How do you feel after a day of work?

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
1

I feel CRAP. Tense (tension headache, tense jaw), irritable, tired…

I teach Oral English 3 days/week at uni and do IELTS examining 2-3 weekends/month. That means I have lots of free time - no excuse that I’m overworked.

I can’t believe how chipper my IELTS colleagues are after a weekend of examining - chatting all the way home in the taxi. I just want to STFU and be in a very quiet place.

After I finish teaching the best thing for me is a shower, followed by a couple of beers, at home.

Can’t figure out why. Burnt out? Depressed? Fed up with life in China (three in Taiwan, seven in China) and/or the work?

TBH both jobs bore me to tears but I’m earning just shy of 100k NT, so I should be laughing all the way to the bank.

Your thoughts? Your experiences? Your advice?

  • This is not a winge. This is a genuine request for feedback and advice.
2

I sometimes have the same problem and I think it’s just my personality - I come off as outgoing, but the truth is that I LOVE BEING ALONE. I love working alone. Having people staring at me, waiting for me to tell them what to think next, me directing their attention - it makes me miserable.
My answer was to teach no more than 2-3 hours a day. I edit and write for extra income, and find that this solitary work recharges me.

3

Burn out (or whatever people want to call it) is a funny thing because it’s very difficult to spot any obvious build-up.

My main advice would be to take a break as soon as possible. Preferably quite a long one - 3 or 4 weeks if possible. You should be coming up to your uni break reasonably soon, no? And the IELTS can be easily dropped for a month or so.

4

Personally, I like to go online and lie about my salary.

For instance. Sometimes when I get done teaching my 2 hours a day at kindy, I’m get so sick of the constant dribble from my colleagues: " Where are you going to spend your bar of gold Dizzy?" or “Lets spend ours on hookers and booze T!”

I just don’t know what to do with all these gold bars and bags of diamonds they pay me in?

lately i’ve been thinking about cutting back to just 1 hour a day.

Teaching English is such a drag.

T

5

The teaching is only seven 90 minute lessons/week. Re. staring - besides the students in class staring, which I guess they need to do when I’m instructing them, I get stared at by 1000s of students on campus. And 100 000s of people on the streets. And It aint cuz I’m Brad Pitt’s brother in China.

Re. solitary stuff - I’ve become much more insular in the last ten years. Not sure why…

[quote]Burn out (or whatever people want to call it) is a funny thing because it’s very difficult to spot any obvious build-up.

My main advice would be to take a break as soon as possible. Preferably quite a long one - 3 or 4 weeks if possible. You should be coming up to your uni break reasonably soon, no? And the IELTS can be easily dropped for a month or so.[/quote]

Could be burn out. Every time I have a month back home in SA, or even a few days in Taiwan (like last month) I come back and feel charged up … for about three days. Uni holidays are coming up - four months of them (unpaid), and yes, IELTS can be put off for a month.

Where do go Mr Tomthorne? Somewhere in SEA? I got some loot in the bank that could roll a vacation, but there’s times where I’ve left Thailand earlier than expected, out of mmm, boredom. One solution would be to spend more time with quality people and they’re not that easy to locate in this neck of the woods.

I remember leaving China in frustration after my first six months here. Flew to Bangers, got a cheapo room in a guesthouse near Koh San, and ended up hanging with the coolest crew - a Brit, a couple of Americans, a Dutch dude, a Class A South African dude whom I’m still good friends with (became a flight steward recently). Before I knew it two months had rolled by and I was happy camping again (my credit card wasn’t happy though). I think I need a (support) crew…

6

[quote=“achdizzy1099”]Personally, I like to go online and lie about my salary.

For instance. Sometimes when I get done teaching my 2 hours a day at kindy, I’m get so sick of the constant dribble from my colleagues: " Where are you going to spend your bar of gold Dizzy?" or “Lets spend ours on hookers and booze T!”

I just don’t know what to do with all these gold bars and bags of diamonds they pay me in?

lately I’ve been thinking about cutting back to just 1 hour a day.

Teaching English is such a drag.

T[/quote]

That NT547/hour is mad good cash bro, raking in the dough. Rolling. This hater be hating…

7

Sweaty.

No aircon.

(This is a genuine whinge, not a request for feedback or advice)

8

Visit SF , spend a week with tommy (you will be glad when you got back) and be good for another six months . :smiley:

9

Go halves on the ticket and I’ll head that way. Always wanted to visited that neck of the woods!

10

Like I need 2 beers and 4 showers.

The reason it can be extremely tiring for me has nothing to do with my not wanting to talk all day or not liking the job. What gets to me are the students who have zoo-animal levels of listening and interacting ability. I mean you could put rockets on your legs and grow a 3rd head, and these students would still be busy staring into space with mouths agape. They’re basically overgrown infants who have never been made to pay attention to or focus on anything other than a TV for more than a few seconds. Nobody holds them accountable or interacts with them at home, it’s always painfully obvious when this is the case. These are the same kids who run around supermarkets screaming and running into people’s legs while their parents shuffle along, simply too lazy to do anything about it.

And it only takes 1 or 2 in the class to exhaust you. You gotta repeat stuff like 3 times to them before they even start listening (including simple instructions like ‘be quiet’ or ‘look at me’…sometimes you can even give them the answer and they look at you with blank faces, forcing you to repeat…sometimes they find something funny while you teach and laugh, which is ok of course, but then they can’t stop giggling like idiots with no self-control. Just abhorrent levels of focus and attention (especially when it’s older children)…as I mentioned you can even be playing a game or teaching them something cool and fun using pictures and video, still zero response. They don’t have to pay attention to or respect their parents at home so why should they do that with their teacher? I’m not so easy but it drives me crazy to see their Chinese teachers playing nice with them and babying them even more, asking them politely to stop doing something then getting ignored…and then being ok with it.

So I guess that’s how I feel…putting 100% into not only teaching English (which I find extremely easy on it’s own) but also doing my part to raise some respectable kids with the tools to one day turn into respectable adults…knowing all the while it’s pissing into the wind. But in good conscience I can’t stop trying, because that would make me feel infinitely worse.

Also it’s too hot. :discodance:

11

[quote=“mups”]Like I need 2 beers and 4 showers.

The reason it can be extremely tiring for me has nothing to do with my not wanting to talk all day or not liking the job. What gets to me are the students who have zoo-animal levels of listening and interacting ability. I mean you could put rockets on your legs and grow a 3rd head, and these students would still be busy staring into space with mouths agape. They’re basically overgrown infants who have never been made to pay attention to or focus on anything other than a TV for more than a few seconds. Nobody holds them accountable or interacts with them at home, it’s always painfully obvious when this is the case. These are the same kids who run around supermarkets screaming and running into people’s legs while their parents shuffle along, simply too lazy to do anything about it.

And it only takes 1 or 2 in the class to exhaust you. You gotta repeat stuff like 3 times to them before they even start listening (including simple instructions like ‘be quiet’ or ‘look at me’…sometimes you can even give them the answer and they look at you with blank faces, forcing you to repeat…sometimes they find something funny while you teach and laugh, which is ok of course, but then they can’t stop giggling like idiots with no self-control. Just abhorrent levels of focus and attention (especially when it’s older children)…as I mentioned you can even be playing a game or teaching them something cool and fun using pictures and video, still zero response. They don’t have to pay attention to or respect their parents at home so why should they do that with their teacher? I’m not so easy but it drives me crazy to see their Chinese teachers playing nice with them and babying them even more, asking them politely to stop doing something then getting ignored…and then being ok with it.

So I guess that’s how I feel…putting 100% into not only teaching English (which I find extremely easy on it’s own) but also doing my part to raise some respectable kids with the tools to one day turn into respectable adults…knowing all the while it’s pissing into the wind. But in good conscience I can’t stop trying, because that would make me feel infinitely worse.

Also it’s too hot. :discodance:[/quote]

Are you my doppelganger?

The thing that really drives me up the wall is when I ask who doesn’t understand and then a kid raises his hand. I stop the progress of the class to go over it again so that kid will understand, and what does he do? He immediately starts screwing around with the kid next to him, which is why he didn’t understand in the first place (because he wasn’t paying attention then either). So then I get annoyed or move the kid or punish him in some other way and he/the other students/my co-teacher/the homeroom teacher thinks I’m being really unreasonable because no one else has ever held the kid accountable in his life. No one has ever held the adults in the kid’s life accountable in their lives either, including half of his teachers in their sheltered workshop/iron rice bowl/creche for adult government jobs.

With some of these dumbarses, I just want to knock their heads against the wall and say, “Wake up you fucking idiot! This is why you’re never going to amount to anything in life. This is why no one in your family has ever amounted to anything in life. This is why you’re all poor trash who live in a tin shed on the side of a mountain.” Complete waste of time though, but like you said, I can’t just switch off. This problem is endemic to mass education though. Short of taking all of these clowns out of the class (which rarely happens), what else can really be done?

The other one that drives me up the wall, and that I still just cannot seem to de-condition from kids is that if I ask a kid a question, even in Chinese, someone else will always answer for him. I then turn to the other kid and ask him if his name is the other kid’s name. Christ, if I’d wanted to ask the second kid, I would have either asked the second kid or put it out as a general question to the class. It’s just another way in which the smart kids cover for the serial fools in the class. Instead, all those kids who want to learn should be riding those kids who constantly slow the class down due to misbehaviour.

With all of these things, I do have strategies for dealing with the kids, but they’re only marginally effective, and I also end up wasting tons of time each lesson (I really want to bring a stop watch into my class and time it one day) moving kids around, waiting for everyone to shut up, etc., or I spend time outside of class chasing them up because their homeroom teachers always say they’ll do something about them but never do.

Still, the positive I take from this is that I am really determined that my kids won’t grow up to be like many/most of the kids I teach.

12

Its a tuff tuff job but you can make a difference. See Mr hollands opus and a few other movies bout teachers for some inspiration? (but dont get involved romantically with the kids tho).

13

[quote=“Baas Babelaas”]
The teaching is only seven 90 minute lessons/week. Re. staring - besides the students in class staring, which I guess they need to do when I’m instructing them, I get stared at by 1000s of students on campus. And 100 000s of people on the streets. And It aint cuz I’m Brad Pitt’s brother in China…[/quote]

Not sure I’m in a position to be giving advice BUT perhaps some random comparative whining might be of use?

I wouldn’t worry too much about being a solitary weirdo, though you probably are.

I’m definately a solitary weirdo, and I find the alienation that attends my foreign face a useful cover.

I don’t mind being “looked at” on campus though. I rather enjoy being innocently ogled by all those pretty young things, but then I am Brad Pitt’s (elder) brother.

Angstwise, you should bear in mind that, unless you are some saintly sensei manque, the teaching gig sucks, bigtime (see above) so being stressed-out is normal and probably semi-inevitable.

I do 8 2-hr classes, plus a couple of 1hr unpaid “freetalk” sessions a week. Thats 10 deadlines, 10 performances with no applause, 10 sales pitches for a product I don’t really believe in and that the customer doesn’t want. For this I get paid 48,000 a month.

Feeling better yet?

I used to have what was generally regarded as, and occaisionally was, a high-pressure job in IT, but it was nothing compared to the teaching treadmill, and I was paid about 8X more, in 2000, so probably at least 10X more at current prices.

The saving grace is the long vacations, and you should take one. I get the university vacations paid, but unfortunately the boss asked me to teach some bullshit summer course, and, caught off guard, I said I would :doh:

Since they pay me over the vacation there’s some expectation that I’ll be available for extra work, and the implication that not being so might jeopardise my (temporary) contract renewal. However, my knees are fucked, I need a long break, and I think I’m going to have to renage on that comittment.

As well as a vacation I’d say you need an escapist fantasy and/or hobby.

My main escapist fantasy is building a boat, and if I can weasel out of this summerschool shite I might actually do something about it this year, knees permitting.

One sure-fire way of overcoming existential angst is to scare the living shit out of yourself, and the sea/sailing has the (singular? well, apart from Russian Roullette) advantage over other “dangerous” sports of being able to do that without requiring much fitness, or being likely to cripple you. You’re generally either dead, or you arent.

Fits the solitary weirdo profile, too.

I’ve also been vaguely thinking of doing some “educational research”, as a hobby to stimulate some slight interest in teaching, but its not my field, so I don’t (yet?) have a feel for the literature, havn’t identified a niche, and probably never will. It might be an option for you though?

Oh, and one piece of actual advice. You shouldn’t refer to Bangkok as “Bangers”, unless you actually do want to sound like a roaring queen.

(IMHO, of course.)

14

I actually usually feel pretty good after a day of teaching. Ready to relax with a glass of wine or some tea in my apartment, but usually as though I’ve been productive and I typically feel happy. Weird, right? :smiley:

15

Bangers, Honkers, Taiwankers. What the hell is queeny about that? This thread is GOOD, though. Positive reinforcement as to why there’s NO fucking WAY I’m going to allow my kid to be “educated” by a foreigner here, unless its me. Or maybe maoman.

16

Phew!

17

WTF? WTF, gadge? Are you puffing your contemptuous breath on my pink feather boa? I’ll HAVE you!

18

Phew!-as-in-non-verbal-but-generally-recognised-expression-of-relief.

Bit rough on maoman though, but.

19

Brain-fried. Literally, I go home in automatic. After I walk the dogs, I feel like myself again.

But yeah, 10 years in the same thing can take the wind out of anyone’s sails. A long vacation far from tension is necessary.

20

The kids never get me down. But after a few moronic interactions with certain staff members, I feel like I need a crack enema!! :loco: