That’s right! It’s against the law now to do demos with real ive students. If your job hunting you’ll need to teach to an empty room or to a group of adults pretending to be kids.
Ski
It’s in the Taipei Times today and no doubt in the China post.
I saw that,
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any stupider…
My guess is that it’s so when they do raids, the school can no longer say - “he was just doing a demo”.
Brian
Here’s a link to the Taipei Times story http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2004/12/17/2003215434
I remember when I made the mistake of doing doing some interviews up in Taibei with schools that I found on Tealit. One school took a quick look at my resume and then asked me to do a one hour demo. I faked some excuse about having other, more urgent plans, and got out of there quickly.
I was thinking about it, though. I bet you could run a small buxiban not with hired teachers, but with nothing but would-be teachers picked from the bazillion resumes available through Tealit, all doing one-hour demos.
I think some do.
I’ve done one demo in the four years I’ve been in Taiwan and didn’t get that particular job. Just like the west they usually know right there and then if they want to hire you. Resumes are largely a waste of time here.
Maybe we should start requesting that the school do a demo of payday. 
What a joke. I don’t agree with the whole “giving a demo” thing that I encountered in Taiwan, but the government is being asinine again with these unecessary and frivolous regulations. It’s not going to make any kind of dent in the illegal goings on. 
No worries. As with most “laws” on this island, it will only be selectively enforced in certain sections of the environs of Taipei. The rest of Taiwan will carry on in their usual anarchic, law-disobiding way.
Demos are a waste of time at their worst and a fomality at best. There’s a million reasons why but here’s a good one:
I have a few years teaching exp. but still went ahead with a demo at a school that had agreed to pay for my visa flight on the basis of said demo. Anyway, it was a disaster. I couldn’t even find the board marker because it was on the top of the board on some idiotic holster. :help:
At the end of the day, the same school did pay my visa flight, never hired me and hired these other two “highly qualified licensed” teachers who were fired four months later for a variety of reasons, some of which were made public on Dave’s ESL Taiwan board about six months ago. Something to do with inappropriate touching and e-mail hacking, I believe.
And me? I got the last laugh by being hired sans demo at a great school where I still teach. 
, and by hearing about the woes of said school.
Right around the same time, I was asked to do a 2.5 hour demo :loco: at an undesirable school to boot. Then when I told boss lady that she could hardly judge my ability during one demo, she agree and told me and two other candidates there would be an additional full-day demo. :bravo:
I declined the offer.
There’s an ESL publication that expects interviewees to edit reams of material before being offered a job.
Along the same lines…I suspect.
It also said:[quote]In Taipei City, there are approximately 1,900 documented foreign English teachers working at private language schools. It is uncertain how many undocumented teachers there are in the city.
[/quote]
Does 1900 English teachers sound a little low? I wonder what the number would be if they could include illegal English teachers. 
I dunno, I’ve taught here for fifteen years and run my own buxiban for eight, and I always ask to see a demo ( 15-20 minutes) just to see if the teacher looks comfortable in front of kids.
It’s not necessarily the deciding factor, but I certainly think it’s a reasonable part of the hiring process.
I’ll do a demo if they pay me for it, otherwise I feel they are just wasting my time. As for doing a demo sans students, that’s just stupid though I have heard of it being done.
The article in the Taipei Times seems to more or less clearly state that they are cracking down on demos so buxiban owners can’t claim that a teacher caught teaching illegally was “just doing a demo.”
God, can you imagine doing a demo where you have to pretend 5 or 6 secretaries and the boss are a group of kids? I am able to establish rapport with children, but I don’t think I could prove it in that kind of a situation.
Yeah, i did one of them once. Funny part is, I already had the job, but they were just transferring me to another branch. So I got in front of the “class” - the branch head, assistant director, and two secretaries. They told me it would be a “classroom simulation” and I would have to deal with challenges and situations and would be scored on my competence in dealing with them effectively.
After I corrected the branch director’s grammar several times and threatened her with my bamboo stick, I realized that her broken English wasn’t a put on. Boy did I feel like a tool.
Anyway, what’s wrong with giving a 15 minute demo? I always have a good laugh doing them.
I think a 15-20 minute demo is highly reasonable (for jobs teachign children - adults, I’m not so sure) and you should not expect to paid for this as part of an interview. Anything longer than this is totally unnecessary, and it is quite possible they’re trying to get a free class out of you. If they want a real trial, they should hire you for a month ‘probation’.
From an employer’s point of view (I’ve been there) a demo is useful for the simple reason of seeing how well you can get along with kids.
That said, I think every job I actually took didn’t require a demo, but was more a case of me getting on well with the boss. I did plenty of demos for jobs that I didn’t take, and I used to do ‘demos for customers’ all the time (and still do ‘demos for parents’).
Demos without actual children are absolutely pointless. The skills you need to show in a demo are how you relate to kids, that simply doesn’t work if there are no kids there, or adults standing in for kids. It’s like going for a job as a chef and them saying “Can you make a good omelette? Make an omelette for us. Pretend these oranges are eggs”.
Brian
I can personally attest that demos are still happening. I’ve done one since the supposed new law went into effect and am scheduled to do another later this week.
Like I said - this is Taiwan. They have every law on the books they can think of; they just don’t enforce more than 1/10th of 'em. Like turning left on a red light - this law will never be enforced, because the logistics of going to the trouble of enforcing it making it impossible. What are they going to do, raid buxibans every time a foreigner arranges an interview? Cops got better things to do than hang around cram schools all day eyeballing interviewees.