Yeah, I don’t really understand it either (maybe I should have kept my peace), and I’ve rethunk my previous post. Maybe she, housecat, and/or GIT could work that part out.[/quote]
Thank you for all the informative answers! 
A preliminary teaching license is a Massachusetts-specific thing.
doe.mass.edu/Educators/e_lic … ection=k12
It’s a legal teaching license, but it’s only good for five years. It’s designed as a way for people who didn’t do Education undergraduate degrees (like myself) to test for subject matter qualification and try teaching for a few years. In order to make the license permanent, I’d have to meet further qualifications, such as graduate classes and supervised teaching in a Massachusetts state school.
tl;dr version: It’s a short-term valid US teaching license that expires five years from issuance.[/quote]
Although each American state issues its own licenses to teach, the preliminary license exists in other states. Arkansas, for example, issues one that’s good for either one or three years, but you have to be enrolled in a teacher education program to qualify for one of these, usually. We even have special licenses that can be issued to people considered to be “experts” in a subject matter that a school feels is important to offer to its students, but can’t find a licensed teacher to teach. These used to be used often to hire teachers for languages such as Mandarin, in fact. But now there are programs that send ML Chinese teachers here.
And a fully credentialed standard Arkansas teaching license expires every five yeras. We have to pay for a new license and prove X hours of professional development every five years, to remain licensed.
Anyway, the problem the OP MAY be having with her state’s preliminary license is that each state DOES have an online database that administrators use to verify a teacher’s credentials before hiring him/her. If this preliminary license isn’t listed online, or if it indicates online that this license isn’t fully equal to a regular license, the Taiwanese here will suspect that it isn’t genuine. I’ve known lots of fully licensed teachers from the States who had trouble sometimes getting Taiwan to recognize their credentials because they didn’t look the same as some previously seen by the Taiwanese person in question. It’s really a wonky system here. I’m in Texas for now, for example, and Texas won’t recognize my Arkansas license. Here in Texas, they have their own way of doing things and there’s no reciprocity of teaching licenses between these two states.
If I were the OP, I’d personally walk the fact checker through the process of checking out my license. Each state can be different, and I did that for some myself, actually, with my own license.
And I’d read through and take GiT’s advice about going to local administration offices and looking for jobs directly. Usually, they’ll tell you that they can’t hire you because they’ve got a contract with a recruiter to provide teachers, but working with recruiters sucks for both you and for the school. You may have better luck going it alone and knocking on the right doors yourself.
And then you can spend some time looking through the boards here and weigh the merits of teaching in a “real” school vs. a Buxiban. Sometimes it’s worth it, and sometimes it’s not.
Unless maybe you’re in Kaohsiung, there surely has to be something better on offer than stitching together 14 hours for the lowest possible pay.
I’ll try to answer any specific questions you have via pm, If you like. I wish you the best.