lostinasia: I was coming at it from the perspective of a junior high school teacher, where the kids still have a spark in them and their teachers can, and will, be hard on them. From all that I’ve read on these fora, university is like a day care centre in this country. It’s just about the only age group I haven’t taught in Taiwan, and I have zero desire to do so.
Loretta: I’m having a very flat day emotionally, and your posts are normally quite uplifting, so the more depressed tone today is really doing my head in.
I try to set a certain bar in my classes where we will do interesting and fun things, but the kids have to put some effort in. I’m not going to give if they’re not willing to give in return. That’s very emotionally draining otherwise. Many of my kids are really starting to figure that out and probably 80-90% of the seventh and eighth graders are pulling their weight. With the ninth graders, it’s more like 50%, up from probably 20% when I first came here. There are still some constant and slightly malicious troublemakers amongst the ninth graders and I’m done with being nice to them. I know that their other teachers have issues with them too, and that there’s the possibility that we’re all bloody useless, but they complain of the same issues that I do.
This morning, I woke up and while I was lying in bed, I was thinking about this whole thing. By the sounds of what you’ve written, it seems like (at least when you wrote it), you feel the same way. I want to do my job well, but I don’t want to do my job. If someone handed me a big bag of money, I’d walk away. Perhaps I would come in and do a few select private lessons with some students here, but I wouldn’t work here full-time. Most of the kids I teach are nice enough kids, and my colleagues are nice enough, but there just isn’t an air of seriousness here. I’m six weeks into the semester here and I still haven’t got an accurate timetable. I’m scoring all sorts of extra free periods every week because no one can organise things properly or tell the students and their homeroom teachers that they have a small class with me at a particular time on a particular day each week (or, as with today, no one bothered to tell me the kids have exams today and tomorrow – so today and tomorrow, I have only one special class), or because whenever there’s some extra activity that needs to be done at school (rehearsals, test preparation, outside reading programmes in Chinese, a wood carving class once per fortnight, etc.), my classes are almost invariably the ones that get cut. It’s really slack, and that’s cool in a sense, but it’s not serious.
In general, this school isn’t serious. My wife was telling me recently that at one of the after school assemblies, my supervisor (who is a director) was telling the kids they’re really slack. Yet how many of my colleagues do much preparation for their classes? How many turn up to class on time? Why would they then expect the students to study hard, put a lot of effort into their classes and be on time and attentive in class? Back in Australia and England, I did a lot of sub work, so I’ve seen probably well over a hundred different schools. After a while, I could tell, after arriving at the reception and talking to the daily coordinator, what sort of school I was going to be teaching at that day because there was just a certain tone to the place and the person. You just knew that certain places meant business. The tone to this place when I arrived a week before semester began was that my supervisor, despite having several months’ notice, hadn’t found anywhere for us to live. In fact, he wasn’t even here! Nor was the principal. Further to that, because the school was still trying to fill three positions (at one point they were even seriously considering my wife – who studied commercial design – as a chemistry teacher), they still hadn’t worked out the timetable. So, I came here a week early, cleaned up my room a bit, and then spent the rest of the week doing nothing because there was nothing for me to do.
The person who runs this programme for this county says that I am the quietest person in the programme because I’ve never sent him an email or rung him to complain. I’ve asked my supervisor several times to do certain things. I’ve hinted about others. He’s not a stupid guy. He just came to tell me, after the fact, that I don’t have classes today or tomorrow because of the exams. I already found this out from the students twenty-five minutes before he came to tell me when I went to find out why my students weren’t in class. At some level, and a pretty obvious one to me, I’m just not important. If I were to contact the coordinator of the programme in this county to tell him all of the above and about ten times more, what would it achieve? Even if he were really motivated to change things, what power does he actually have over my superior or the general ethos at my school? Even if he could twist arms, what would that do for my working relationship at the school?
I have a whole lot of ideas about a whole lot of things, including really trying to get some professional development going in this programme, but I don’t think any of this really matters because this isn’t professional to begin with. There are a whole lot of other ideas I have, but unless they’d be window dressing, no one would really put any effort into them.
When I first came here, my supervisor told me that he felt like the previous two years with the teacher before me had been a bit of a waste. Why is that? Is it because she was constrained by the system here and couldn’t live up to her potential (and apparently, she was quite good friends with one of the other teachers here who told my wife that the previous teacher used to complain a lot about my supervisor)? Was it because she didn’t know what she was doing? Well, if she didn’t know what she was doing, what were the support mechanisms in place, especially professional development? Maybe she just wasn’t right for the job. In that case, what’s going on with the recruitment process and why isn’t Taiwan going about trying to recruit really top-notch teachers?
The answer is because none of this – and none of us – is taken seriously. All over Taiwan, there’s money being thrown left and right at these fucking English Villages, despite no one really knowing what the hell those are good for, if they’re good for anything, rather than saying let’s get some big names in EFL to come along, set up a really excellent programme and train or recruit teachers, including with the Taiwanese English teachers.
So I look at it all and ask myself what I should be doing about this for myself. A few months ago, I was actively looking for particular types of jobs abroad, but even if they have better conditions and are more professional and aren’t as full of crap as what’s going on here, there are other issues to consider, namely that my wife would quite possibly be a real fish out of water and very socially isolated elsewhere, particularly if she weren’t working (and she most likely wouldn’t be unless she could start a small business or run an online business). To complicate things, we’ve recently moved to a proper house with a proper garden and all of that jazz in a nice little town. Some of the locals are real hicks, but most are nice, and some of my students drop by to help in the garden and my wife cooks for them. We really like it where we live right now. Yet if I decide to stay here, in the (un)professional side of my life, this is probably (95%+ probability) as good as it is ever going to get. Short of eventually getting a principal who a) really knows about EFL, and b) really cares and isn’t a show pony trying to make a big name for himself like my previous principal – and why would such a principal be at a school in the middle of nowhere in Taidong County? – nothing is really going to change here. I am still going to be dealing with all of the same stuff and I will never get a promotion within this system, and so have some say over it.
My only saving grace is that I have a decent amount of money invested and continue to save and add more to that, so it’s quite likely that in ten or so years, I will be able to walk away from this and live very comfortably (though not to a developed nation, obviously). In the meantime, I want to do this job well out of a sense of professional duty and personal pride, but I don’t want to do it.
Well, that was quite cathartic!
