In an apparent move to copy Japan’s highly impotent JET program, Taipei has said it wants one white face per elementary school. More job opportunities in the near future?
focustaiwan.tw/news/asoc/201402140015.aspx
I don’t know about this. Are there enough qualified teachers to go around for this plan to work? How do they expect to lure teachers from overseas?
[quote=“Hokwongwei”]In an apparent move to copy Japan’s highly impotent JET program, Taipei has said it wants one white face per elementary school. More job opportunities in the near future?
focustaiwan.tw/news/asoc/201402140015.aspx
I don’t know about this. Are there enough qualified teachers to go around for this plan to work? How do they expect to lure teachers from overseas?[/quote]
By paying more! If they want it to work they need to realize that a qualified (certified) teacher in their home country isn’t enough. Pay 90000 a month and employ either CELTA qualified teachers who are also certified teachers, or teachers with a Delta or tons of experience here, considering they are going to be dealing with non-native speakers unlike the students they deal with back home.
They should also change the textbooks they are using and probably the methods, but heck we’ve been saying that for years. Implementing a proficiency testing program like the Cambridge YLE, instead of some test some teacher came up with, would also do wonders.
Pay more? :roflmao:. I predict that this program will fail like others in the past in Taiwan for this very reason. They may do a bit better than those in the past because of the location but the low pay will put off most people.
Is this job ad for this particular program?
esljobspot.com/jobs/view/tai … h-village/
If it is, they will have to drastically raise the salary to attract certified teachers. When a certified teacher can work at an international school in places like Phuket for far more than that, why would they come to Taipei? And most contracts like this should include furnished housing (not a measly allowance that would barely rent a room) and other allowances like relocation expenses, etc.
I can’t imagine them being able to recruit quality certified teachers on what they’re offering. Like Feiren said, it will most likely fail.
I often hear of qualified teachers here working in some backwards arse places so I don’t know… I don’t understand why they would come here to do that but some do!
What really got me in that ad was the housing allowance of 5,000 a month, though. What could you get for that in Taipei? That alone would would be a deal breaker. Unless you want to rent a room in someone else’s home, you’d have to dig deeply into your salary to be able to afford something decent.
If I were a qualified teacher, I might well be interested in one of those positions somewhere in Taidong or around Kending. I think the lost cost of living and the lifestyle might well make up for the low salary. I can’t see why anyone would want to live in Taipei though on those terms.
But I don’t think the ad Indiana posted was for the Taipei positions. It appeared to be in Taoyuan. It will take some time after the announcement for them to actually start recruiting teachers for this new scheme.
By the way, what is wrong with JET? I thought it was very successful. And I don’t think you need to be a certified teacher.
If you are a qualified teacher, you could get a contract with NET in Hong Kong or ADEC in the UAE, both government programmes that pay three times that salary and provide free housing. Or, you could work at an international school anywhere in the world for twice or more of that salary. I just think it will be extremely difficult to convince certified teachers to work in Taiwan unless you can come somewhat close to matching those types of contracts. Hopefully the link I posted isn’t similar to what the TW government is prepared to offer.
What do certified local teachers make on average? I can’t remember, but I would imagine that the government couldn’t offer much more than that to foreign teachers without expecting a backlash.
[quote=“Indiana”]
What do certified local teachers make on average? I can’t remember, but I would imagine that the government couldn’t offer much more than that to foreign teachers without expecting a backlash.[/quote]
I think that’s the key. For a school to pay a competitive international school salary that compares with Thailand or China, the school could hire at least two local teachers which is just poor use of finances.
Either they need to raise pay and benefits considerably or they need to drop the certified teacher requirement. South Korea AFAIK doesn’t require public school teachers to be certified so there’s at least one big country that doesn’t.
This doesn’t begin to address the issue (poor results from non-buxiban kids) though.
[quote=“Abacus”]Either they need to raise pay and benefits considerably or they need to drop the certified teacher requirement. South Korea AFAIK doesn’t require public school teachers to be certified so there’s at least one big country that doesn’t.
This doesn’t begin to address the issue (poor results from non-buxiban kids) though.[/quote]
My friend’s kid the Korea program and loved it. She did it as a gap year thing before her teacher training.
[quote=“Ermintrude”]
I think that’s the key. For a school to pay a competitive international school salary that compares with Thailand or China, the school could hire at least two local teachers which is just poor use of finances.[/quote]
I don’t think it’s the cost per se. I think it’s because the senior people would lose face if Lao wai was making as much money as them with many fewer years of experience. And the other teachers would complain.
[quote=“BigJohn”][quote=“Ermintrude”]
I think that’s the key. For a school to pay a competitive international school salary that compares with Thailand or China, the school could hire at least two local teachers which is just poor use of finances.[/quote]
I don’t think it’s the cost per se. I think it’s because the senior people would lose face if Lao wai was making as much money as them with many fewer years of experience. And the other teachers would complain.[/quote]
Goes without saying.
[quote=“BigJohn”][quote=“Ermintrude”]
I think that’s the key. For a school to pay a competitive international school salary that compares with Thailand or China, the school could hire at least two local teachers which is just poor use of finances.[/quote]
I don’t think it’s the cost per se. I think it’s because the senior people would lose face if Lao wai was making as much money as them with many fewer years of experience. And the other teachers would complain.[/quote]
I’m pretty sure this is already the case. It’s not that Taiwan isn’t paying a fair Taiwan wage (65Kish/mo). I don’t know the local teacher pay scale but I think that’s pretty good for a teacher. It’s that 2000ishUSD/mo isn’t going to lure certified teachers from outside of Taiwan. If that’s what they want to pay then they should expect to get untrained 20 somethings for a bulk of the positions (like SK).
This is a major problem in Taiwan, the local payscales are set so low than whenever they want to hire some ‘talent’ the issue of jealousy and resentment rears its ugly face. And how do you hire a designer or a sales manager or a professor who is getting higher pay than the VP or the department head?
Of course even if foreigners get paid more per month they don’t get benefits and a pension (another problem is that there are now many contract teachers in schools here on miserable wages…with little chance of getting a permanent job…there IS already a two tier system that already exists for locals).
They’ll get them. It will be a disaster in the making like Feiren said. The agents will do their best to relaunder govt money to people who really want it.
They already deal with co-worker resentment, but f-them as the ones making less are all on one-year contracts and if they rock the boat their gone.
Eh, I thought this kind of scheme had already been tried. First of all, the gment gave the business, eh, the task to agents, who promptly went about hiring people from the streets like day laborers. Please note such people included the likes of yours truly, a non Native - and there were many more no nos in the bunch.
And if memory serves me right, it also did not start in Taipei. Is it like election year or something?
Talking about JET, one of my favorite books is Learning to bow. Someone needs to make a Taiwan version of it.
I don’t have any personal experience, but a lot of friends from college went on JET right after graduation. None of them were placed in Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto, for what it’s worth – mostly suburbs of the above three.
Three or four of my friends told me they felt underutilized, like they were human tape recorders that just read from the textbook but didn’t get any actual time teaching. One told me that elementary school students seemed to have fine pronunciation in English, but by the time they got to high school a combination of peer pressure and apparent disinterest made their pronunciation resort to Japaniizu Ingirishu.
I posted this quote a few years back; I guess it’s time to dust it off and display it again:
[quote=“Lao-tzu”]Not to value and employ men of superior ability is the way to keep the people from rivalry among themselves. . . .
Therefore the sage, in the exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthens their bones.
He constantly (tries to) keep them without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, to keep them from presuming to act (on it). When there is this abstinence from action, good order is universal.[/quote]–Tao Te Ching (Tr. James Legge)
I’m not saying that the above ideas of Laozi’s are necessarily operating in work situations here. It’s just something I think about every now and then.
For it to be on a par with JET you’d need to be paid about 120K nt per month, free rent and only do about 6 hours work per week, working solely as a co-teacher. That was pretty much my deal in Japan. Plus being taken out to eat and get pissed 3 or 4 times per week. 20 days paid sick and 20 days paid holiday per year. PEACE of PISS. I miss those days.