extra classes from the age of three produces any improvement in the general level of English. The MOE are fully aware of this, btw.
I may be pissing in the wind by writing all this. I think it’s a shame that Taiwanese kids are subjected to this constant money-grubbing. It’s not fair for people to make their cash doing it. it’s not about the market, and ‘everybody else is doing it’ it’s about YOU. Are you a force for good or a force for bad or simply not a force for anything?
[quote][quote]
TomHill wrote:
If you do a good job then results are observable by outcome.
[/quote]
How is the outcome measured though? Most buxibans do all their assessment internally, perhaps so they can bamboozle the parents. I certainly saw that when I worked at Hess. Little Johnny may have got a 98% on his test, but what did that mean?[/quote]
Well, you as the teacher should be aware of improvements in their skills. If a parent wants an observable proof then give it to them.
It’s all a cost versus leverage thing.
It is actually fairly easy to get 75 students, it is hard to leverage those 75 students to 200. There are a number of reasons for this.
Whilst one good teacher can easily teach 75 students a week with 15 kids in a class. If you want to expand the class size quality quickly suffers and you need to employ teachers aids to support the teacher because the workload of just one extra student can make it impossible to hit the remaining students effectively. That means your costs go up pretty quickly if you need two people to manage a 20 person class. Also getting more than 20 in a class then leads to logistical problems in terms of class size and space and finding 20 students at one level. Many schools do deal with these problems some very effectively, but the issue as I raise it is that it quickly complicates management and cost effectiveness.
The other issue is that you most likely won’t have all your classes firing on full capacity and you start to see the picture a little differently than if you are an individual teacher trying to make a go of it. You are now a school manager and confronted with just keeping numbers as a whole up in the school. These problems arrive very quickly beyond the 75 student level. If you cannot cope with the management – staff (foreign and local teachers), teachers aids, front office girl, program management over a variety of levels and still maintain the touch that attracted your original 75 then expansion is difficult and many people simply blow it.
Where as if you were stashing away your money for 75 students month after month without the expansion issue you’d be getting paid better than a doctor for less than 30 hrs a week of classroom time.
The start up costs if you build an original school would be closer to two million than one million: however, you could easily buy a school for less than the start up cost of an original school. A coat of paint can do wonders.
Except that:
a) the outcomes are not apparent to new customers when they come in for the consultation. You’re asking them to take your word for it that you know better than the establishment, which they may come to believe after time as they see an improvement in performance, but which is a big ask for a walk-in. We’re talking about a new school, remember.
b) someone else pointed out that outcomes are measured by standards that you or I may find questionable, eg they want to pass some vocabulary local test but we want them to remember that processes are described in the passive.
c) [quote] they they curved the grades so that the B class walked out with higher grades than the C class to make things look right.[/quote]as you said, you can’t trust the school’s own reports of outcomes. I’ve seen this happen everywhere, including universities…
In other words, you have to educate the customer about what a good outcome is and how to measure it. Difficult when they’re obsessed with what they know and not receptive to being told that they’re wrong by a mere foreigner. First you establish your bona fides, then you identify problems, then you obtain a commitment to change, then you make the sale. And only then do you worry about making it affordable. (affordable <> cheap)
That’s basically what I’m saying. If you can’t do that then you’re just a service provider, like Fox is pretending to be. (However I suspect that he’s a lot better at this than he’s letting on.) The customer decides what he’s buying, and you compete on price. If you do it my way, you decide what the customer is buying, and then you have to make it affordable. This depends on his finances, not his preconceptions of the value of an English teacher.
Btw, most Taiwanese don’t understand that ‘sucks’ is a verb and will use it as an adjective. My English is sucks. And they usually refer to ‘vocabularies’. They demonstrate to you with everything they say that their grammar is not adequate to express themselves using the vocabulary they already know. But you’re saying that we should go along with this and let them tell us what to teach? Screw that. I want to have fun in my classes, not pander to ignorance.
A good starting point in your sales consultation (I work with adults, not kids) is to give them the following and ask them how many mistakes they can find: Because my English is not very well so I must learn more vocabularies and improve my pronounce. The point is that none of the mistakes are vocabulary errors, they’re all to do with grammar or logic. An average good student might spot three, maybe even four. This illustrates that they are making avoidable mistakes and they need your help to correct their bad habits. You could also point out the less obvious errors, and demonstrate that there is a lot more to learn about communicating in English than just memorising word lists.
Oh, and you could also discuss the issue of how many words they need to know to achieve a specific goal. Give them the list of the 283 words used in “The Cat in the Hat” and ask them to write a story. Or just make a few coherent sentences. If they can’t do it then you’ve made your point.
Don’t try this if you haven’t gained their trust and respect already! It just pisses them off. Like you said, you have to be good at sales. 
A new school… Let students come to demo classes. Make classes be subject focussed, rather than grammar focussed, show the weekly plan that you have to the students so they can see the mix of grammar and skills lessons. This weeks topic is health. Grammar point is present perfect VS past simple. Monday: Reading. Tuesday: Listening and speaking etc. Word list for the week is: (provide list) Students will be tested on spelling, meaning and grammar on Friday.
Simple as. Put the learning in their hands.
I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot today. Unless you are truly exceptional and famous, which I’m not, there is an upper limit to the perceived value of a teacher which is not dependent on the customer’s finances.
Teaching a regular class, you’re typically worth NT$5-800/hr. In exceptional cases a few people make, say, NT$1200. This is pretty good, but it’s not really “a lot”. If you have the right connections you can make more, but it’s very rare to do so for regular classes. The MoE, for instance, usually sets the standard at NT$1600/hr for ‘expert’ lectures by specialists but you’re unlikely to repeat the same lecture very often. I have met people who claim to occasionally command figures in excess of NT$2000/hr but it’s certainly not a regular occurrence and even if it is… you’re in competition with those people in a very small market.
Private students are the same. Even if they have lots of money, a glance at tealit tells them that the going rate for a private tutor is maybe NT$600/hr. The average as reported by MYU was NT$700/hr the last time I looked. Why would they pay two or three times that? You might be able to make a case for being worth NT$1000/hr or more, but not a lot more. You reach a limit pretty quickly.
So as a teacher there’s a pretty clear upper limit to how much money people are willing to give you. I think this applies to the suggestion that you ask a parent to provide a room and fill it with students for you. You become an employee, and your value has a pretty clear upper limit. I think you’d be lucky to get NT$1200/hr and might have to settle for a lot less.
On the other hand, people will pay a lot more in relative terms for a class. NT$200/hr/student sounds cheap, even if there are 10 people in the class. But only as long as there isn’t a customer in the middle expressing opinions about what is fair or reasonable.
For IELTS/TOEFL preparation you might push up past NT$300/hr/student. Twenty in a class is not too many, most of the time, and in fact you could also go the route of mixing big lecture-style classes with small-group tutorials. Imagine the Saturday lecture with 60 students all paying NT$150-200/hr, say 4-6 hrs of ‘teaching’, and split them into four groups of 15 (M,Tu,W,Th evenings?) for tuition at NT$300/hr.
Those kinds of numbers are acceptable to customers who wouldn’t give you more than NT$800/hr to sit with them in a coffee shop. Whether you could actually find that many students at one go, and whether you could find a suitable venue at an affordable price, is the million-dollar question.
I don’t think that being a freelance teacher has the same potential as being your own school, legal or not. As Fox points out, there is still an upper limit, but it’s a lot higher than someone who rents himself out by the hour. But there is no guarantee of getting enough students into the class to make the bigger money, and you can easily find yourself working just to pay the rent. It’s a conundrum.
I guess the first issue is marketing. How do you get enough people through the door that you have an oppportunity to make enough sales to fill the classroom(s)?
Why? You’re losing sight of Taiwan now that you’re in the real world again.
I sick. I am headache. My head is hurts. He have puke. Today I go MRI scan.
No. More. Fucking. Vocabulary. Until. You. Get. The. Fucking. Basics. Right.
The free introductory class can either confront their uninformed preconceptions head-on, causing a crash and departure without money changing hands, or it can be completely unindicative of what will happen after I get their loot.
Before you put them in a class you have to make them understand that learning more words is not going to solve their basic problem. Nobody is going to achieve that target score in an international test until they change their fundamental understanding of how the language is used. If mommy wants precious to learn more vocabularies, then putting him in a class that requires him to produce acceptably correct sentences instead is not going to endear her. She needs to understand that good English is not a jumble of rare and impressive words, no matter how well they are pronounced or spelt. She needs to be educated, so that you can do something helpful for the students. Until you do that, the result will be as you described.
‘We have a saying in Taiwan, “foreign English teachers are like potatoes.”’
Ring any bells? It’s what people say when they need to be educated before you can do your job.