Good God I am glad I’m not in the buxiban system where people are fighting over crumbs. 450-550NT/hour? Christ! When I came here three and a half years ago, Hess was paying 560NT/hour and that was about as low as it got. Grief, what a come down.
Anyway, if the OP has a JFMV, then what he should do is hit up the local government schools. Plenty of them hire people on a JFMV either part-time or as subs and they pay better. I personally don’t see why anyone on a JFMV would commit to a buxiban contract unless it were paying really good money.
The color of your skin is probably the thing they care about most when they are looking for a foreign teacher, even more than your English language ability. Should I leave out crucial information like that when asking about my job prospects? I’m sorry if I offended your sensibilties, but it’s not like I was preaching racial purity or spouting racial epithets.
The highest minimum wage in the US is for the state of Washington at 8.67$/hour.
That makes 15$ almost a 75% improvement over that. Definitely not “somewhere near the minimum wage.” Still might not be worth relocating half-way around the world though.[/quote]
You quote makes me look as if I said that as fact–it was a guess, and gladly, acourding to you, wrong. I was guessing based on what I know friends make in a factory job, and which I assumed was minimum wage. I guess the factory pays better than average. Well good for my friend, I guess!
But I don’t see how ANYone is surviving on 8.76 per hour. I googled Arkansas’ min. wage just now, and it’s 7 and a quarter.
When I first went back to the States, about six years ago, my first job was working for the government for 10.01 per hour as a food stamp worker. That wage was about 99 cents too much per month for me to qualify for food stamps! You see how they did that, there? Heh.
And I have only one child, and we still couldn’t get by on just that.
On point, you may not NEED an education to be a buxiban teacher, but you are required to have one, so you’d think they’d be required to pay you as if you had one. I guess not.
housecat: Most ESL work though is unskilled labour, at least in this country. This industry is an industry and they want factory workers, essentially. The difference between us and the Southeast Asians is we’re a better paid class of factory worker, but we’re still factory workers. We make the mistake of thinking of ourselves as tradesmen or engineers, when we’re not.
You don’t need an education in the field of EFL/ESL/linguistics per se to do this. You need a degree in anything. What you also need is to be from a native speaking country (all claims of Russians and Poles teaching illegally aside), which doesn’t even necessarily make someone a native speaker. Aside from Afrikaaners and Quebecois, there are also people such as the Nigerian I used to work with who was obviously not a native speaker (after repeated attempts to find out, he eventually told me English was not his native language), but who had studied in the U.S. for a few years and somehow picked up citizenship. There’s also the odd situation of an Afrikaaner being able to teach English here, but someone from Jamaica or Singapore, both of which have English as an official language, being unable to teach English here.
Of course, there are jobs here that do require education in EFL/ESL/linguistics (university jobs), but oddly, they don’t really pay accordingly, though there are better holidays. My current job requires that I have slightly more specific education than the average job here, but it still doesn’t necessarily mean anyone working in the MOE programme like me actually has a background in EFL/ESL/linguistics.
[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]housecat: Most ESL work though is unskilled labour, at least in this country. This industry is an industry and they want factory workers, essentially. The difference between us and the Southeast Asians is we’re a better paid class of factory worker, but we’re still factory workers. We make the mistake of thinking of ourselves as tradesmen or engineers, when we’re not.
You don’t need an education in the field of EFL/ESL/linguistics per se to do this. You need a degree in anything. What you also need is to be from a native speaking country (all claims of Russians and Poles teaching illegally aside), which doesn’t even necessarily make someone a native speaker. Aside from Afrikaaners and Quebecois, there are also people such as the Nigerian I used to work with who was obviously not a native speaker (after repeated attempts to find out, he eventually told me English was not his native language), but who had studied in the U.S. for a few years and somehow picked up citizenship. There’s also the odd situation of an Afrikaaner being able to teach English here, but someone from Jamaica or Singapore, both of which have English as an official language, being unable to teach English here.
Of course, there are jobs here that do require education in EFL/ESL/linguistics (university jobs), but oddly, they don’t really pay accordingly, though there are better holidays. My current job requires that I have slightly more specific education than the average job here, but it still doesn’t necessarily mean anyone working in the MOE programme like me actually has a background in EFL/ESL/linguistics.[/quote]
This is spot on, isn’t it? Not only are we factory workers, but we are FOREIGN factory workers. Just like the SE Asians, we won’t get wage increases over time, aren’t protected by unions, and don’t have much in the way of long-term career prospects. At least we have relatively high wages compared to the average here.
Relatively high in a sense, but not when you consider two things:
Buxiban teachers basically get no perks. No hongbaos. No paid holidays. No sick leave. No pensions. Nothing.
The average white collar worker in this country doesn’t work nearly as hard as the average buxiban teacher. Sure, they put in an appearance, but there’s a lot of chatting on msn time or shopping on Yahoo! time.
I bet if you were to actually really compare the two in terms of actual work time and benefits (monetary or otherwise), the average buxiban teacher wouldn’t do so well here, especially not over the long term.
[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]Good God I am glad I’m not in the buxiban system where people are fighting over crumbs. 450-550NT/hour? Christ! When I came here three and a half years ago, Hess was paying 560NT/hour and that was about as low as it got. Grief, what a come down.
Anyway, if the OP has a JFMV, then what he should do is hit up the local government schools. Plenty of them hire people on a JFMV either part-time or as subs and they pay better. I personally don’t see why anyone on a JFMV would commit to a buxiban contract unless it were paying really good money.[/quote]
I know plenty of people who are on JFRV visas and still work in buxibans. Many government schools require that you be a licensed teacher in your home country, regardless of your visa :s .
[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]Relatively high in a sense, but not when you consider two things:
Buxiban teachers basically get no perks. No hongbaos. No paid holidays. No sick leave. No pensions. Nothing.
The average white collar worker in this country doesn’t work nearly as hard as the average buxiban teacher. Sure, they put in an appearance, but there’s a lot of chatting on msn time or shopping on Yahoo! time.
I bet if you were to actually really compare the two in terms of actual work time and benefits (monetary or otherwise), the average buxiban teacher wouldn’t do so well here, especially not over the long term.[/quote]
True. This certainly isn’t what I was expecting when I got into the high-salary expectations and easy hours that generally come with teaching.
Puppet: That’s right. I’m not sure which area you’re in, but for people in the buxiban industry, their roles are more akin to casual labourers or factory hands than teachers. In my job, I do get more benefits than the average buxiban worker, which is nice, though there are still some better gigs out there (only a few of them in Taiwan though). Someone would really have to like Taiwan to stay in the buxiban game for the long haul, in my opinion, and there’s probably a certain shelf-life anyway. There’s one woman in Taidong City who likes Taiwan a lot and was working at a buxiban, but she went back to the U.S. for a year, became a teacher, and then returned to Taidong. That would seem to be a more sensible way to do it.
Maybe it was longer than that and I got the story wrong. I don’t know. A friend of mine was going back to the States to do a similar thing and I was under the impression it was a year-long programme also, but maybe I am mistaken.
In Australia you can do it in one year, or could when I did it.
I don’t really know anything about this; I just did a quick Google search and saw a couple of examples.
Here’s a fourteen-month Master’s program at Yale, apparently leading to some kind of certification: yale.edu/tprep/urban/index.html
But the webpage says it will terminate in June of this year.
This appears to be a one-year Master’s program at the University of Kentucky, again, apparently leading to some kind of certification: education.uky.edu/EDC/content/welcome-mic
There are one year teacher cert programs out there, but I’m not sure if that year includes any sort of practicum or internship. All US licensure programs that I’m aware of (and I’m not aware of all of them by any means, and each state has it’s own requirements) require some sort of internship for licensure.
But there are programs that allow you to be hired and teach from day one, so a years worth of classes, and a year of simultanious “paid internship” is a possibility.
I could have been employed durring my graduate studies, and in fact I was supposed to be. The program was set up that way (it was also a two year program requiring at least six months internsip). But being a full time mom, student, and teacher was just more than I could handle. In fact, so many of us opted out of full time employment while in school that it is no longer an option–they force you to find full time teaching employment for internship, or don’t allow you to do it (because we were competing for internship slots with undergrad students).
How did she become a licensed teacher in one year. She must have had some previous credit ?[/quote]
Washington state has a summer long intensive program followed by a school year of student teaching. They only accept candidates for certain fields of teaching. Usually it’s better to have a couple of years of US teaching experience before going abroad though (from what I’ve heard).
