[quote=“BigJohn”][quote=“sandman”]Well, isn’t it YOU who keeps bringing up the “we foreigners should stick together” schtick? Maybe it was some other poster. If so, sorry. My point is that Taiwanese are FAR less foreign to me than Americans, so therefore I’d be more inclined to stick together with Taiwanese than Americans – if I felt the need to “stick together” with any particular nationality.
[quote]Why not have compassion for a stranger, if they are not really harming anyone?
[/quote]
But they ARE! If you happen agree with the government’s take that kiddies shouldn’t be learning English. 
Who am I to believe? Government education experts or angry 20-something backpackers on their unique Asian sojourn?[/quote]
That’s funny. I never thought of you as one of those “I trust the government” types. Kindy teachers hurting the kids. Yep, it’s a psycho bloodbath out there. I wonder why all those parents are so in love with their foreign kindy teachers, who are harming their children? Strange. Let’s ask the government.[/quote]
Amen, it is indeed a psycho bloodbath out there, but we don’t seem to have the attention span to address the problem in a sustained way.
We seemed to come together as a community and focus on this growing problem back during the John Mark Karr Crisis. For those of you who weren’t here or weren’t following the news, John Mark Karr is the man who confessed to killing Jon Benet Ramsey. Mr. Karr came to Taiwan and almost got a job here.
For more information:
Had he had the time and opportunity to do so, he might have confessed to killing still more children. In all likelihood, Mr. Karr had very poor Chinese skills, so he might not have been able to understand news reports about recently murdered children. That being the case, he might well have taken to confessing to the murder of living children, which would have been worse, because it could have scarred those kids for life.
For more information:
Contemporaneously with the Crisis, someone in our community came up with a set of criteria for determining whether a foreigner was a danger to the children. The criteria were as follows:
If the person in question is
(1) over forty years of age;
(2) white;
(3) male;
(4) overweight;
(5) sweating profusely (i.e., “constantly looks like they’ve just got out of a very hot bath”);
(6) while teaching “cute” Asian kids;
then he’s probably a danger to the children.
For more insights:
Additionally, the Minister of Health has recently reported on statistical studies that show that single people have a greater tendency to suffer from mental illness than married people. So I submit that it’s an added warning sign if this over-forty, sweating, cute-Asian-kid-teaching white guy is also
(7) single.
For more detailed evidence:
taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/ … 2003470148
But as the Who said, “The sun shines, and people forget.” We forget, we ignore the problem, hoping it will go away, and it periodically comes back to haunt us. Let’s not get fooled again. Let’s set some real standards this time. I propose the following litmus test: Anyone having more than four of the above-designated characteristics should not be allowed to teach kids on this island. Full stop. (As luck would have it, I’m off the hook: I’m a single, white male, and I’m over forty, but I’m not overweight, I hardly ever sweat (and when I do, I don’t sweat profusely), and the Asian kids I teach are not “cute.”)
Now of course, the above negativing standards don’t foreclose the imposition of affirmative ones. For example, I find the ideas of sandman and some of the others very worthy, viz., that prospective teachers of children have at least a DELTA diploma (preferably, though, an M.A. in Applied Linguistics), at least a B.Ed. (preferably an M.Ed.), possess teacher certification in their home country, have at least an M.A. (preferably a Ph.D.) in either developmental or child psychology, and have attained at least an Intermediate (preferably Advanced) level of Chinese fluency on the HSK. I think these standards should be gradually introduced over, say, an eight-to-fifteen year period. That should have the added incidental benefit of eventually ridding us of the Young Backpacker Scourge, for the most part at least.
Additionally, police criminal-record checks can miss a spot or two, since they only cover, well, criminal records, so I propose that a thorough background check be conducted of all prospective teachers of children, on the order of the kind the U.S. military conducts prior to granting a Top Secret clearance.
We need to implement the above standards with all deliberate speed. Otherwise, as the global economy continues its collapse, we can look forward to more and more creepy middle-aged white men sweating all over the children, more and more footloose-and-fancy-free twenty-something backpackers gallivanting around and taking jobs away from real teachers, and more and more John Mark Karrs turning up on our shores and confessing to God knows what atrocities.