English teachers thought of as professional drop outs

The lowly profession of teaching English in Taiwan, is it really looked upon as being lowly? Many Taiwanese I have talked to have the same conclusion. Set aside for the moment the fact that many and most English teachers on this little rock make 2 to 3 times the average salary of a University graduate here in Taiwan. I’m just talking about the status symbol. Apparently, many Taiwanese view foreign English teachers as people who could not cut it in their own country. A professional flounder, a drop out form that great rat race for fortune and glory, and as such isn’t really qualified to be considered a professional at all.

My GF doesn’t mind at all, given the salary potential (I already make 2 times what she makes and work fewer hours than her). But she did confirm what I was told by others. We come and educate their children, they pay us loads to do it, and yet we are looked upon as being people who couldn’t make the grade back home.

Do you honestly think that the average Taiwanese thinks of the foreign English teacher this way?

Think of your own feelings for your language teacher. I do think poor old English teachers do cop an incredible load of shit for what can be a very honourable job. Perhaps the Taiwanese are just angry because they’ve spent almost as much on English lessons as they have defending the country and still can’t speak English for shit.

HG

Yes, from the Taiwanese I’ve spoken to this is a very popular sentiment here. I think it’s more an indication of an individual’s low self-esteem than anything else. What kind of person has such a low opinion of their country that they see foreigners who visit it as burnout losers who couldn’t cut in their respective lands? :loco:

I’ve also heard that, but they conveniently forget about the fact that there aren’t any fringe benefits attatched to the salary.
Who would work here for a third of what they’re earning now? That would be about NT$ 20K to NT$25K. You would be lucky to pay your bills with it. You could make more than that in South Africa, let alone Canada and the USA.

I prefer “life arteest.”

There are more important things in this life than giving two shits about what people think about one’s occupation.

Whenever someone says that to you derek, immediately buy a round of drinks and say, “Go f…” nevermind…I’m trying to be nice again. :angel:

derek wrote [quote]people who could not cut it in their own country. A professional flounder, a drop out from that great rat race for fortune and glory, and as such isn’t really qualified to be considered a professional at all. [/quote]
And it gets worse. You come here in your 20s, a world of possibilities before you; then you sober up one day and realise you’re about to hit 40, no career, no future, you have no savings (are actually reduced to searching your apartment for coins to pay for your next beer run) and you’re stranded in Taiwan, dreams turned to ashes, and the only thing you can hope for is an honourable death. :laughing:

And it gets worse. You come here in your 20s, a world of possibilities before you; then you sober up one day and realise you’re about to hit 40, no career, no future, you have no savings (are actually reduced to searching your apartment for coins to pay for your next beer run) and you’re stranded in Taiwan, dreams turned to ashes, and the only thing you can hope for iis an honourable death. :laughing:[/quote]

Bullshit, you hope for drawn out choking on a hotdog whilst washing it down with cold beer in front of a great footy match, or rugby, or whetever the hell you people watch. :wink:

Classic :bravo:

fuck 'em. haven’t they ever heard of a thing called “life choice?”

when i was younger, i decided i just wanted to work part time. my bosses would ask, so you have another job?

no.

you’re going to community college?

no.

why don’t you want to work more?

just want to work on my jazz.

oh (loser on their face).

why do these middleclass slaves feel one has to justify his/her time? if i wanna work half a day, so be it. life choice. ain’t asking for no handout.

If Mandarin became very important to learn and a bunch of Chinese and Taiwanese came over to your country to make some big bucks, people with degrees in Science, Business, etc., wouldn’t you think they were doing so because they couldn’t make it back in their home countries? Why else would they come over?

[quote=“jdsmith”]I prefer “life arteest.”

There are more important things in this life than giving two shits about what people think about one’s occupation.[/quote]

Wisdom folks. You only get that after realizing most people don’t give a shit about your reason after 5 secs of asking the question. Also, comes with age. :laughing:

Respect is earned, folks. There are plenty of dropout English teechurs here. There are also some very fine, intelligent, well-educated educators whose better students quickly recognize that they have found something special, and who recommend them enthusiastically to others. Some teachers develop a reputation for excellence and are highly respected. The same can be said of any field, really – doctors, lawyers, mechanics, hair dressers, chefs… quality breeds respect. And higher incomes.

Yes, it is quite possible to become King Shit of Turd Island. Easier than becoming the King of England.

To screw our women?

I enjoy my job and work hard at it.

Do I have a degree in education? No.

But I have learned a lot about teaching in the past 6 years.

I planned on coming for a year or two but i’m still here cause I like both my job and living here. (Most of the time :wink: )

I really don’t care what anyones opinion is of me. I feel good about myself and that is all that matters.

I’d have to agree that there is a deep rooted local perception that teachers are in Taiwan because “they couldn’t cut in their own country.” In the inimitable Taiwanese fashion, many people will let fly with direct comments about what they think of you as English Teachers. These are the people with no class, manners, or tact, so it’s easy to dismiss them as assholes. What gets you is when you realize that most other people share similar views but are just too polite to say so.

Many years ago, Hess Language Schools ran a commercial on T.V. In it, two down-and-out bums are sitting homeless and penniless on the street in their home country. One filthy urchin asks the other, “What are we going to do, we have no job, no money, no prospects?” And his white trash companion answers, “I know! Why don’t we go to Taiwan and become English Teachers!” This ad ran on T.V. for a couple of years, despite much protest in the local English language newspapers, in the form of letters to the editor. (Hess’ point was - At Hess, we hire experienced professionals, while other schools use fly-by-night drifters, who have no qualifications). This one reprehensible ad was hugely influential in shaping the public perception. Hess did not give a shit that it tarnished the image of the profession as a whole, as long as it was good for Hess. Many articles in local newspapers and magazines persued similar themes. (I had one student tell me that their teacher at school had told him the same thing)

The painful truth for those of us who have worked in the profession is that there is an element of truth in this sterotype. I myself arrived in Taiwan with very little money, little experience, and no training, and I worked for some very fly-by-night “buxhi-bans” in my first year, when it was still possible for any schmo to open a school, and to hire any warm body that could pass themselves off as a “native English speaker”. After 10 months of being pimped out by greedy agents, I buckled down, got a job at a very good school, embraced the training they gave me, and became an excellent teacher. But, I’m not so proud of my early career, nor am I proud of the many expats who come to Taiwan and never take their work seriously. In a general sense, when people intimate that you are here because you can’t make it back home… it stings a bit, regardless of how you deport yourself - in the same way that it’s okay for you to criticize your own family, but take offense when other people have a go at them.

Back in the day, particularly when that friggin ad was showing, and students would let a comment fly, or ask me directly, I would remind them that many schools in Taiwan have high standards for their teachers, train them well, and that all of us were University degree holders, working with work permits from the MinEd – and we all pay taxes! And when pressed - yes, but you are here, because you can’t find a job at home - I’d reply that many of us chose to live in work in Taiwan, because we love it here, love the international experience, enjoy chinese culture and language (Do you really have so little appreciation for your own country that you can’t understand how others might find living here appealing? Actually I had several students tell me that they couldn’t understand why anyone would want to come and live in the ROC unless it was for huge money or out of desperation). And when pressed even harder, I’d remind them that in the US (for example) hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese, and millions of Chinese have come seeking economic opportunity. Do the States really need yet another Chinsese restaurant? Are the people that open them “professional cooks?” Does it really matter as long as the community is satisfied with the end product and gives them business? (My perspective, by the way, is that of an adult teacher - 99% of my 12 years in the profession in Taiwan was with adults)

(Another variation to this popular conception is, You are only in Taiwan because you can’t find a woman back home. The message is still - we know you are a loser. This has been covered ad naseum in other threads.)

As for the salary issue - yes, English Teachers can make as much as, or even quite a bit more than office people working for local companies. On the other hand, most teachers make no where near as much as Taiwan’s white collar professionals or entrepreneurs. And, yeah - the “out of the box” money that can be made in English Teaching, while not a fortune, does kind of make people resentful. Perhaps that’s why every other cabbie wants to know how much you make, because they want to remind themselves why they dislike sombitch English Teachers.

First, if they have a degree in science, business, etc., then I would not suspect that they couldn’t cut it back home. If they’ve got a degree they can at least beat out the high school dropouts and people who just get out of high school for jobs.

Second, I would suspect they took the job because they wanted an experience outside their own culture. I’d think of them as explorers. They could make as much, or a little more within their own field of study, but they’d rather see the world.

What I wouldn’t think of them as professional educators, though, until they proved that that’s what they were.

Disclaimer: I am not an English teacher but I would like to try and look at this from the other viewpoint.

I personally know a few Taiwanese teachers. They work hard. REALLY hard. And you know how much they make? Top end of the scale is about NT$80,000 per month for a lady who’s been at the same school for over ten years. These people live for teaching and one guy I know gives up more unpaid time for his kids than he actually gets to himself. Imagine how you would feel if you spent the best years of your life testing into this that and the other school, working towards your BEd/MA, going through all the teacher training and working your ass off for some foreign kid with a degree in Advanced Beers Of The World to waltz along and pick up NT$600/hr+ for speaking her native language with no training and limited desire to teach.

I worked for a year as SENCO in a UK primary school - stupid government-approved abbreviations aside, that means I taught the uncontrollable autistic children how to behave in a mainstream classroom. I grew really fond of the kids and had a lot of admiration for the teachers I worked with; the amount of work and dedication that your average primary school teacher puts in is nothing short of astonishing. Working with such troubled children was often emotionally draining but I felt lucky to know that when I clocked off at 3:30pm my job was done. What’s my point? Well, I think teaching is a really special profession and deserves respect not just from students and parents but the teachers themselves. In England the pay isn’t great and there’s a lot of competition at primary level, so everyone I know chose their profession out of love. (I was making NT$300/hr. In England. That goes about as far as a dead tortoise up a mountain. My Aunt has been teaching for 20 years and makes less than NT$1200/hr). Of course you get the odd exception or bad egg but the majority are what you would call top-of-the-line people.

Now, I honestly do not believe that even 50% of Taiwan’s foreign English teaching population are in it for anything other than some cash and a bit of fun. This is not really the fault of the teachers themselves and if it were any other profession I’d say, ‘good on you!’ However, we’re not talking manual labour, editing, copywriting, programming… we’re talking about some very delicate and important years of children’s lives. And I’m bracing for impact with this bit but here goes… a very sizeable chunk of the “English teachers” (quoting to distinguish the real teachers here) I have met around Taiwan are proud of the fact that they booze it up every weekend, shag as many women as possible, stuff as many drugs down their gullets as they can practically manage and then turn up on Monday morning to address a group of impressionable seven-year-olds. I don’t care what they are like in the classroom - as far as I’m concerned, this kind of behaviour does not put one in the right frame of mind to deal with young children. If you teach adults, go ahead, have fun and see what you can get away with. But children? It just seems very wrong to me.

I have sat in on several classes led by foreign teachers and I’m sorry to say that every one of them was dreadful. The kids all had a great time and most of the teachers were very entertaining, but they had no idea how to control a class and no idea how to actually teach. I’m sure if parents wanted their kids entertained they could get in A-Huang The Perpetually Perturbed Clown for half the price. I do, however, know some really upstanding foreigners who teach English. They take pride in their work, spend time preparing lessons and try to get as much training as possible. Unfortunately, they are not the majority and anyone here who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves. The teachers I have met through Forumosa are, I’m pleased to say, all good’uns. I applaud those good’uns and feel sorry that they are brought down by not-so-good’uns. Unfortunately, the Taiwanese opinion of the English teaching foreign populace is not entirely without merit and you have an uphill struggle not against the Taiwanese but the fellow “teachers” who are dragging you back. Good luck!

To screw our women?[/quote]

Well, duh. Of course! Big bucks make them the big cheese and then they get all the big women.

First, if they have a degree in science, business, etc., then I would not suspect that they couldn’t cut it back home. If they’ve got a degree they can at least beat out the high school dropouts and people who just get out of high school for jobs.

Second, I would suspect they took the job because they wanted an experience outside their own culture. I’d think of them as explorers. They could make as much, or a little more within their own field of study, but they’d rather see the world.

What I wouldn’t think of them as professional educators, though, until they proved that that’s what they were.[/quote]

Nah. They go to Taiwan 'cause they can’t get a good job back in their own country. If you want a good experience, why the hell would you sacrifice a dental career or whatever to teach English to little brats? Doesn’t compute. “Oh boy! Let’s go teach English to Chinese kids! Great idea! Good experience!”