If any of these schools had programs with proven, objective results, and such results were known, the demand from parents to enroll their kids there would be so high that schools would have to turn away students. That would translate to an employers’ demand for highly skilled staff, educators with objectively measurable teaching effectiveness, and that would mean that most of us wouldn’t qualify to work at cram schools in Taiwan.
These things obviously aren’t happening, so instructional quality is not what sustains this market.
The places price compete, market on the convenience of their location, and provide services more akin to a daycare than to a school. I’ve watched the math teachers and Chinese teachers here do this. They just act like surrogate parents, barking at children to finish their work and giving them extra busywork of the same kind for further review, feeding them dinner, and training them to be socially civil.
Buxiban/hagwon instruction is the only workplace I’ve ever seen that frowns on objectivity in scoring, even when it shows relative progress among the class as a whole. One failing student means one upset parent, means one fewer student, means less money in the pot. Never once has a parent thanked me for failing his/her child among a sea of B-averages. If they fail, they’ll take their kids somewhere where failing is virtually impossible, or they’ll “consult” with me to find out how to get their dear child’s scores up (like it was a mystery that acting like a jackass in the classroom and at home hurts academic performance).
Don’t waste your money making them and yourself money. Recognize the purpose of these places, make sure that you don’t get ripped off, save your money wisely, and then GTFO before you’re in your thirties.
One employer recently asked whether I had a TESOL certification as I was putting my shoes on to leave an interview.
They were impressed (or polite enough to pretend to be impressed) by my English and Mandarin skills. They said that they liked my “ten-minute” teaching demo (mine went for twenty). They were happy with my qualifications, as far as I could tell. For some reason, though, they thought that some extra qualifications might help.
I didn’t have the nerve to tell him that speaking two languages fluently and a third (Mandarin) enough to impress him at some level (seeing how he tracked me down from 104.com.tw and that I didn’t even know that they existed until then), all without formal training, really ought to show that I know more about languages than a correspondence course offers, not to mention the relevant skills that I acquired at university.
But their application also required that I tell them my family members’ professions, as if that were going to be of any use to them. And there was an extra questionnaire, which I didn’t have enough time to do there, that I e-mailed to them after I returned home from work.
Kojen, conversely, just asked about my ARC status.
The pay difference had better be pretty impressive.