[quote=“Ermintrude”]Sez you and you smell.
But seriously. False dichotomy.
May we shorten to ERMIN? FFS![/quote]
T-rude?
It is not really fallacious to suggest that there is some benefit to random crappy teaching, after all, it is the bread and butter of most academic tutors. Lots of evidence to suggest that short term measurable objectives do not have long term learning benefits. Random teaching often embeds deeper and is more transferable for the learner.
Nope, not fallacious. Just not dichotomous and so not really different to what I was writing.
Erm. Yes, that’s it.
Ok, quick lets get back to prole level discussion before we confuse everyone.
You suck and so do all the things you write. I do not suck. 
Yes, I do. But I stopped before I caught.
You’ve got bad knees.
[quote=“Ermintrude”]Yes, I do. But I stopped before I caught.
You’ve got bad knees.[/quote]
I’ve got ONE bad knee. The other is just fine.
My entire skellington looks like a piece of ginger root. Maybe. Why did I leave my physiotherapist?
Edit: You smell. Even from China. IDST. hahahaha.
[quote=“Ermintrude”]OK, you’ve convinced me. Taiwanese students are not worth bothering with. If I’m honest, I’d rather teach Kazakhs or Chinese or Libyan or Turkish kids.
Do you enjoy it? You don’t need the money. Do you do it for a visa? What’s your motivation? No hostility here, I’m interested in what makes you tick. I didn’t teach for years after leaving Taiwan because I couldn’t be arsed. I do it now and I like engaging with it. If I don’t have that engagement, then I can’t stand teaching. Isn’t it a ballache, having a job you don’t like?
Did you mean ‘spout’? Autocorrect?[/quote]
Now I never said that I disliked it. At worst I am indifferent towards it. I work mainly for my old company back home, as my job was sourcing and producing product from China and a few other countries. I also do some consulting. My wife is local, so I don’t need to teach to stay here.
Due to time differences I have extra time during the day. I can either sit at home or go and teach. Don’t complicate things by trying to work out motives.
It is basically money for nothing. As simple as that.
The fact that I do not take it seriously is one thing. However, I am confident that the kids I teach learn.
The fact I don’t take teaching in Taiwan seriously, also does not mean I do not do my best.
Its a case of hating the game, not the player.
Let’s not kid, the industry is a joke. People try to play dumb but they are only kidding themselves.
There is zero incentive for qualified teachers here.
You can definitely make more coin working in a buxiban than you will working public school. Added benefit being the lack of responsibility. A few qualified teachers have told me this. They can do the maths for themselves. A few hours and a kindy and then off to a cram school pays a lot more than an eight to five public gig.
Any educational system that works in this way is a joke, so have a laugh.
You sound like a nice person. What evidence do you have that most ESL instructors here (presumably you mean in Taiwan, not frequenters of this forum, feel free to clarify) don’t know their shit? [/quote]
I have mounting inductive evidence from life on the ground here, including many direct conversations with people about what they do and know, to establish that most ESL instructors here know diddly. In my current job, I spend a fair chunk of my time explaining areas of grammar to people who are supposed to be the authorities on it. Granted, I don’t use the centuries-old folk grammars that they try to fetch from their memories of high school English, and I spend a fair amount of time shitting all over their “sentence patterns,” among other horrible approaches and severe misunderstandings. They can baffle their beer buddies with bullshit, but I’m cursed with having to comprehend where what they say fails even a cursory inspection.
This forum has been a source of the same evidence.
Why can’t it be a reciprocally helpful process?
……
In defense of my personality, I’m merciless, but about as nice as any other Joe Schmo.
Your gut feeling says more than real evidence ever could 
What exactly do ESL instructors in Taiwan need to know? Most of them aren’t teaching learners who are at a level where they would be able to achieve CAE or CPE type qualifications. They don’t need to be authorities on the English language to do their NT$600 an hour jobs to an appropriate standard. If they were, they probably wouldn’t be in Taiwan teaching ESL. To make the contention that most ESL teachers in Taiwan are completely useless (which the disdainful language you have continually employed indicates) is harsh in the extreme.
Ultimately, if the teacher uses assessment well then it should benefit learners. For example, if I teach how to convert between fractions, decimals and percentages and some learners don’t grasp it/others already know how to do this, I should use my assessment of the individuals in my class to benefit them. I may reteach the material using different methods, I may provide more challenging yet related work to some etc in the next class. If an alternative approach helps me improve as a teacher the next time I teach said material, then it will (hopefully) benefit future learners as well as my current ones.
Assessment should be a reciprocally helpful process. However, that is not what you indicated in your post. You said your means of assessment benefits you, which I wouldn’t have bothered responding to were it not for the fact you have set yourself up as some kind of master of the English language. If you “know your shit”, try to make it clear what you actually mean in the first instance 
No, they don’t need to be authorities in the English language to babysit children in an English-language environment at NT$600 per hour. To actually impart knowledge to someone, it’s required that one actually have it, himself.
My means of assessment does benefit me. I never said that it benefits me exclusively.
EFL teachers don’t ‘impart knowledge’. You facilitate the development of an ability. And that holds true as much for advanced classes as it does for the intermediate adult learner or low level kids. Just try with all that meta ‘Oi knows moi graaammaarrr, oi doo’ stuff in a real class with, say, Turkish law students, or German doctors. The students would just say ‘Er, yeah, right, little miss linguistics major. Can you stop explaining why the sky is blue and can we learn something now?’ Have you ever taught English outside Taiwan?
Why are you employing ‘your’ means of assessment and not your institution’s? ‘Because mine is better’ or ‘Because there isn’t one’ are the wrong answers, btw.
You’re very high-handed with others, but you sound like an untrained newb. You need to be a bit less of a cock about it. Even if you have managed to crack EFL teaching with no training and a very limited repertoire, you’ve hardly cracked the secrets of the universe and you could help those younger and less ‘gifted’ than yourself.
I’ve taught English and Spanish outside of Taiwan and the US, among other subjects. Since you know approximately dick about what I do, it would be smart not to assume that I do whatever your pet stereotype of me imagines that I do.
Language instruction is not intellectually challenging work. No one needs to crack the secrets of the universe to do this job. I do a job now that’s more intellectually demanding and requires these skills which you deem “untrained.” I mean that my current title and salary reflect something quite contrary to the accusations you’ve launched here.
And the answer is “…because mine is better.” However, I think that you think that “mine” in that sentence means “the one which I’ve invented,” but not “the stuff that I’ve borrowed, as well.”
If you don’t like a “high-handed tone,” then you can follow these steps:
1.) Click my user name.
2.) Under “Viewing profile - ehophi,” click the link “Add foe.”
3.) Watch my posts disappear from your screen.
But what do I know? I don’t impart knowledge in any subject. Even when I teach formal logic, I don’t impart knowledge. I “facilitate the development of an ability” – the ability to derive proofs from premises and inference rules. That’s nice, empty wordplay for someone who wants to accuse other people of being know-nothing, jargon-playing cocks.
[quote=“ehophi”]I’ve taught English and Spanish outside of Taiwan and the US, among other subjects. Since you know approximately dick about what I do, it would be smart not to assume that I do whatever your pet stereotype of me imagines that I do.
Language instruction is not intellectually challenging work. No one needs to crack the secrets of the universe to do this job. I do a job now that’s more intellectually demanding and requires these skills which you deem “untrained.” I mean that my current title and salary reflect something quite contrary to the accusations you’ve launched here.
And the answer is “…because mine is better.” However, I think that you think that “mine” in that sentence means “the one which I’ve invented,” but not “the stuff that I’ve borrowed, as well.”
If you don’t like a “high-handed tone,” then you can follow these steps:
1.) Click my user name.
2.) Under “Viewing profile - ehophi,” click the link “Add foe.”
3.) Watch my posts disappear from your screen.
But what do I know? I don’t impart knowledge in any subject. Even when I teach formal logic, I don’t impart knowledge. I “facilitate the development of an ability” – the ability to derive proofs from premises and inference rules. That’s nice, empty wordplay for someone who wants to accuse other people of being know-nothing, jargon-playing cocks.[/quote]
You sure don’t teach languages. You just think you do. 
Seriously. You sound like a newb. I don’t use the ‘foe’ button, but you are welcome to remove yourself from my notice by not being arch and rude about EFL teachers when you clearly aren’t very qualified or experienced as a language teacher. Be a bit more polite and helpful to those you deem to be ‘beneath you’ and then people who are later in their careers than you are won’t laugh at what you post, perhaps?
I think ehophi actually is a good teacher but I wouldn’t want to employ him, teach with him or hire him to teach my hypothetical children. He has made it pretty clear that he will do things his way or piss and moan about it. He’s likely the type that will say something isn’t his job and not give a shit if something (even small) needs to be done for the classes. He has also made it clear that he is always looking for a better gig and will leave if something better comes up even if the employer (or parent) had paid fairly and hadn’t reneged on anything. Actually that is kind of why he’s a bad teacher. He sees his role as an interchangeable short term instructor and doesn’t care if someone comes in and screws up any of the progress that he’s made.
He could actually be she but I have no idea.
I’m a decent instructor. I know language teachers who are better than I am.
You are right, though, that I have no sense of company loyalty. I routinely encourage people’s blackmailing buxiban owners, exposing ridiculous or illegal contract clauses, siphoning students from former employers, and ruining former employers’ businesses if they pose a threat or are relevant competition.
But honestly, if any buxiban were serious about keeping someone, it would pay a competitive wage to do so. I find people who are willing to pay more for my services (which for Ermintrude must be a total mystery), so I can slash, burn, and move on. I care about my students, and I would be happy if they would be willing to follow me wherever I may go. However, I’m realistic about the lengths people are willing to travel to learn from me, so I just recommend to them that they leave if the next teacher isn’t good.
I’ve since found the gig (which is not in language instruction, but which is language-oriented) that I wanted, though, and I partly thank my Machiavellian tendencies for landing it.
But getting off Ermintrude’s false conjectures about me, and halfway re-railing the thread…
The alternative is to focus on a student’s knowledge and conduct and to reward students for good work instead of your rewarding yourself for making them feel better at a 1% rate of success. If a student doesn’t care to be good at a productive skill, and if he wants to make it difficult for people who do, he’s a dick, no matter his age or excuses for being a dick. For the ages that I teach, being decent is a choice, and if a student doesn’t want to make that choice, it’ll cost them more in 面子 than he can afford.
I’ve got demons, regrets, traumas, and baggage. The last thing in the world that I want or need on top of them is hired empathy, so the most empathetic thing that I can do in such cases is to leave them to lead their lives while I do my job of helping them retain a lexicon of a few thousand headwords and phrases and arrange them in syntactically acceptable and contextually relevant ways before they hit the nth grade. But if they don’t want my help, I won’t give them a second glance. As long as they’re quiet, I can focus on the ones who care.