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

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
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This thread has lost its original focus quite a bit, but I just want to say I agree with you about all the stuff you said about sexual abuse being a problem here.

I’ve met a lot of people (men and women, from all sorts of countries of origin) in Taiwan who shrug their shoulders about what is obvious sexual abuse of sometimes very small children. And that doesn’t get better when they get older. It gets soooo much worse (and better hidden away)

I’ve had teachers and admin tell me about things that girls “claim” boys did to them when they were in three year old kindergarten (now they’re all in elementary), but emphasize that there’s “no evidence” so the girls “could have made it up”. We’re talking about the girl rushing out of the bathroom after (ok, “allegedly”) being sexually assaulted by a boy and going straight to the teacher, not parents training the kid to say this weeks later because they’re out for blood for no reason. Yeah, cuz a three year old is going to make up a story about (ok, I’m actually not going to put the details in here. But it’s not possible a three year old could possibly make up such a story. They haven’t existed on the planet long enough to know that’s a possibility unless it really did happen)

I have had parents (usually raised abroad) tell me about how they think their daughter might have been raped during nap time in kindergarten by their classmate but that they don’t want to make too much of a fuss because of the status of the family of the other child in question.

I can’t emphasize enough that ALL sexually inappropriate behavior by ALL children before they have reached puberty is a red flag that that child is most certainly being sexually abused and that it’s happening consistently. The warning signs are subtle, but it is the role of educators and parents to teach clear body boundaries and make sure you NEVER brush aside “so and so touched me here”

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[quote=“nz, post:141, topic:242435”
This thread has lost its original focus quite a bit, but I just want to say I agree with you about all the stuff you said about sexual abuse being a problem here.
[/quote]

I think so! But since we on sexual abuse now, yes it is a problem. Who taught kids that behaviour? It’s coming from adults. Abusers are incredibly sneaky and it’s very hard to catch them in the act. For reasons of shame, kids won’t talk. I’ve been suspicions about a co-teacher before but can prove absolutely nothing. It is frustrating not least because what sometimes gets labelled as attention deficit disorder is in some cases almost certainly a sympton of being sexually abused. And then we get the phobia about touching, often unjustified. Oh dear…

Back to Tealit, same old schools by and large. I even saw one just now that I actually taught at for one semester. Pretty grim private school. Their standard advertisement is really a bait and switch thing–they end up offering most people some part-time work with lousy classes. Another trick, widely used on Tealit, is to state a salary range 60k-80k ‘based on experience’ etc. You can’t pay one person 60k and another 80k to do the same job! No one does that. Throwing in a lowball figure is a negotiating tactic, and a red flag of sorts. Reckon I’ve said as much as I will about Tealit…

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As someone who works for a company you listed in your post, I can answer this question. Tealit have us sign a one or two year contract in order to advertise. Part of this agreement is 365 day advertising and banner rights.

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Could you give some specific examples of this? I’m not very familiar with Montesorri education. I have heard that most schools in Taiwan that use the name do that and really nothing else. Montesorri in name only.

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The main goal that Maria Montessori had when she started her method was for children to be independent from reliance on adults as soon as possible. “Help me to do it myself” is the motto. This means showing children how to do things and then giving them the space to practice, a lot, even if it means taking forever to do tasks that we can do easily as adults. This is because children are driven to do everything by themselves and that any aid to them that is unnecessary hurts their psyche, confidence, etc.

They sit at tables in size-appropriate chairs and eat with real cups, forks, spoons, etc. as soon as they’re able to sit up without support. They learn to carry things and wash things by themselves. They learn to take off, put on, and tie their own shoes. They learn to express their dissatisfaction with the action of others and express what they need instead.

In general, it blows my mind how much Taiwanese parents generally help their children to an annoyingly unnecessary level. Five year olds who literally don’t know how to hold a tissue to their own nose and wipe it. Second graders who can’t tie their shoes. Third graders who point at an object and make a pathetic looking face because they are accustomed to adults jumping in and saying “oh honey, you need me to ___ don’t you?” And then doing the thing for them. The parents make them helpless, nonverbal vegetables when they absolutely have the neurological and physical capacity to do all those things from a very young age.

In montessori schools specifically, sadly it’s not just the parents but also the school owners and many of the adults that are hired who help the kids to become hopelessly reliant on others to do everything for them. You’ll see teachers with Masters in education (in something that’s not montessori) jump in to help children roll up their project paper or see that they don’t have a water bottle and hand them a paper cup, rather than saying “do you need help with something?” and making sure the child freaking knows how to use their words to ask for help or suffer the consequence of not having what they need because they didn’t ask for help.

You also have school owners to think that “Montessori” means “you never let the child feel bad under any circumstance”. Yeah, no. When you hurt someone and then they are mad at you for that, you are supposed to feel bad about it. That’s the literal point of negative human emotions, to make sure you can recognize that you don’t want to experience that emotion again and do what you can to avoid it. But when, as a teacher, you say things like “yes, I feel bad when my friends are mad at me too. But when I do things to make them upset, I know that I need think about what I need to do next time to make sure that my actions don’t hurt them, so they’re not mad at me”, any semblance of possible progress goes out the window when parents tell their child that they “just need to be sneaky about hitting/kicking/punching/name calling” or “that kid needs to learn how not to be a tattletale” or “that kid is a snitch, tell him he’s a snitch next time he tattles on you”, followed by many complaints to the admin about their absolute bully of a child “being bullied by everyone” (because the parents believe that bullying is anytime their precious baby doesn’t get their way), and you have a bunch of kids who have the potential to solve problems for themselves and be good humans (the other main takeaway from Maria Montessori) becoming incompetent idiots who spend their days plotting how to get away with hurting others while not even being able to wipe their own butts. Cuz adults undo the progress you try to instill in them, literally every step of the way.

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Yeah, sounds about right. It’s weird how kids here are simultaneously coddled and also put under extreme pressure. I think the whole line of thinking is something along the lines of “you just study, and only study, I will try to do everything else I can possibly do for you so you can focus more on studying.” Hence you get kids who are in first grade who are literally being spoon fed by adults, mom, grandparents, nanny whoever. I’ve also seen kids probably 7-8 years old getting waterbottles shoved in their mouths like they were infants. And also, why do they let kids older than like 7-8 sit on priority seats on the MRT? F&^% that, give it to someone who really needs it.

Maybe I mentioned this before, but Troy Parfitt does a great job of explaining how kids here are simultaneously coddled but put under pressure. He still can’t really explain the why though. I’m still wondering that myself. Do parents do things like holding water bottles for kids while they drink from them because it’s like the only thing they can think of doing for them to be kind/nice because of all the intense pressure they put them under?

Or is it because they want the kids to eventually do that kind of stuff for them when they are elderly and feeble?

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The elephant in the room with Montessori is she skipped the child-raising bit with her son. She wasn’t necessarily at fault for this, but she only became his mother when he was pretty much an adult. It does open her theories up to a kind of “You don’t want to do it like that…” criticism.

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Sometimes the best advice that people can give is the "Dont do what i did…-

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It’s cultural. There’s not really a why on the individual/family level.

There must be enough data to tell by now, one way or the other.

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That’s not an elephant in the room. You can tell that her entire life’s work was shaped by the trauma of being forced to “choose” between giving up her son or literally ending her entire career. Becoming pregnant at that time, regardless of marital status, meant the end to everything you worked for, 100%, no exceptions. This was not a situation where “she could have just…”. She was a medical doctor who had spent her live working on human rights, but, simply on account of she had a vagina, her “choice” upon becoming pregnant was a. Marry the man who impregnated her, becoming his property and giving up her entire career, no exceptions, b. Move into a work house for unmarried women with children, where she, a medical doctor who had put in all the work to become a medical doctor, would do menial tasks in exchange for room and board, never allowed to go do the job she’d trained for (completing medical school!) or c. Give up her son and continue her career. All of those are very fake choices, as they’re not choices at all.

But you can tell that that trauma shaped the direction she took her career and her legacy. Her focus shifted from rights of humans generally to specially the rights of children, emphasizing in the years following WWII that children need their own set of international laws to protect them. Her whole focus was that if children can do things for themselves, especially fairly resolving conflicts without the influence of a partial adult, we can’t even imagine the world we could live in in future generations. That’s all shaped by the fact that she had to give up her son and she couldn’t provide to him what she was able to provide to hundreds or thousands of children across the globe. She saw the need to shape a world that was genuinely equal and fair to absolutely everyone, cuz it most certainly wasn’t fair to her or her family

Absolutely nobody in Taiwan that has any impact over any of the schools that claim to be Montessori cares about that. One exception is one American guy in Changhua or something that keeps his school on the super DL. But any “Montessori” school that you can find on a Google search in Taiwan is not a Montessori school.

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Most of the research I’m aware of is positive.

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:slight_smile:

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Since we’re way off Tealit, I found out a close friend had sent her kid to a Montessori school and I wanted to say something, but didn’t. I don’t know enough about what it should be or what the problem is in Taiwan, and I don’t know if that particular school might not be better. I don’t think most parents know and or would understand beyond the basics, and I doubt if I explained the things that you just did, they would see that as a problem. TBH, I’ve considered putting my kid in one on the assumption that at least they have to try to be better than most of the crappy kindergartens here.

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My mother works in elementary education in America. Apparently fake Montessori is also a big issue in America.

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Considering the total crapshoot that is kindergarten in general, I can definitely see why some parents would be willing to pay 25-35k/month for fake montessori, rather than paying the same amount for hell kindergarten, which, yes, many/most seem to be across the board. I do not recommend the fake montessori for elementary though. A public school education in early elementary is half days most days and the foundations are solidly covered. Hire a nanny who’ll take your kid out exploring and doing things on their own in the afternoons or just let your kid walk themself to the park to play with the other kids who are only in school for half the day…

Fake Montessori is a problem everywhere. Jeff Bozo is supporting the building of them (he’s the opposite of the kind of human Maria Montessori wanted to shape with her Method, so I assume he himself was at fake Montessori…) and there’s also Guidepost, which is an international chain of “Montessori”.

Anyone can call themselves Montessori. There’s no trademark. Even people with AMI and AMS licenses are not a guarantee to be in any way following any aspect of Montessori

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One place I see on there all the time advertising is GEOS. What’s their deal? Anyone ever work with them before, either in their Tianmu location or the other one in central Taipei?