Hi, iamlovingit, and welcome to the board!
[Edit] Dang, I got so involved in side issues that I forgot your question.
In the past, posts on this board and other evidence gave me the impression that the standard hourly rate for foreign teachers here was NT$600 per hour. However, recent posts seem to suggest that the rate may have gone down some. As was mentioned elsewhere in the thread, some foreign teachers have an adequate number hours at one job, but some wind up combining two or more jobs that have a lower number of hours. In either case, I would say that some are doing well, some are getting by all right, and some are struggling–maybe relative newcomers are especially prone to be in the “struggling” category. However, I’ve also gotten the impression from the board that some relative newcomers are getting by all right or even doing well.
My case may not be within the norm here. I’m at work eight hours a day, six days a week, on a monthly salary of NT$55,000 and with free housing valued at NT$7,000 per month, for a total monthly compensation of NT$62,000. I guess that’s not much, but I have a light teaching schedule, and the rest of the time I write various materials, occasionally look for public-domain materials on the 'net, and do various odd jobs. Usually my nose is not continuously to the grindstone; my job is usually not very difficult. I’ve never been able to figure out whether I’m one of the ones who are “messing the rest of us up by accepting lower pay,” or whether I’ve got a reasonably nice thing going.
Now back to the side issues. [End Edit]
Considering that you are a non-native speaker, your English is good. Based on your posts, I would say that it is better than that of most of the local teachers here, and generally their English is not bad and is adequate for teaching young learners (I taught adults in Korea, but I’m not familiar enough with the adult-learner scene to have an opinion about it).
I recently had a look at some Ministry of Education figures for elementary school, junior high school, high school, and vocational school enrollment
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, which I think is a decent set of indicators for one element of demand for cram school teachers (although obviously there are probably other elements), and according to the MOE:
In 2000 there were about 1.9 million students enrolled in elementary schools here. By 2009, there were only about 1.6 million. So there has been a substantial loss in elementary school enrollment in the past ten years or so. However, the junior high school student enrollment was higher in 2009 than in 2000. It’s declined a little from a peak in 2003, but it’s remained fairly stable in the past ten years (unless there was a major change last year). Senior high was also higher in 2009 than in 2000, but peaked in 2005 and declined between 2005 and 2009. Vocational school was lower in 2003 than in 2000, but higher in 2009 than in 2003 (with somewhat of a decline between 2005 and 2009). To sum up, elementary school numbers have gone down quite a bit, but junior high, senior high, and vocational school numbers don’t look too bad just yet, as far as I can tell.
While the decline in elementary school enrollment is noteworthy, I suspect the bulk of the difficulty with job-seeking here (which I think is related to the pay issues that are occasionally discussed on the board) is connected to an increase in competition in this field over the past, say, ten years, combined with a walloping economic blow in 2008. But it also seems to me that people here have been unhappy, disappointed, worried, etc., about the economy since considerably before the Lehman Brothers thing.
Like quite a few things in life, it seems like a dice roll. I think it could go either way, or somewhere in between (sorry, wish I could be more definite :s ).
I started off in Korea, and back then I sort of viewed this whole thing as a last-ditch effort to get something going where I could sustain myself and make debt payments (and I still sort of see it that way). Not to make a big dramatic deal out of it, but when I think now about the sorts of things that were on my mind back in early 2001, right before taking the plunge, I’m put in mind of this song:
[quote]A month of nights, a year of days,
Octobers drifting into Mays;
I set my sail as the tide comes in
And I just cast my fate to the wind.[/quote]–Vince Guaraldi and Carel Werber, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”
I’m not suggesting that you cast your fate to the wind, but whatever you decide to do, I wish you good luck.
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There’s an Excel (spreadsheet) page of those and other figures here, and if you don’t have Excel, there’s a (probably temporary) Google cache in html format here.