The external evaluation usually has a lot of weight. For the teacher it’s worth 30% of their overall evaluation score plus you get an extra day off if you do well. They also use it as a way to evaluate the school and their program. So, the school wants to do well to keep the program.
No they don’t expect it. At my school you don’t even have to use the textbook. It’s a good resource though, so I usually just Google translate the pages to get ideas and also incorporate it into my lessons, that way they aren’t entirely in English and the students are learning some of the content.
Yeah, I agree. My point is that having 0 Chinese shouldn’t be a mental barrier to someone who wants to teach in Taiwan. Of course it makes things easier if you can speak Chinese
They loved it when I spoke Chinese in China. That was at a college. In Taiwan, I used to have a little introduction of myself when started a new class in Chinese that I stopped because the kids weren’t impressed and once told me to speak Taiwanese, but one time as soon as I started the TA snapped “No Chinese!”
I also briefly taught a class in the US that was mostly new Chinese immigrants where I had to speak Chinese for even basic things.
Awesome! But Teach Taiwan may have looser standards than the national TFETP program. Or they might go through the same approval process.
Sorry to repeat a question, but can anyone tell me when the best time to apply is, public or private? It looks like everyone is taking applications now, but I’m still not 100% sure what I want to do. I don’t want to wait too late, though.
Can’t hurt to start applying now. If you’re going through an agency, they’ll keep your profile on record and then probably send it to schools when positions open. It seems like schools will start to actively look starting in June. It’s my first time applying to work in Taiwan though, so grain of salt and whatnot
The answer is “it depends”. There was an international schools recruiting fair in December, but many of those schools (including the only actually international ones) continued to post their available jobs into January and February. Now (April to early June) is sort of the “second round”, when schools have found out who isn’t going to be around next year or teachers they thought they’d recruited bowed out. There will also be schools in August and even early September who need immediately filled positions, kudos to people they recruited not showing up for whatever reasons…
As early as that? It seems like all the good ones will be gone.
Which means the longer I wait the less I have to scrape from the bottom of the barrel.
Or it means that if I take an offer now, it could be worse than if I wait. Great. I hate decisions.
I suggest taking an offer now. I would suggest that to anyone to be honest. It is their fault if the public schools want to wait until the last minute. They can get the last minute teachers who were rejected from the good jobs until they learn.
I’m still working on my resume. I’m still deciding if public or private is better. I have mixed feelings about teaching again at all. I wish they’d waited another year to release ChatGPT.
It’s really a mixed bag to be honest. One of my friends working at a public school is being watched constantly. Another told me that at the last minute the school will told him that they are having second thoughts renewing his contract (told in mid July for Christ sakes!!)
Others however love their jobs and have no trouble. It really depends on the school management.
In terms of stability… I suggest taking a good offer if you have one. Don’t wait for a last minute public school job. If they want talent. They need to learn to offer the contracts earlier
Where? Watching how? I was on CCTV all the time at my last two schools.
I think if a school bluntly tells someone they are considering not renewing the contract before they must, the teacher is probably doing something wrong. If mid-July is late, they probably didn’t want an unhappy employee around longer than they had to.
That is going to be dependent not just on the school but also the specific classroom and their homeroom teachers. Even if you don’t coteach with the homeroom teachers, the homeroom teachers impact the entire class’s attitude toward being at school, learning, and other teachers.
One (private or public) is not better than the other. Especially because private schools can be registered as things other than day schools, which means they can hire someone with an APRC and no background in education for a lower salary than you’re willing to take.
This doesn’t really have anything to do with anything. The pandemic taught us that children need in person interaction with other humans to learn. There’s a lot of talk of “current AI makes teachers irrelevant” but I haven’t heard any reasonable argument for why. Essay writing and photo manipulation on that level aren’t skills children need to develop until adolescence. AI can’t recognize a confused look on a child’s face and provide proper scaffolding as they learn to sound out words in a physical book. Children still need to learn to pick up a pencil and physically write things on paper long before they’ll be typing in “express my thoughts in English about playing outside in the words of a six-year-old whose first language is Chinese”. They also need an adult to pull children aside and help them work through their problems as those inevitably occur, because they are humans, and conflicts happen. Imagine a chatbot, trained on the shit of the internet, telling Sally to beat up Susie for saying “can’t you just work quietly?” or something equally minor that just needs a quick discussion about appropriate reactions to other people.
Even if you wanted to teach university level English, you’d still have however many hours each week in the classroom wherein you’d be responsible for teaching English in the classroom. ChatGPT isn’t going to replace you for any of those things unless AI really does actually take over.
What exactly is a homeroom teacher? I think it means something different than where I’m from.
My thinking now is that public school FETs are put in unimportant classes are generally ignored. Private school FETs vary, but most of the ones that are hiring seem to take the teachers more seriously, giving them some of the important classes or even making them homeroom teachers. What worries me is that they some seem to micromanage the teachers and give a lot more work. The teaching hours are about the same, but they seem to squeeze more time out of teachers for profit, either through clubs, Saturday activities, or one that required afterschool classes. I want to do an M.Ed. eventually, so I need some free time.
So the general idea seems to be that public schools are easier to work at, but you may not be accomplishing anything, and there’s less work to do, and they’re frequently without air conditioning. Private schools expect more from teachers, give them more work, but the work is potentially more fulfilling assuming the school isn’t just a big cram school. The salaries are similar, but public schools have a housing allowance that would put the total pay much higher.
So public school would probably be the best place to start for me since I’ve never done this before and I don’t want to deal with a lot of weekend and at-home work. I’ll probably apply to the TFETP program first and apply to private schools if they don’t take me or I can’t find one near enough. I guess that’s my answer for now.
Sorry I made you write all that, that was just a stray thought. I don’t expect AI to ruin teaching yet. I thought I had mentioned it, but it has caused problems with my current working, which was writing and editing but is now proofreading low-quality ChatGPT output, and that’s why the interest in teaching again. If I do quit or lose my current job (they’re using ChatGPT to replace people left and right), I’ve got a whole rant post planned for that. I actually like ChatGPT as a tool.
If I can’t work at home, I’d prefer to work in an office, but nothing I’m qualified for is open now. If I was single, I might try working freelance and do some part-time teaching, but with a family I need a stable income. If ChatGPT hadn’t come along and my company hadn’t gone all in on it, I probably would have quit anyway, but I would have had more time to plan. But even looking at possible jobs or freelance work, I think I’d make more teaching at a public or private school. I’m doing better than most buxiban teachers now, but we’re not saving anything. Plus, if I work at a school, most offer discounted kindergarten tuition or preferred entry to children of employees.
Actually, is that the case for public school FETs? I don’t know if you, @cats_meow or @yankeedoodle have kids or know any FETs that do, but that’s a very big plus. Mine is still in diapers, but we really want to get him into a kindergarten program. Foreigners aren’t admitted to the lottery, and we could only afford a private school kindergarten if my wife managed to get a job.
She who? What public school has someone monitoring the teachers bathroom trips?
All the way up the high school (or has that changed? Maybe only through junior high now), the kids have a class managed by one adult that is their homeroom teacher. In some schools, that teacher doesn’t change (and the kids don’t change classes) for the whole time they attend the school. The other subject teachers come to the room (or the kids go to things like music and PE in the other rooms). The homeroom teacher in a public school will only be Taiwanese. There is no way they’d allow a foreigner to have that kind of responsibility— you’re a painting on the wall to show off to visitors, not a qualified teacher, after all. Private schools do have foreigners as homeroom teachers. Keep in mind, that’s a huge role to take on. You become a judge, arbitrator, mediator, and psychologist, in addition to your teaching responsibilities, for all of the kids in the room and their parents. When I was at a public junior high, I listened to one homeroom on the phone with a parent for over an hour about why that boy wasn’t at school because he’d just gotten the newest iPhone and didn’t want to put it down to come to school. I overheard “no, I cannot come over and help him put his uniform on. I have 26 other students here that I’m responsible for” said in a very nice, kind, polite voice by that teacher. If I were in that position, I would have much less nice things to say about that parent’s total lack of control over their little prince. But those are the responsibilities you take on as a homeroom teacher in TW.
FETs exist to make the MOE look like they’re doing something. Your classes don’t count and someone local will come in and teach the “actual stuff the students need to know” (have drilled into them for the tests). That doesn’t mean you can’t or don’t teach, but your role is purely symbolic.
That’s going to depend on the school. Some private schools put teachers in important roles, but I know a lot of people who are in no way qualified for teaching who are put in those roles and then shrug their shoulders and say “no one dares look me in the eye and tell me what I should be doing so I’m just going to play on my phone all day and collect a pay check”. I put this kind of job satisfaction below public school job satisfaction…
I didn’t feel like I was accomplishing anything, but I know plenty of FETs with better experiences. Lower el is certainly more rewarding, as they still don’t start official English until third grade, so you can make them more excited about learning, therefore have more satisfaction/feel like you’ve made a difference in the children’s lives. A/C depends on a lot of factors. There’s a minimum temperature that it needs to be outside and time of day (I feel like it’s 28 and 10 am) but the ac was on in the office first thing in the morning (and frequently set to 17 degrees) pretty often for me.
Ehhhh… there’s too much variation for me to agree with this statement. Another big thing to keep in mind with private vs public is that you’ll be left alone in a public school while parents are paying through the nose for private schools (which are pretty much all for profit, unless you’re at specific religious schools), so they will expect you to deliver the product they were promised, which is likely not the same product you signed up for (in Taipei, it’s shocking how many private school guarantee the children can test into TAS…)
Seems like you have a good idea in your mind of what you will do for next steps!
Yikes. Sorry to hear about that. Yeah, in that case, teaching is going to be a much safer and not going anywhere career choice for you!
Yes for many (though not all!) private schools. I haven’t heard of help for public school teachers, but if you start to have those connections, it’s going to be easier for you. (Guanxi and all that, especially if your principal likes you)
I see. In my experience, the homeroom teacher was for 7th and up. I don’t know what their full responsibilities were, but where I’m from, homeroom teachers were subject teachers themselves and students are only in their classroom for the first period unless they had their subject class next or later. 1st-6th grade teachers are just called that. That’s why it confused me to see private schools looking for 2nd grade homeroom teachers. Though, oddly, one school’s teachers had titles like 2nd grade homeroom teacher and 3rd-6th grade science teacher. Not sure how that would work.
Homeroom teacher does not sound like a job I’d want. I can’t imagine they would let a foreigner be responsible for all that even at a public school.
If you’re a homeroom teacher and you’re teaching, let’s say, 20 hours per week, who is teaching the kids the rest of the time? Or are you just babysitting them?
Not help, but there is a hierarchy for admission to kindergarten. I can’t remember the order, but children and relatives of teachers of the school are high on the list if not the top. Foreigners are at the bottom, if there are still places after the lottery, which there won’t be (hence, the lottery). Public kindergartens are cheap, but even if private ones are half-off, they’re still expensive. If working at the school lets your child be be put in the higher bracket rather than the impossible one, it could save a lot of money.
I don’t think guanxi is going to help much if that’s not the case. Kindergarten placement is a serious and regulated thing, and putting a foreign kid above Taiwanese ones isn’t likely to happen.
Not according the information published by the nearest school with a kindergarten, and maybe throughout Taipei. We covered this on another thread and the answer was a definitive no.
That what I would expect happens. In those cases, is the foreign teacher in the class all or most of the time? What is concerning me is having adequate time to prepare lessons without having to do it at home.