What is it with all those schools on Tealit who constantly advertise?

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
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He easy fix is he consumer demands better

But ya.

Enjoy the education racket. It’s pretty terrible how it has become. And I don’t see many people giving even half a shit. Which speakers to society far more than it does about bosses in my opinion. But people don’t often like discussing personal responsibilities.

Rinse and repeat, we are all complicit. Sole reason I refuse to let my kid go to a cram school. I don’t care how much we need to lose based on not working. That’s our cost, lost wages to teach our kiddo. Public school is for social interaction. And that alone.

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Inertia. Spouse. Familiarity. Fruits and vegetables. The landscape. Low utilties cost. And so on…It was NEVER about the JOB.

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Not asking you but good answer.

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Yup ain’t that the truth !

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Do you have a teaching license from your home country? In the past five years, I’d say that if you don’t have a teaching license but you do have a university degree and come from an “English speaking country” (that is to say, legally, you can work in a cram school here), 60k should be the absolute minimum payment, but it’s really too low. If you have a year or more of experience and a TESOL certificate, that should be sending your wages way up, as you’re not just some random person who has no clue what they’re doing. But if you have a teaching license and beyond, 70k is way too low, especially since someone with what are effectively no qualifications can make 60k right off the boat.

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Yeah but turnover here usually leads to the unqualified sticking around and the qualified running away. Sometimes in the middle of the school day… I worked at a school where the first question parents asked me was to promise I’d be there for their child’s graduation. That was a one of hundreds or maybe thousands of red flags…

But parents really hate this one. Especially in the public schools. When this one became a thing, I had quite a few not so wealthy parents taking me up on my NT1,800/hr rate for tutoring. Parents were ok with random Americans “who aren’t real Americans” (translation: they’re not white). But when the Filipino teachers started filling spots? Yeah the racism got real, real fast!

Teachers from not the US/Canada/Western Europe make much better serfs! Particularly South Africa, where job prospects are quite grim…

They grumble about it for a little while but yeah, they don’t exactly take action…

:joy:. Great question. Right now, I have the opportunity to try some new things out in the school year that I have high hopes for. I learn from my mistakes each year. I keep myself relevant and individuals are willing to pay me what I’m worth. I just need enough hours to make that work on a real level, which at the moment we’re not at. I reflect on the sunk cost fallacy a lot and wonder if I should leave. The problem is that housing in the US is so expensive nowadays that I would not be able to afford much by way of housing, I would need a car to get places, the cost of food really has skyrocketed, etc. Ask me again this time next year?

Thanks for recognizing the need for socialization!! That’s basically the whole point of sending your kid to school. Academics are secondary…

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At the end of the day, they are also all about the low cost and chabuduo

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Thanks for the answer.

The sunk cost fallacy keeps a lot of people here.

The situation is really not getting better though. I agree with most of the things you say concerning work conditions. The kids are getting harder to teach. It was unheard of for middle class students to still be in diapers when i got here. Now, there are always 3 or 4 in each class. Not a big deal, but it demonstrates the way parenting is going.

The money isnt keeping pace either.

I will explain it in sandwiches.

When i got here in 2006, my favorite breakfast sandwich was 25 nt and i was on 600. So i could buy 24 for every hour worked.

Now, my fave sandwich is 40 and i make 800. 20 sandwiches.

Rent is worse. 12k when i arrived, 28 for the same place now.

So i actually had more spending power as a newbie.

So the only thing to do is work more hours to make up for it.

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Yeah. It’s not a great situation all around, except, again, for total newbies to both the country and to teaching.

I’ve had quite a few sit-downs with people in various city and county governments about what direction they could take public English education and every single meeting had some sort of conclusion along the lines of “well yeah, you’re raising excellent points and we’re sure that these ideas could have much better impacts than the current situation, but Fulbright…”. But Fulbright what? They’re a US governemnt scholarship to random American students who just graduated from college to help out in, not run, Taiwanese public school English classrooms. They’re not teachers and the majority of them have no interest in or experience with teaching. The Fulbright trainers (the people hired to train the Fulbright ETAs), like so many people who run PD in Taiwan, have masters degrees in TESOL and maybe six months of teaching experience at all to speak of. Or they’re Taiwanese people who have 25+ years of perfecting their kill and drill game (as in, they think that if all the grammar drills they do on the chalk board are just moved onto a digital game board, English class is fun and effective. Guess what? Language acquisition doesn’t work that way!) So, in public education, the Taiwanese governemnt has handed the reins over to a program funded by US tax dollars (and I guess some Taiwanese tax dollars. And Formosa Plastic) that has absolutely no stake in the success of Taiwanese English education. And they pay their teachers half of what the FETs are paid to do the same job. So that’s a joke.

Then you get to private schools, which are very much “rich get richer”. 30k+/month + fees for, I shall remind everyone, usually a foreigner with no qualifications in their home country to play teacher for probably 60-80k/month. But we can’t have rich Johnny coming in contact with poor children, so it’s worth it to the rich parents. Who have the cash to throw at outside support so their child doesn’t have any trouble with learning to read, play multiple instruments, sports, speak multiple languages, etc.

And cram schools have gone way up in cost. I’ve met people paying NT$600/hr now for their kid to be in class with 15-20 kids. That used to be maybe NT$120/hr. Yet the foreign teachers there are being paid NT$700/hr at best.

The problem is that this is an overall issue with society. In the US, standards for teachers have dropped through the floor, with some states pushing to not even require a GED/high school diploma to teach. This lowers the cost of hiring teachers, but it’s going to have a massive long term impact on society as a whole — only the children of the wealthy who can afford outside support will be able to read, write, and do math. The same is happening in Taiwan, and not just for foreign teachers. I’ve posted elsewhere about how I have had college students as co-teachers (who are the homeroom teacher) in public schools. This despite there being plenty of people who graduated from NTNU and passed the requisite tests for teaching being available in the same area. But people at the top (cram school owners, private school owners, fake international school owners, the head of Fulbright, some people in the MOE, etc.) are pocketing lots of cash in the short term. If they’re investing that money elsewhere (TSMC stocks and real estate), they don’t care if the education market collapses. They’ll be plenty rich and they’ll be able to continue to boss the peasants around for many years to come. But Rome will fall.

The problem I have is that I enjoy doing education, mastering my skills, and seeing what does and does not work for learning. And it’s not like turning around and becoming a programmer or an accountant is going to make me any more money in the long run. So I might as well do what I enjoy, even if it’s a Sisyphean task.

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Is very cost effective, sounds prestigious, and probably gets them into cool meetings with important Americans

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Yes, somehow Fulbright is tightly intertwined with AIT, which just gets everyone excited about prestige and stuff. That’s a load of utter nonsense, as demonstrated by the complete lack of progress in any way, shape, or form when it comes to English proficiency for the kids going through schools serviced by Fulbright, but it makes people feel important!

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I have a CELTA and a masters but in science not English , I ended up teaching science and English for a few years. That’s probably why I maxed at 70, 000. I’m not from a wealthy background however, and the cost of living then over a decade or two ago was way cheaper. I was comfortable in that. I think I was qualified as I was teaching it as a second language. However, if qualified as a high school teacher they should be paying around 100,000NTD I think. I think some of the bilingual schools pay around that.

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I was never in higher education but worked at one of the famous adult English cram schools. Started in 2012 at $500/hr. Many years later the same pay and they would not entertain a raise. If I were to bet, they are probably still paying $500 today. Inertia kept me there as people said, as Taiwan was still reasonably cheap. But every month everything would go up $5nt here, and $5nt there. Death by a thousand cuts. Not much left after rent and food.

What sucked was the students kept telling me that their tuition fees kept going up and up and one by one they slowly dropped off. The only people left were the uber rich at the end of my time there. They were making bank but still no raises. They take advantage of the fact that most people would prefer not to teach kids.
Finally took off back home once I got sick of it.

I tried to get into my business field in Taiwan but I found that most (all in my field?) companies have zero interest in a foreigner as they don’t want to pay extra or they don’t see any need.

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That is pathetic. That is exactly the same standard rate at adult conversation schools as 10 years earlier. 600NT was the going rate for newbies if you could endure the xiao di ren. Higher than that with a little experience. You are telling me that you people have had literally no wage increases since 9/11 happened and Andy Lao was shooting Infernal Affairs II?

Why would anyone in their right mind come to this little island to teach kids the Alphabet Song? When I was here, I was pulling down 5x per hour what the guy in 7-11 took home. Now your salaries are almost equal. Your scooter grease monkey and taxi driver who brings you back home drunk from the bar earn more than you. Even the hordes of useless office drones that populate most of Taiwan earn a similar underpaid salary as yours. Only Filipina maids and foreign factory workers earn substantially less than you, and at half your salary, even they are catching up. English teachers are on the downward slope to becoming an underpaid, looked down upon underclass with the same social status as Indonesian grunt labor.

Err, wait, they already are, aren’t they?

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That’s purely a reflection on yourself. I know thirty odd people working in international schools and making mint.

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Presumably it’s GVO. They are a bit of an outlier pay-wise. There are advantages to working there.

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He means easy p*ssy :melting_face:

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GVO paid 400NT 25 years ago. So wheeee, a whopping 100NT pay increase in a quarter century!

I feel old now.

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Yes, I had a friend who worked at GVO and he said all he did was twiddle his thumbs and collect phone numbers.

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One thing to bear in mind it that larger organisations are more likely to have more frequent recruiting needs. Imagine it like this: if I am a one man band the frequency of my hiring musicians would be ‘never’. However if I am the Berlin Philharmoniker the frequency of my recruitment would be tending towards ‘all the time’, simply because I employ many people.

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