If you do telephone teaching, do you get paid for doing it?
0 voters
I don’t know who the bright spark was who came up with the idea of telephone teaching, but whoever you are, thank you, thank you very much in fact. :bravo: 
I was just wondering how many teachers actually get paid for it. I don’t. :fume:
no telephone teaching for me, but two comments:
chinese teachers usually get stuck coing it, and their pay is often crap. i feel bad for them.
secondly, and more importantly, why do schools (not yours, but some) hire telephone teachers with absolutely horrible pronunciation? isn’t it common sense that conversing over the phone, certainly an imperfect medium to transfer sound, requires a person whose pronunciation is clear enough so that students can understand what is being said? i hear so many telephone teachers have to repeat every question 3-4 times, with pronunciation/intonation/pitch problems, students with no clue what they are saying (until finally it’s translated into chinese), that it all seems pointless. it’s not all, or even most … but still. students feel bad because they don’t understand, parents listening feel they are wasting their money/their child is not paying attention. the whole exercise results in regression of ability, and less intrinsic motivation to learn, which needs to be fostered.
anyways, my rant is over. kudos to schools who have tel. teachers who are understandable, but not when they don’t wanna pay for it 
I used to do it at a previous schoolbut I was salaried so didn’t really care. It was a good way to pick out fluency however a lot of students tended to write down the answers and if you varied the question order. You got nonsensical anwers. My present school has a system were the students call in rather than some one calling the students. As a numbers game it’s usually a failure. I agree with the pronunciation and grammar issues when a Chinese teacher does it.
I tended to be harder on the students than the Chinese teacher because I could hear the errors.
Telephone teacher What’s your favorite food?
Student: I have two feet.
At my school, the teachers get paid for it. It is part of their monthly teaching hours. If I didn’t get paid for it… I wouldn’t do it! :loco:
I don’t see the point of telephone “teaching”. At my school TA’s do it for the great rate of NT$20 per phone call (please note my sarcasm).
From listening in, it just seems that the students are required to answer 4 questions per week. Where is the actual teaching? Isn’t this telephone testing at best?
And I agree with what was posted earlier, usually the pronunciation of the TA’s leave a lot to be desired and I can’t count the number of times I have been asked the answer to the questions they have to ask.
What exactly is the point of it??
I don’t get paid for telephone teaching as such, but there are other aspects of my job that make up for it. My only problem is that the whole idea is a farce. Grinder, I think you’re right. It comes down to telephone testing.
The whole idea must have started with a suggestion made by a teacher. I was just wondering how such an idea spreads from one school. :s
my money is on a parent for spawning tt … there were a few rabid parents in this regard, one of whom would complain every week that her son didn’t get called - b/c the chinese teacher wouldn’t call at 11:00 at night, when that poor kid was finally allowed to stop going to various cram schools at go home. she tried to get the teacher fired, who would phone 3-4 times before 10, which is when they all stop calling and go home.
other parents are breathing on the phone so heavily you’d think they were stalking the chinese teacher - just to let her know that they were “listening” (although as i recall, they wouldn’t (couldn’t) string together three words of english.
i think tt could be a useful way to review, esp as most students do squat during the week when they aren’t in class. too bad it doesn’t seem to always do that.
[quote=“Grinder”]
What exactly is the point of it??[/quote]
Marketing…parents get to hear their kids speaking English.
I like TT and I enjoy it.
It’s good marketing.
Sometimes the parents are a hassle, but sometimes it really shows who knows their stuff and who doesn’t.
It has to be done right though.
You got it…
It’s a rather pointless exercise except as a marketing tool.
I can see no good pedagogical reason to do it, and my school refuses to provide telephone teaching. We try to make up the marketing aspects in other ways.
Big waste of time, IMHO.
Kenneth
I once gave as a homework assignment that my students (a class of 8 from a company in XinDian) call me on the weekend with a list of topic questions to answer. I did this because my students wanted to do it, had no idea that people actually do this as a form of teaching. :s
No, ‘teaching’ it’s definately not.
Telephone teaching is a fucking stupid idea. I’ve been asked to do it a few times. I just refused.
Brian