How living in Taiwan has helped my career

The other day I was talking to a friend who'd relocated from Taipei to Hong Kong (a journalist). He called Taipei a "professional backwater" and for a lot of industries, I can see where he's coming from. I don't think it's right or fair - I mean the city is about the size of Chicago and is the capital of one of the most prosperous and modern-industry-heavy countries in Asia - but he's got a point that successful professionals in Taipei are underpaid, the best tend to leave for Shanghai, Beijing, Japan or the West, and that a lot of times you just have to move because, I dunno, your crappy joke rich-people-are-trolling-us newspaper has decided to close down its Taipei office because now I guess it's OK to report on Taiwan from a totally different country - China. (I'm looking at you, Wall Street Journal, though that's not where my friend worked). I do think this is in part due to bad domestic policy - this is what allowing wage stagnation to continue has wrought - and in part due to purposeful and strategic marginalization by China that the crappy joke rich-people-are-screwing-us Ma administration has let grow unchecked.

But, with a few posts in recent months that included criticisms of Taiwan as a difficult place to build a career as a foreigner, I felt that perhaps a post about how Taiwan has actually benefited my career was in order. This will mostly be useful for English teachers, of which I am one: one of the few jobs it is fairly easy for a non-Taiwanese to come here and do.

Most obviously, Taiwan gave me the chance to actually try my hand at teaching longer term and as a possible career goal. That's not something that's so easy to do in the USA or, I gather, most western countries. I am in the USA right now for a family visit (for once there's no bad news) and I reflected during my recent trip to Hong Kong, where I spoke to this friend, and this morning in my dad's house, on what my life would be like if I hadn't chosen Taipei to spend the last decade.

If I'd moved on from Taiwan to another country to teach, I can't say for sure what it'd be like but I'm not at all sure I'd have the same level of professional development (CPD) that I have gained from living in Taiwan, simply due to time and funding. More on that below. Most countries underpay English teachers, and those that don't often require long hours, are very expensive, or just don't have the technological infrastructure to do well in online classes if they don't have in-country CPD.

If I'd stayed in the USA...oh god. I know many people prefer the stability of a salaried office job, but anyone who's met me knows that sort of work just doesn't suit me. I get restless if I'm in one place too long, or have to spend very long hours there. I get bored with routine more easily than many. I don't like being expected to clock in and out at certain hours when that's just not how my best work gets done. I have a strong personality that doesn't quite fit with most office politics, where 'normal' is the new beige. It sounds very self-centered and entitled and "kids these days" although I'm in my 30s, but better that I know this about myself and act on it than put myself and others through the torture of my trying to work such a job, yes? I find most office work meaningless on a personal level, even as I acknowledge that some of it must be done and others do find meaning in it.  So, with my remarkable lack of talent at doing office work I don't find meaningful, and my penchant for saying what I think regardless of the social consequences, and my intractable inability to act 'beige', I probably wouldn't have gotten promoted very quickly and would probably still be wondering why I'm on the bottom rungs at a company that's given me a job that I could do far better at, but lack the motivation to try. I wouldn't even be able to afford training for something different, so I'd feel stuck. I'd still be taking the bus 2 hours to work and back each day and struggling to pay rent on the fringes of a major city, working a 2nd job to have any savings at all, watching my 20s melt into my 30s with little change.

Doesn't that sound lovely?

Taiwan, in short, gave me the chance to do something else. I can't imagine I would have been able to afford the path to becoming an English teacher in the USA.

Anyone who reads this blog semi-regularly knows that I'm a big proponent of teacher training. I really don't buy the argument that all you need is the right personality or talent and some classroom practice - if anything it's condescending to teachers who have worked hard to perfect their craft to imply that any reasonably extroverted upstart who isn't a total dullard could just sort of figure it all out in a few months through magic or something. But, what I haven't perhaps made clear is that I'm also a fan of experience, and getting someone fresh off the plane into a job where they can see for themselves if they like it and are suited to it as a career before committing to an expensive degree program is something I support.  After all I got my start that way. I'd only insist that such opportunities come with somewhat standardized, respectable on the job training and continuing with the job would require getting (school-funded) qualification such as CELTA after a year or two.

But you can't do that in the USA - you might be able to volunteer or get a job at an unaccredited school/institute, but you won't be able to get a real job paying a living wage teaching English in the USA unless you commit to perhaps more money than you want to spend getting certified to do something you've never even tried. Most such jobs seem to require a Master's or teaching license. I can see how promising new talent may decide to just take office jobs rather than commit to that.

So, thank you Taiwan, for making it possible for me to discover a career that suits me in a way my home country could not.

You could say that a lot of countries provide this - you can teach English anywhere. Yes, almost anywhere, but Taiwan has the advantages of being more livable than say, China (or the Middle East for women with strong feminist beliefs), with better wages than most of South America, all of Europe, Turkey and most of Southeast Asia (I hear wages in Vietnam are pretty good but are awful and exploitative in Thailand). It's not as expensive as Japan or Europe - perhaps only in Korea can you save more as jobs there tend to provide perks such as flight reimbursement and free accommodation.

So, in Taiwan you can live fairly well and potentially save enough to pay for CPD - which schools should be paying for or helping to fund but generally don't.  That's actually pretty rare in this profession! I'm not sure if I lived in a more expensive country if I'd have been able to afford Delta at all, or if I'd had to commit to one full-time job. You may have to go abroad for CPD in Taiwan - more about that and other issues below - but at least for me, Taiwan has given me the flexibility and funds I need to get it done.

Taiwan also allowed me to become a permanent resident fairly easily - not something a lot of countries necessarily do. This allowed me to sort of 'create a job' for myself in which I work part-time in corporate training, part-time in the IELTS world, and part-time for my private clients. This is not something I could have done as easily (and legally) in, say, China where permanent residency is hard to come by, or Korea where you need a job offer and work visa to even come in, and so that job - paying for your flight and accommodation and all - is more likely to expect you to work for only them. Even in Taiwan without permanent residency schools that sponsor your work visa can and do ask you to be available for them at set hours - you lose a lot of flexibility, but the fact that I was able to get PR fairly painlessly is a big plus in favor of Taiwan. That sort of freedom has really helped my career because I've had more chances, through being free to work whenever and for whomever I like, to not only get a Delta in my spare time (something that may have been torturous at a full-time job) but also to expand into other ELT specialisms. I don't know that I'd have had the chance to do both specialized private teaching, corporate training and IELTS in a more traditional job setup, and it has been very good for me professionally.

Notably, I could not have done this in the USA either, in part because there's just less demand for English teachers (and what demand there is seems to mostly be in public schools, and I don't teach kids) but also because that sort of freelance work requires a fair amount of bouncing around the city. I do not like to drive. Other than possibly New York - and maybe not even there due to long transit times - I couldn't do the sort of all-around-town commuting that I do on a reasonable schedule without a car. It's a life goal for me to never have to own a car, so this is a big deal.

That's not to say that Taipei is a totally professional place for English teaching, or that it's necessarily the best place to start a career. Certainly about 99% of the cram school industry, where most untrained "Engrish teechers" work, is also a crappy joke, Taiwan has no important professional conferences in ELT, whether academic or professional, and even real employers don't always treat you as a professional. I've been lucky in this regard but even friends of mine who've worked at actual universities complain about treated like grunt workers. There are no good training or qualification programs in Taiwan - you have to go online or go abroad. Most jobs don't care if you're qualified or not. Those in ELT research who actually want to participate in the academic side of the field rarely publish from Taiwan, and professional development is almost never paid for or even encouraged (again I'm lucky in that for me it is encouraged, but I can't help but notice it hasn't been paid for, and that's one other reason why I freelance rather than committing to one employer. No employer has a package quite good enough to get me full-time). The idea of working at a university and having a research budget as well as funding to travel to international conferences, as my friend in the same field in Japan does, seems to simply not exist in Taiwan. So, there's room to improve. A lot of room.

But it would be unfair to slam Taiwan totally. We have a very small community of ELT professionals - I probably know the majority of Delta holders in the country - but I've found a great deal of support in that community. I met my Delta tutor randomly through an online forum post. Other professionals have allowed me to observe classes, accepted me into training programs and given me advice on my way up. Those who 'get it' really get it, and there are few enough of us that perhaps it does mean we support each other more.

And on a more personal note, I grew into my own in Taiwan. I am not the same person who got on a flight from Dulles to Taipei 10 years ago - now I know how to work hard, I know how to deliver results at work (even if I am a bit temperamental or have high expectations at times), I know what I want and I feel like I have an actual career. I discovered that career through working in Taiwan, and I'm not entirely sure the conditions would have been right for it to have happened in another country. I couldn't stay in China, I love Japan but have serious reservations about what it would be like to live there, Korea is not as laid-back, and other countries don't pay particularly well. I've had the chance to try out different types of teaching and had work opportunities I likely wouldn't have had elsewhere. I recently had the opportunity to work in a professional capacity with a public figure I happen to personally admire and respect, on a topic I am very passionate about, and I enjoyed it greatly. I never would have had that chance if I'd just stayed in the USA and worked some crappy joke office job or slogged through work at a cram school in Japan. I wouldn't even be the same person - the professional English teacher who is passionate about her field - who would have had such an opportunity.

So, while my friend has a point about Taipei as a "professional backwater", I just can't entirely sign on to that perspective. Taiwan made me the English teacher and person I am. I  have come to love Taiwan as a second home, and care about it as a nation. I had none of those things in 2006 and while I suppose I could have the same feeling about any country I'd chosen to spend these years in, I chose Taiwan, so Taiwan means something to me.

The Tale of Lance Lightning

I've sort of hesitated in writing this post because it forces me to come to terms with my past.

That sounds way creepier than it really needs to, but it probably got your attention!

Back in 2002-2003, when I was living in China, I had a coworker who was teaching at another branch of our small provincial English language center. He had a very memorable name - we'll just change his name to "Lance Lightning" - and was an retired-military Englishman with a grizzled-in-a-wiry-sort-of-way air about him.

We traveled to Kunming and Dali together - this is not as weird as it sounds - we got along quite well (I tend to get along with grizzled-Englishman types, the more sarcastic the better) and generally hung out going to tourist spots together, meeting up after breakfast because I was a poor kid staying in hostels and he could afford proper hotel rooms.

At one point, Lance mentioned something about teaching - some educational concept I hadn't heard of - and I asked him about it and where he'd learned it. It was probably something I really should have known about before embarking on a year of teaching abroad, like classroom management. He said he'd taken a CELTA course before coming and, quite offhand, that he did so because "if I was going to move abroad to do this, I thought I'd better to it right or it's not worth doing at all."

That's just the sort of person Lance was. And although I was a feckless 22-year-old at the time, that attitude appealed to me. It's a part of why we got along - he didn't suffer fools (and I suppose that because he suffered me as his weird pink-haired coworker-and-traveling-companion, that I must not have been as much of a fool as I now see myself as having been, and I probably liked the validation).



Me and my weird pink hair in Kunming, late 2002 - it was way pinker than this old photo makes it seem.

Anyway, I remember wishing I'd had the forethought and money to have done it that way.

In Kunming, Lance and I stopped at one of the famous temples - either Yuantong or Golden, I don't remember which. It was cool and overcast, a bit drizzly. So much for the famous Kunming weather! Leading up to it was a very long staircase of marble or granite, really onerous to climb. Being a retired army guy, Lance jogged up at a comfortable pace and met me at the top. I climbed comfortably for some time but was huffing and puffing and pushing myself forward by the end.

"Well, you made it," Lance said. "The key to getting up a long stairway like this isn't how strong you are. It's got nothing to do with muscles. It's all about the respiratory and circulatory system. If those are weak, you won't pump the oxygen you need to give you the energy to get to the top. You're not fat" (at the time I wasn't overweight, now I am), "but it looks like you've got some working out to do."

My first reaction was defensiveness - hey, I wasn't that unfit! - but I tamped that down. He was right (I mean I'm not sure about the exact physiological aspects, but generally speaking, he wasn't off base).

In later years I would look back at that moment - it wasn't just about climbing stairs. I wanted to teach as well as Lance could jog up and down those steps. Confidently, knowing what I was doing and how I should proceed, seemingly effortlessly (though it's anything but). Just as one might work out to improve respiration and circulation, I wanted to work out my mental muscles to be a competent, trained teacher.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

Over the next few years I backpacked around Asia, tried to work in finance, couldn't bring myself to care enough about the field to achieve anything within it (and I did try - I just inherently wasn't interested), got an evening job teaching ESL to Korean immigrants, saved some money and moved to Taiwan where I taught English again without any sort of qualifications or credentials for a few years before finally getting my act together and getting a CELTA, then moving on to Delta and IELTS examiner training. Eventually, I will get a Master's. I need it if I ever want to work in this field in a Western country.

Fast-forward to now, and that offhand comment from Lance is quite possibly a part of why I've since swung so far in the other direction - I have the zeal of the converted. I know the CELTA course is a quality course because I've done it. It won't make you a star teacher, but it will give you the basic competency you need to move on to better performance - something you aren't going to get from experience alone.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

Here's the thing - Lance wasn't a career teacher. He wasn't a seasoned professional. What I respected - and still respect - about this worldview is that he saw a fairly affordable basic course that would allow him to do his "retirement" job with a basic degree of competency, and he shut up and took the damn course rather than construct some unrealistic narrative in which he didn't need it, a narrative that would have insulted teachers, the profession of teaching, and the generations of hard work and research in education, pedagogy and second language acquisition that people have put into the field, all to make himself feel better about not taking his new job seriously. You don't need to be a career teacher to do this. You don't need to plan to stay in it for more than a few years. Even so, you can do better than showing up and pretending your accent and face is enough.



A dragon carving somewhere in the Golden or Yuantong temple, Kunming, China, late 2002.

Now, I advocate pre-service teacher training (as in, taking some sort of English teaching course before you actually begin working as an English teacher), specifically the CELTA, Trinity or equivalent, and will go so far as to say that a.) I think this, or something like it, should in fact be a legal prerequisite for employment in ELT in all countries and b.) I do not view ersatz "English teachers" who lack such qualifications as professionals.

I'll go even farther than that - not only should all English teachers have to get a basic, respected qualification (CELTA, Trinity or equivalent) but that if someone wants to open an English language center, they either need to be, or need to hire, someone with adequate credentials in ELT in order to ensure that the training, curriculum, materials, hiring etc. are all in line with sound educational practice. In short, to ensure that the school wasn't run by businesspeople whose only concern was profit and who were not concerned with the actual quality of the product being provided.

Perhaps it would be acceptable for someone to go abroad and teach English for a year or two without a CELTA if and only if the school in question had a qualified head teacher on staff who trained all new hires, and whose training was examined and approved by a higher accreditation agency or a committee within the Ministry of Education of that country. After a few years, however, it should be required that they either get a CELTA or equivalent (or take the TKT), or leave the field in that country. Government incentives to schools that help sponsor their long-term teachers to gain these credentials would be a solid step forward.

"But Jenna," you're probably thinking, "you didn't do that. You started as a backpacker-teacher! How can you then say that you don't think others should be able to do exactly what you did?"

And you'd be right. So before writing this post I had to think long and hard about why I now feel the way I do, and if it's fair to do so when I benefited from a system that allowed me to get a pretty well-paid job (by Taiwan standards) without having even remotely close to the qualifications I should have had to get it.

Here's what I've come up with: if I could do it all again, I wouldn't have started teaching without doing something like the CELTA first. In 2002, after graduating from college, deciding not to go into Peace Corps (long story), and choosing instead to spend a year in China teaching English, I would have instead delayed my trip by 6 months, saved enough to pay for the CELTA and living expenses in a relatively inexpensive country like Thailand, and done that before moving on to that first teaching job in China.

After all, the CELTA course cost a pretty packet for 2 people to do, with an apartment back home to pay rent on, along with living in a fairly expensive city like Istanbul, but it wasn't so expensive that I as a singleton couldn't have pulled it off in, say, Chiang Mai at age 22.

22-year-old me would have been pretty pissed to learn that she couldn't go teach English abroad without first laying out a few thousand dollars for a basic teaching qualification.

22-year-old me was also an entitled, spoiled idiot. An spoiled idiot who did not understand that she was not so special as to not need basic teacher training before, you know, teaching. That professional fields require, by their very nature, some sort of training to be taken seriously in. That I might have a natural knack for teaching but that's not enough to make one a professional- level teacher, or a "teacher" at all. I was playing teacher, like a kid might "play doctor" or "play firefighter" (or "play lawyer" if kids were inclined to do something that dull to kid sensibilities). That being a native speaker did not qualify me to teach English, just as being "good at math" or even "highly educated in math" does not qualify one to teach math. That being a native speaker of a language is not the same as understanding the underlying systems of that language, and even if you understand those, being able to teach them using sound pedagogy is a different skill entirely. That teaching is so much more than knowing something - knowing how to impart it is equally if not more important.

So yeah, 34-year-old me would tell 22-year-old me to suck it up, save up the extra money and do the damn course. Then she could bum around for a bit, but eventually, if she were to get serious about the job, she'd have to find a job under a real director of studies and improve her craft before moving on to higher qualifications.

With that in mind, reading articles like this bring me back around to that thing about my past that I don't like to admit: that I took the easy route, and that I regret it. I should not have been allowed in front of a class of students who were paying (or whose parents were paying) for the experience. It was one giant facepalm, and I didn't get better until I got some decent pre-CELTA training. My entire professional existence was probably one huge facepalm, in fact, until approximately 2009 when my experience finally caught up with my training. I was doing alright by the time I did the CELTA, but I was not a professional:

"It can easily be the case that native speaking teachers working abroad, in large part because they do not speak the local language, are excluded from the decision making process at their schools. This leads to the native-speakers feeling frustrated because they are not being taken seriously as professionals, while the non-native teachers sit quietly thinking, “Well, you’re not really professionals, are you? You were only hired because you’re a native speaker.”

And that's exactly it. If you're only hired because you happen to speak a language (or in many cases, simply look like you do), then how are you a professional? Professional work requires training and development. It needn't be a teaching license if you're not working with kids. It needn't be a Master's, just as you can be a financial professional with Series 7 and 66 certifications but don't necessarily need an MBA or degree in Finance.

As such, no, I don't think that what makes a good teacher is necessarily the piece of paper to say that they did this or that course - although the content of the courses themselves help. It could be done through more informal on-the-job training, but, honestly, most schools don't even offer that and those who do offer training of such varying quality that it simply cannot be the basis of "professionalism" unless it's either standardized by an accredited authority, or there is a way to show measurable outcomes (in much the same way that a business professional may start out with an unrelated degree but proves themselves through measurable outcomes that lead to promotion). The only way I see this happening in teaching is for everyone, at some point, to take a similar training course just as, say, financial advisors have to do with those Series 7/66 licenses.

22-year-old me would have been butthurt to hear that she was not a "professional". 22-year-old me was an idiot. 34-year-old me accepts it, and is still worried that, not yet having a full Delta, she is not quite professional enough. Incidentally, the end of that conversation with Lance about some aspect of teaching practice entailed me admitting I had no training whatosever, and Lance saying "you're pretty smart. You'll be fine." I see no reason why others can't be "pretty smart" too, and have no problem with kicking those who aren't out of the field.

What worries me is that a lot of these "native speakers hired as teachers" isn't just that they aren't qualified, as I wasn't (and so I can only imagine that in the classroom a large number of them are variations of the walking facepalm that I once was), it's that, like 22-year-old me, they get super butthurt if you say so. They don't like to hear that they aren't professionals, that perhaps their opinions aren't as valid as teachers with training, that there is a reason employers view them as replaceable and interchangeable and don't take them seriously (although I also get the feeling that employers purposely look for "teachers" they don't take seriously as native speakers without qualifications are much easier to "manage". If you are some rando businessman who started a school to make money but you don't know jack about teaching, then it can be quite inconvenient indeed to have a teacher with some training challenging your decisions, most of which are pedagogically crap).

They want to construct a narrative in which one learns to teach by doing it - forgetting first of all that "doing" doesn't mean much if it's not augmented by training and feedback from a professional who can point out where you're going wrong better than you can, and so if you learn by doing without that meaningful feedback (which most teachers at these schools don't get, as most schools don't have a competent, qualified head teacher or Director of Studies), you'll just pick up a bunch of bad habits that you won't even know you have (and will get very defensive about being called out on). Second of all that if you try to "learn to teach by teaching", along your path to learning you've just stepped on a whole bunch of people who've paid you to learn how to do something, and not even gotten a quality product out of their investment. How is that fair?

A system like the ones I proposed above - force English centers to have some modicum of professionalism before they open or to maintain their business, and force teachers to either come in with a qualification or only allow them to work for businesses that can provide training, and even then only for a specified period of time - would not be onerous. The regulations would be quite manageable for any business that takes itself seriously - any business you'd want to have around, in fact. It would get rid of the bottom-feeders and barrel-scrapers, and free up a saturated market so that better quality schools could open, hiring better quality teachers. It would be a net win. Sure, some schools would go out of business but as I see it, good riddance. And sure, some foreigners would find the CELTA/Trinity requirement too onerous and not choose to teach English. Again, I'm fine with that. We could use fewer "native speaker backpacker-"teachers". Open up the market to higher quality. And it would be a definitive step towards improving the profession and maybe those of us who take ELT seriously getting a little respect as teachers for once.

And, come on, all you "native speaker teachers" with no credentials? You can be better than whiny-ass 22-year-old me. Almost anyone can. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. 

Ears of Corn

Teaching English is a real job, but few people treat it that way.

Shibboleth shibboleth shibboleth!
Photo from here

Yeah, I know, that will shock exactly no one, except maybe those who were under the impression that teaching English could never qualify as an actual career (and I know a few folks who think this way). There are enough people on both sides to fuel many debates on LinkedIn, expat forums and TEFL forums, and yet nobody's written a truly thoughtful article or blog post on the subject. I found a few basic posts (like this one) that I don't think fully addressed the issue, and nothing that was comprehensive. I've written about it before, but I hadn't really found my voice on the subject yet.

My stance on it is basically this: teaching is a profession. It's as hard - or harder - than law or business and at times can feel like you work similar hours to those working in law, medicine or the higher echelons of business (all that talk about how teachers get their evenings and summers off? Bullshit. Plenty of teachers not teaching children in school systems don't get that time off, and those who do usually use it to do all of the spillover work which can't be finished during the school day, even with free periods. Continuing education, thoughtful marking of in-depth student work that goes beyond basic testing as well as planning good syllabi and classes all take time). It's a profession that requires a degree and certification as well as continuing education.

First tangent: a lot of people who don't fully understand the role race, class and gender play in our lives and what lives are on offer to us will often say "the reason women tend to earn less than men is because they choose less-well-remunerated careers such as teaching over well-paid ones like law". First of all, this is not true. Secondly, even if it were, the underlying assumption is that teachers are not well-paid because of something intrinsic to the profession. Perhaps that it is "not that difficult" (except it is), or that people who are passionate about it are more likely to do it despite the low pay (which is true - how often do you hear "I'm so passionate about law, I'd be a lawyer even if lawyers didn't earn a lot of money"?). But what I suspect is really going on is that it's not that women often become teachers despite the low pay; rather, teachers are poorly paid because they tend to be women. Gender discrimination at work (pun INTENDED). The teacher-and-nurse effect.

I just made "the teacher-and-nurse effect" up but it really needs to become a thing.

Most people would expect this of a math teacher, a history teacher, a Civics teacher, a French teacher, a Chemistry teacher, even an art teacher. They would never stand for "well I don't have any experience but I'm pretty good at chemistry and the school gave me a quick training session so let's go!". They would never accept a teacher for themselves or their children who was not trained, and they would want a teacher who was not only engaging and fun, but also had long-term course plans and class learning goals, and knew how to take concrete steps to achieve them. "Well, I'm being paid $15 an hour, I don't know a lot about history but I'll learn it and then teach it" or "I don't have a degree in Calculus but let's just figure this out together" would not fly. Not in a public school, not in a university, not in a center of continuing education.

Even if you took a foreign language - the sort of class that (obviously) most resembles a TEFL classroom - you wouldn't be okay with "I'm a native Spanish speaker, I have no teaching experience but I have this book, let's go through this together". Maybe that would be okay for a language exchange partner, but not a teacher. You'd want someone who actually knew what they were doing, someone who had training in pedagogy and methodology and knew how to impart knowledge of and fluency in Spanish unto you. Merely knowing something doesn't translate (pun intended) into knowing how to impart knowledge of something.

Basically, we expect our teachers in any other subject to be professional. We don't always treat them like professionals - we pay them too little and give them few resources and often even less respect, which is why some great potential talents in teaching don't go into the field - but we expect professionalism.

So why is it that we don't expect professionalism from English teachers? Why is this the one area of teaching - a profession - where it's not treated professionally? What is so different about teaching English as a foreign language that any inexperienced rando can get hired to do it, as compared to science, math, Civics or French?

I honestly can't think of anything. In terms of pedagogy, the methods used in language teaching don't differ that much from methods used in any other subject, including the difficult subjects such as Chemistry. In terms of content, I don't see how it's all that different from French class in my high school - the language has changed, but the ways of teaching it are more or less the same. There is really nothing special or different about TEFL/TESOL/ELT etc. as compared to any other subject you may wish to learn.

Before I go any further: I know that English is not the only foreign language to suffer the scourge of untrained, nonprofessional "teachers". Certainly the vast majority of Chinese teachers are awful, or at least wholly untrained. There are good ones, but pedagogy in Chinese and Taiwanese TCFL (Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language - I just made that acronym up) certification/diploma programs, if it is taught at all, tends to be taught very poorly, not relying on the mounds of applicable research available, not taking advantage of current practices in LT methodology, and generally outdated. In TEFL there is a (wrong) assumption that a native speaker just spending time with students will cause them to learn English (well, not entirely wrong: they will pick up some English, but not in any easily measurable way). There seems to be a different (also wrong) assumption that if you are a native speaker of Chinese, that telling the students all about the target grammar - all about it, even aspects they don't need to learn when first introduced to a concept - and then plugging in vocabulary, will cause them to magically learn Chinese with minimal practice required (certainly at Shi-da we didn't get nearly enough practice and fluency did suffer as a result). And again, that's not entirely wrong: if you attend a class like this, you will learn some Chinese. It just isn't the most efficient way to do so. Certainly language schools aimed at tourists in various countries employ untrained native speakers who have taken a quick introductory course.

All of those fall under basically the same rubric of the TEFL model that I'm criticizing. My attempt here is to compare TEFL to teaching as it is professionally considered, and to language classes done that way, by trained, talented and knowledgeable teachers.

So yes, quite clearly, TEFL is a real job. It's a real career. It's teaching; teaching is a professional occupation. It's no different from teaching Biology or Geography (which, I wish Geography classes would get an overhaul too. There's so much interesting discussion and learning fodder there, of the Guns, Germs and Steel variety, although maybe not so much the End of History or Clash of Civilizations variety, and yet it's so often reduced to memorizing capitals and main exports. Now that I'm gaining more knowledge of the various elements of good teaching, and being knowledgeable about Geography, someone should put me in charge of a Geography class - we'd have so much fun, ohmigod).

I do wonder if the lack of respect for pedagogy/proper methodology and what it can do for one's teaching is something more ingrained: public and primary/secondary school teachers are expected to have this training, but professors and other academics, mostly, are not. I think in four years of college classes that I had maybe three professors who actually knew how to teach. They were all very knowledgeable, some were quite well-known in their fields. But they didn't know how to effectively impart their knowledge: it was all lectures, Powerpoints, multiple choice and the occasional essay question. Part of that is, of course, huge class sizes especially at the lower levels, but part of it seems to be this pernicious idea that if you know something, then you know how to teach it. Professors know their subject, therefore they can teach it, apparently. Except they can't. Most of my professors would have benefited a lot from some training sessions, not in improving their own knowledge, but in how to get that knowledge to us in an interesting, motivating and relevant way.

If you do go ahead and get yourself educated - a Master's or at least a string of reputable certifications (no online weekend courses), or even better, both - and learn how to teach, it will show in your work. The difference between you - a professional - and an untrained 22-year old (or even an untrained 42-year-old) will be apparent. You will be able to lift yourself out of the Expat English Teacher Gutter pretty quickly. Anyone with a shred of sense or acumen will see the difference. It is absolutely worth it, and that's why I'm currently pursuing a Delta, and after that, hopefully a Master's (we'll see: I can't afford a Master's, won't take out more loans, scholarships and fellowships are hard to get for students not intending to enter a PhD program, and for American students tuition is preposterous - and foreign schools charge us international student tuition which is also preposterous. I could cash out my IRA for it, but that would be stupid. I could retire for a few months on that! WOO! PARTY WHEN I'M 90!!1! So...let's see if the winds of life blow me that way, or if they just blow).

So why don't people treat TEFL as teaching in a professional capacity? If there is nothing to differentiate it from any other kind of teaching, why does it get the shaft?

Three groups of people are affected by this: owners/bosses, teachers/"teachers", and parents/students (depending on the students' age).

From the boss' or school owner's point of view, this is obvious. They can pay an unskilled, untrained "teacher" far less than a real teacher would expect, and treat them like unskilled labor (something a real teacher would never accept). These folks - often twentysomethings with little life experience, though not always - will feel they've gotten a lot if you give them a slapdash bullshit training session made up of a mishmash of cribbed notes from teaching textbooks, strung together with vague platitudes about "keeping it fun" and "engaging the student", hoping that the interesting foreign-ness of the worker, with a smidge of charisma from that worker, plus a few textbooks thrown their way for material, will keep up the illusion that the students are getting a professional service - all for cut-rate prices (for the boss - the students or their parents pay a premium of course).

Some owners, I presume, know that they're peddling shoddy product. Others don't know the first thing about real teaching or what it takes to be a professional educator, and truly do think that all it takes to teach something - including English - is to know a lot about that thing. And who better to know about English than a native English speaker? Nevermind if they don't actually know all that much about the grammar or underlying structures or history of their own language, and therefore can't teach it. Nevermind that they are unaware of the latest practices or past research on teaching methods so they can't employ them in the classroom. Nevermind that they haven't heard of even the most basic concepts in English, Linguistics or pedagogy and therefore can't refer to them. If you've never learned, or heard of, IPA, you can't use it when it would be effective (and it isn't always). If you've never heard of a "student-centered classroom", you can't work towards creating one. If you don't know the difference between PPP, TTT, TBL, Dogme, TPR, Audiolingualism, Grammar-Translation or the Communicative Approach, you can't learn about, and practice, how to use them in your classroom at the times when they'd have the most effect, or when to avoid them. If you haven't read up on research into the best way to introduce new language, you won't be able to consider it when you plan a class, and your approach may be substandard (or it may just be different, if you are extremely talented. Most people are not). You may base some of your teaching methods on inaccurate or misguided assumptions about language learning, or not really know at all why you are doing what you're doing - which is rarely effective.

The first type of owner recognizes the shibboleths that distinguish teachers from "teachers"; the second doesn't. In both cases, they don't care.

From the newbie "teacher"'s point of view, it's a relatively well-paid job - for the country it's in at least - that they can get right out of school, no experience necessary, and they get to live abroad. Makes sense, even if from a professional standpoint it doesn't seem very ethical: I'm going to go and pretend to be something I'm not so some school owner can charge people rates for my work under the illusion that I have the credentials! But since when have ethics ever played a big part in prosperous business models?

In fact I'd go so far as to say that a lot of those twentysomething unskilled workers fancy themselves teachers: intellectually they know that a professional teacher must have training and experience that they don't have, but there's a bit of cognitive dissonance going on, fueled by not a small touch of defensiveness: they are teaching, and they want to style themselves as education professionals; they know they aren't, so they tell the voice in their head that whispers "you need more credentials, you need more training, you need more experience" to shut up, and they gas on about how they are real teachers, how they're just as good, how their bosses are lucky to have them. They don't seem to realize that the reason their bosses chose them was because they lacked credentials, and therefore the ability to seriously negotiate compensation and treatment, not in spite of their credentials in the face of their massive - often delusion-based - "talent". They're college grads, they're used to believing that no matter what they do they'll be professionals, they'll be skilled, they'll be worth something. They're used to having that belief reinforced. I don't blame them for wanting to believe that they are more than they are.

I am definitely guilty of this. I was guilty of it before I had training or experience, I was guilty of it before starting the Delta, and I might still be a tad guilty of it up until I enroll in a Master's program. Until I realized how bad I was, I thought I was pretty good. Then I got to be pretty good, and all I want to be is better. But that process took awhile. So, I know of what I speak.

I want to stop here and note a few things before I get back on track.

First, that I am somewhat grateful to the TEFL industry for being what it is. I don't think I would have gone into teaching otherwise, and I wasn't doing very well at the bottom rung of the office ladder. I need to write a longer blog post about this at some point, but this is one way in which the USA screws over its youth. I didn't know teaching was right for me when I went to college, and so I didn't major in it. I "wisely" majored in the subject I'd enjoyed most in high school: I chose International Affairs because it was close to Social Studies. Social Studies + history + travel + language? Sign me up! By the time I knew I not only wanted to teach, but would be very good at it with the proper training and guidance, I couldn't afford a Master's program. I still can't: the deal was that my folks would help me with college, but I was on my own for grad school, and I shouldn't go until I'd worked awhile and knew what I wanted. By the time I knew what I wanted, I didn't have the money because, well, wage stagnation and wealth inequality are real things. Now, I bet they actually would help me if I asked, but tuition at an American school is far higher than any of us can take on and international tuition is not much better.

So, TEFL allowed me a path into teaching that didn't require that I go get a Master's I couldn't afford, for a job that wouldn't pay me enough to pay it off in any reasonable amount of time. I am sure many very good teachers have taken this route, and the educational landscape is richer for it. I wholeheartedly support having this sort of route into teaching, although I'd like to see the model change (maybe a future blog post on that too - what a 'path into teaching, but not TEFL as it is now' might look like). I wouldn't be doing what I love today, with at least a shred of professional dignity, without that start as a twentysomething hack. I'd probably still be at some crap office job that I never got promoted out of, because I hated it enough to not be in a mental state to do well. It would have been a waste of a life.

Second, that as above, many good teachers do come out of this cesspit. The ones with a spark of natural talent that leads them to seek training and experience, to be better and to do better.

Third, that many schools, especially in rural or underprivileged areas, can't afford more than an unskilled twentysomething. There are professional teachers who would be willing to take a job like that, in rural China or a small Bolivian town or what-have-you, or even rural Taiwan, for low pay. A lot of them join the Peace Corps and do something like that. But not enough to meet the demand for English class among those with a bit of money in those places. Plenty of others would love the experience, but would expect a higher standard of pay and benefits that the school just wouldn't be able to offer.

In those cases, a twentysomething hack with a local teacher in tandem is still better than nothing, in terms of offering some sort of foreign language education to those who who want it and can afford it.

So, all that aside, back on track - what about the final group? Why do parents support this awful, unprofessional system? Unless they are paying markedly lower tuition (as may be the case with rural schools or schools in impoverished areas), they may simply be unaware. People without a background in education don't always understand what being an education professional is. That goes for students, school owners, parents and obnoxious people at parties who think they can tell you how to do your job. They may hear the teachers' and boss' "blah blah blah professional blah blah highly-trained teachers blah America blah" and believe them when they say that their words are "shibboleth shibboleth shibboleth", because they don't know better. They may just be lied to by the owner. They may know that the teacher is not a professional, but not realize that that matters and feel it's acceptable to pay high rates just to be in proximity to a native speaker. 

And of course, if they think it doesn't actually take that much training, talent, experience or knowledge for a native speaker to teach their language effectively, and that anyone who speaks English can do it, they'll feel more confident in trying to tell the teacher what to do (I will accept this from adult students in terms of what they want to learn, and will at least consider what they say when they express how they want to learn it. I don't teach children, but if I did, parents of children telling me what to do would get straight-up ignored unless their child was problematic and it was advice on how to deal with managing the behavior problem). It gives them a handy sense of superiority. Seems like a small thing to pay inflated tuition rates over, but what can I say?

That's really the crux of the problem, too: it's that school owners, often shrewd to the point of immorality, rake in huge sums of money by glossing over or entirely misrepresenting either teacher qualifications or the need for them. I suppose all's fair in business&war, and if someone is aching to pay too much money to get talked at by some white kid (because hiring practices really are racist), then they should be allowed to pay that money. If I want to pay a million dollars to snort cocaine cut with diamond powder, I should be allowed to do that (note: I don't want to do that). If a school advertises "look, we've got foreigners!" and folks line up to pay, then okay. If they advertise with "qualified, experienced native speaker professional teachers will help you gain fluency quickly and with ease", they're lying. Even f the "teachers" are qualified, experienced and talented, students still won't gain fluency quickly and easily. 

Presumably most parents and students want a good teacher for their money; a qualified and experienced one. Misrepresenting the teachers you are actually offering as worth the money - as more than they are - and then paying those "teachers" far less than you'd pay real teachers so that you can $$PROFIT$$, is thoroughly reprehensible. 

It also contributes to that same pernicious myth that it is not hard to teach well, that anyone can do it - and that for language teaching all you need is to speak the language, you don't need any knowledge of underlying structure, grammar, history or etymology. By hiring people who don't have that knowledge or ability (at least not yet), and paying them fairly well by local standards (although not well by international teaching professional standards), you're spreading the idea that this is all a teacher needs to be - that anything more is unnecessary, possibly even unwanted as it comes with demands for higher pay and better treatment. (That it also comes with better measurable outcomes for students is often ignored - I still don't understand why nobody, at least the students or parents, seems to care about this). 

That contributes to the norms of hiring cheaper inexperienced people, which makes it harder for the good people to get jobs. Quality goes down and fewer people bother to get qualified. Schools treat "teachers" badly, because these "teachers" are basically unskilled laborers, no matter how they're advertised. When qualified teachers want to get jobs, they often don't go into TEFL because they know it's a labor dispute minefield and their credentials likely won't be respected as they would in any other field of teaching.

That's a loss to us all. I suppose you could make the Libertarian argument that if quality goes down and nobody complains, then the quality was too high to begin with and if the market runs in that direction, then it should go down according to what people want. I reject this: those students still want to learn English. Whether or not you believe your "teacher" is a real teacher won't change the outcome of whether you've learned English to a satisfactory degree or not. It's like the market for medicine. Even if people are willing to buy your snake oil, the outcome will still be that patients won't be cured. In medicine (although not in homoeopathy) we have laws against this: if you are going to sell a product, it has to work. Learning a language is a lot more like medicine: you need a measurable outcome. It's not homoeopathy.

What's the solution for this? How do we get more people on the road to training, qualification and a professional career path and in the process raise the level of respect for TEFL as a career, as well as improve working conditions for those already in the field? How do we do that while also making it possible to become a teacher through a process of hard work and experience, without having to go back and get a degree that many can't afford, and when they were in school, didn't know they wanted?

I don't know. I suppose that really is the subject for another blog post.

I've gotten a lot of pushback on my stance on this issue in other discussion forums, so I'll just address some of the more common backwash here:

But certifications like CELTA and Delta won't make you a better teacher! If you are talented and have experience you can be a very good teacher!

I just don't believe this. If you are talented and have experience, you still need training to be a truly good teacher. It would be the rare prodigy who could do well without it. I don't care much where that teaching came from but I prefer reputable programs to "a teacher trainer at School X told me". Certainly it is possible to go that route and do well, but reputable programs are more likely to have measurable outcomes. 

The actual piece of paper you get for CELTA and Delta don't mean as much as what you learn in the process of getting it. It bothers me when people denigrate what you learn on these courses without having taken them, or worse, assuming that they are more than they are meant to be. While a piece of paper won't make you a better teacher, what you learn in order to get that piece of paper will. 

The only real pushback to this I've heard is "no it won't" and that's too ridiculous to bother replying to.

CELTA and Delta are nothing - real teachers need Master's degrees or a teaching license after their bachelor's degrees, like a PGCE.

I'm a fan of a two-pronged approach: a Master's is great for theoretical knowledge related to the English language and to teaching. I would like one someday and am currently deciding which kidney would garner the best payoff with which to pay for it. But from what I've seen during my time in the field, a Master's doesn't provide a lot of great on-the-ground practical teaching advice. I've noticed it in ivory-tower comments on LinkedIn full of advice that would make no sense in most real classrooms, and noticed it in watching other teachers who certainly had the qualifications but weren't very good with flexibility or trying different, more student-centered approaches. 

So, in order to get that practical knowledge, I believe it would be smart for most would-be professional English teachers to also have a CELTA or even a Delta. The CELTA is thoroughly practical, and the Delta starts delving into the theoretical. After that, a Master's is the next logical move, to expand your theoretical knowledge base.

It's not that I think Master's are worthless, or that CELTA and Delta are the gold standard, but that they focus on two entirely different things, which are both valuable if you want to be a true education professional.

Pfffff! But CELTA promises to make you a great teacher, as though it can stand in for a real teaching degree. It can't!

That's true, it can't. 

But that's also not what CELTA advertises. They advertise an introductory course that will help you to become basically competent in the classroom without making a right fool of yourself. If you pass, which most people do, you'll still need a lot of training at your first place of employment. The CELTA grading rubric spells this out. If you get a B, you'll need some training, but not as much. If you get an A, you'll be fine without training (but everyone can benefit from receiving it). Almost nobody gets an A - around 2-5%. I got one, but I'm just special like that. (Actually, I'm not. I had good training before I did CELTA). 

A lot of people seem to think the CELTA advertises as a teaching certification on par with a degree - it doesn't. Or they think what the CELTA claims it offers is more like what the Delta offers - it's not. If you're going to criticize CELTA, do it on its own merits. 

The reason schools hire those inexperienced teachers is that the "qualified" teachers don't want to pitch in and always demand more. They won't go outside and hand out fliers for the school, they want more money - it's no wonder schools go for the inexperienced ones. 

This is technically true, but that doesn't make it right. A teacher is a skilled worker - it doesn't make sense, in terms of resource allocation, to have your skilled worker stand on the streetcorner with a signboard passing out fliers (also it makes your school look ridiculous, but that's a PR issue, not a teaching one). If you had a college intern, and an experienced logistics professional, who would you send outside wearing a sandwich board? Who is worth more in the office, creating something great? 

And of course they ask for more money - they have embarked on a professional career path. They have paid - often out the nose - for education. Business, legal, medical and other professionals all expect to be paid accordingly - why wouldn't teachers? You get a quality outcome.

But you don't get a quality outcome! I've seen as many bad qualified teachers as I've seen good un-certified ones!

Something tells me that line of thinking comes from anecdata. Of course there are bad qualified teachers - there are also terrible lawyers and shitty speech pathologists and horrible doctors. But on average, not just along the lines of some anecdote about a bad teacher you knew once, but as a statistically significant group, teachers who are qualified do provide better outcomes than those who are not. I wish I could quote a study on this, but I can't. Someone should do a study. Especially as I'm putting on scientific airs I can't easily back. 

And those un-certified talented teachers? Probably got their training unofficially in one or more of their previous jobs. And that's great - I'm not saying they don't exist. I'm not saying they shouldn't be recognized (some sort of reputable program that could certify such teachers after a survey of their work would be great, but is not likely to come about and might not be trusted). But these are not Fresh Off the Plane kids we're talking about here. 

What a teacher does is not measurable, therefore it can't be jammed into a certification or degree program. 

First, all sorts of professions do things that are not measurable - social and political scientists comment and analyze non-measurable outcomes. They are still considered professions. (I know a lot of hard science types would like to think they're not, but I'd actually argue the soft sciences are more challenging as you're dealing with squishy unknowns - analyzing something immeasurable without as much access to clear data is much harder than analyzing based on hard results). 

Secondly, I would say that what teachers do is measurable, or at least it can be. The state of the global testing industry is pathetic, and I don't believe the tests given today consistently measure student ability or learning. But good testing is possible - tests with construct and content validity, integrative, direct tests...you could do a lot better than the way students are tested in most schools today and get a truly measurable outcome.

In my own work, I feel that what I do is measurable. My IELTS students come in, and when they go out their mock test scores are higher than when they came in, and they score higher on the real IELTS than they would have without my class. My long-term students show measurable improvements in systematic errors - if I wanted to, I could in fact graph their improvements in past tense consistency, correct usage of perfect aspect, correct usage of prepositions in various circumstances and more. I could measure how many sentences per speech block were correct at the beginning vs. the end of the class. I could do identical beginning- and end-of-course role plays that could be analyzed for language learned. 

But these certification programs all force students to adopt one kind of teaching style which may not be the best. And degree programs teach young teachers to stifle creative lesson planning.

Spoken like a person who has never been through a certification program (I can't speak for degree programs, but at least in my observation that's not the case). CELTA and Delta don't actually push one teaching style on you, and in my courses they've been pretty open to any style that's effective, and any style that reflects the teacher's personality. They're not trying to create clones or automatons. Sure, CELTA advocates the communicative approach, but what else would you advocate? There's nothing new on the horizon, or at least nothing so new that it's unseated the communicative approach, and it's arguably the best of the lot that we have, although it's okay to let ghosts of teaching methods past inform your lessons. And a truly innovative new idea, while unlikely from an inexperienced teaching student (few if any of us are nascent Steve Jobses of teaching), if effective, would probably be embraced or at least allowed to pass. 

"Theyre all 'student-centered classroom, less teacher talking, the activity must be communicative'! No creativity! It's mind control!" 

First, having been at the weird end of cult recruiters in my neighborhood (and it appears I'm not the only one - there's a new blog out exposing these people, but I won't publish the link until I vet it further and talk to some people), I have an idea about what mind control is, and teaching degree/certification programs ain't it. 

So what would be better - a teacher-centered classroom? More teacher talking (note: this can at times be okay - and in my CELTA and Delta courses it was seen as potentially okay, depending on what the teacher was talking about and why)? Activities that don't urge the students to communicate or speak? Huh? 

Creativity is usually enhanced by training and experience, not diminished by same. The most creative lawyers can be creative because they know the law and can pick it apart. The most creative doctors can be creative because they know enough to know where a new experimental treatment may come from. The most creative businesspeople can see opportunities because they know the market and have experience in watching it change. The most creative person on your team is probably not your intern (and if it is, then training that intern will make them more creative, not less). It's no different with teachers.

But small schools in poor countries or rural areas can't afford these fancy spoiled foreign teachers!

That's actually true, and it's one of the few times in which I'd say hiring an inexperienced native speaker is better than not hiring anyone at all. This isn't a black-white thing.

* * * 

Anyway, this has been a very long blog post, but one I hope people will read to the end. I've enjoyed writing it - I hope you enjoy reading it! 

Peace.

Of Naked Emperors

This isn't Taiwan centric, although it seems to happen to a frightening degree in Taiwan. Let's be fair: and elsewhere, too.

Simply put, one great failure of capitalism is this:

A company needs to improve the English communicative ability of its staff. It's a large company with a generous training budget. Some money is allocated to English training. The person who oversees that training is an HR representative. While they generally have a grasp of things like benchmarks, showing improvement, KPI etc. etc., and may know how to achieve that in a managerial/office context (the extent to which this is actually true is fodder for some future post), they generally do not know how to achieve that in a teaching or training context. They know enough to contract that out, but because they have to be involved, they create the achievement benchmarks and try to cram the classes and seminars into their own rubrics.

I'm not against this generally, but the whole point of a good rubric or KPI is that the person who formulates it is someone who has intimate knowledge based on experience and training in the field they're setting achievement benchmarks in. In this case, it means any HR person who sets benchmarks for English improvement (which I'd argue they can and should do, if they have the appropriate knowledge) should be at least somewhat experienced and trained in language teaching. This is usually not the case, but for the money to keep flowing, someone in power has to set the benchmarks, and the flow of the money means that the person doing it isn't the person who best knows how to do it.

But I'm not writing this just to slag off HR people - some of them are intelligent people with a solid understanding of when, where and how much to get involved in training. They're not the main problem.

So this budget is set and a company goes about looking for trainers. Knowing there's a market for such things, companies pop up to provide teacher trainers for such jobs.

The companies that pop up also know nothing at all about training, language acquisition or English teaching. They are not totally useless - they do know about marketing, market potential, negotiating, contracts and sales. These are important skills and I am not arguing that all "management consulting" firms that provide English teachers to foreign companies should just shut their doors.

So the market-potential guy who wants to cash in (not necessarily a bad thing) on this demand hires some teachers. But he doesn't actually know anything about teachers, so he mostly hires people who "look the part", maybe with a few real teachers mixed in there, and some who aren't teachers but as experienced businesspeople who are native English speakers, they do have something to offer.

He then negotiates a fat slice of his new client's training budget, pays the teachers as little as the market will tolerate, set at just a little higher than the rate for the typical teacher in that country (say, Taiwan) - the rate is high enough to attract people, but not so high that he will be able to fill positions with only experienced, talented professionals. He looks up online what sort of credentials he should be looking for - he doesn't know already, because he himself doesn't know a damned thing about the field - and sticks them into his job advertisement, like plastic roses on a cake. Pretty, professional-looking but ultimately just decorative. He'll hire people without them because he doesn't understand what those qualifications are actually worth. To him they are truly just decorative.

He knows nothing about actual language teaching and as such, provides his new teachers with basically no support (what is provided is utter crap - not worthy of being called "training" or "support", but is billed as such because he's the boss, and the boss MUST know what he's doing). The teachers - some great, some good, some OK, some bad, some with potential and some without - do all the grunt work to meet benchmarks set by someone who isn't trained enough in language acquisition to set them with any degree of professional competence.

So he's paying the teachers about a third of what he's getting from the company. In return the company gets what should be talented, trained and experienced teaching professionals but instead gets a mixed bag of the good, the bad and the inexperienced. They're passed off as "the real deal" because nobody really knows any better. Nobody except the few trained teachers in this whole exchange actually knows what a good teacher/trainer is, so nobody thinks to do any QA (beyond those meaningless benchmarks).

The good teachers eventually get fed up with the no-nothing, no-support school and boss, and leave. They're not earning that much anyway. The bad teachers stick around because the pay is better than teaching kids. And there are plenty of bad teachers - the market will tolerate them because they can be paid less, and nobody at all in that system has a freakin' clue how to actually teach English. Not the administrators, not the school owners, not the students and certainly not the teachers. Nobody really cares, because nobody really knows what student achievement could be if they did only hire good people.

The boss, who doesn't know a damn thing about teaching, earns money from this whole teaching venture. The worst teachers earn an OK salary. The good people move on. The competent people (the students, the good teachers) lose, and the incompetent ones (the boss, the bad teachers) win. HR could fall on either side of this equation (I've met plenty of good ones, really).

What should be happening in a utopian world is this:  company needs English training. Company sets training budget and starts a search for competent teachers. Person who is a trained education and training professional runs a firm to provide such teachers and pays them a fair chunk of the course fee, as well as providing them with meaningful professional development. Competent teachers are provided at a fair rate, successfully fulfilling the company's need. HR knows enough to let these teachers set benchmarks for themselves, and they do (without setting bullshit achievement goals), because they are experienced, trained and talented, and assesses based on that. Everybody wins. Teachers who deserve good pay get it for good work, students learn a lot, HR is happy, and the person who runs the whole thing earns a profit they deserve for their marketing and sales.

This beautiful summation of how things should work is how business English training is too often marketed, in Taiwan and elsewhere. Everyone pretends to be a professional, everyone claims they provide a valuable service and that they, themselves, have the knowledge to be competent in the subject taught.

But we all know that's not how it is - the long-winded dystopia above is how things really work.

And here most of us are thinking that capitalism helps direct funds and skills in the most efficient fashion possible. Not so. It's a brilliant host for parasites whose only talents are sucking the system dry. Which, don't get me wrong, is a considerable talent (I certainly won't be entering marketing and sales anytime soon), but not one that deserves such a fat reward.

It won't change, because people trying to tap this market don't really want to hire good teachers - they'd have to pay them more. Good teachers don't want to get in the game because they have a very low tolerance for bullshit. HR isn't about to admit they aren't always the best people to set classroom benchmarks (although, again, I've worked with some really great ones), and bad teachers aren't likely to decide to either stop teaching or get better.

Color me disillusioned (and color me Captain Obvious, because I am sure any half-reasonable person has figured out this game already), but there you are.

Just yesterday I took on a course at a more traditional buxiban-like school, teaching test preparation. I had a meeting with the DOS for basic orientation. The DOS is certified, experienced and competent. He knows what a good teacher is and how to find and retain one. He knows what sort of training and development is required for his staff. He knows what skills to look for in a new hire to give students what they need. In short, he actually knows how to do the job he's hiring others to do. It's not a full time job - I still have my freelance thing going - but I'm looking forward to working there. A school where I get support! A school with real avenues to real professional development! A school where the person employing me actually understands what a teacher does and what a good teacher is worth!

That's such a huge change from the job I just left that I couldn't help but write about it...at length. Now it's out...please forgive me.

But in my defense, we already knew the emperor was naked, didn't we?


Sent from my iPad

Not-Really Doing The Delta in Taiwan: Preparation for Module One

I'm posting this - and more blog posts to come - because there isn't much talk of doing the Delta or having a Delta credential among teachers in Taiwan: this includes teachers who are more serious about actually teaching and aren't just kids looking to travel or older dudes who never really thought about doing anything else, or doing what they do now better (I know, I said dudes, not people. But I've never met a long-term female English teacher in Taiwan - or anywhere else for that matter - who didn't at some point seek out training and professional development in order to pursue it as a proper career. There seems to be a time limit on women willing to do this job without improving their skills and 'getting serious'. But, sorry to say, I've met plenty of men who are in exactly that rut).

So what is it like to be based in Taiwan as one works their way through the Delta modules? I aim to find out (also, I'll end up with a Delta) and I figure I may as well blog about it.

This is a "Not-Really" series because we're not really doing the Cambridge Delta course in Taiwan, we're doing Module One online, Module Two - well who knows, really, but if we can't get a Local Tutor here we're going to have to go abroad for it - and Module Three will almost certainly be online (but who knows).

Another option we could have taken but didn't is a 12-week intensive course (I think shorter options are available, though) - they're offered in various centers around the world. We looked into doing it at International House Bangkok but the up-front cost for both of us at that time was just not feasible (and we weren't really excited about repeating our four-week CELTA experience over even more weeks). Why Bangkok? Cheapest to live in of all the nearby cities, and the program director was very responsive. I got a good vibe. If we have to go abroad for Modules 2 or 3, we'll probably put them as our top choice.

These are, at the moment, the only option available for those who want to do this, and I do hope in the future that the number of people who do will increase.

Module One hasn't started yet, but we're already pre-reading for it, because we figured that'd be a good idea. So, some preliminary thoughts:

Why would you want to do the Delta from Taiwan, if you want to work in Taiwan?

The CELTA and Delta are not officially recognized in Taiwan, because the government is stupid that way. Sorry, it's the honest truth. After doing the CELTA, I truly believe that it's the best initial ELT qualification out there, it produces teachers with a good foundation in basic skills for the job, a foundation that further training and support can build on. If the government of Taiwan can't be bothered to recognize that, they're stupid. 

They're also paid for (maybe not literally, but close enough). They're not interested in having quality English teachers, they're interested in keeping wages low at buxibans, because the bosses have more influence than the foreign teachers. One way to keep wages low is to make it easy for the workforce to be unqualified - it's not like most people understand on a deeper, more complex level what a professional, talented, qualified teacher actually does. Doesn't take too much thought to put it all together: they don't want a qualified foreign teacher workforce, because then those foreigners might demand better pay, and the laobans wouldn't want that (the laobans don't seem to care much about good teaching - - generally speaking, they are not teachers, although some believe they are).

But there are other reasons to do the Delta, even if your home base now and for the foreseeable future is Taiwan. Here are mine:

1.) It will make you a better (real) teacher. The CELTA is an initial qualification. It doesn't make a full-on professional teacher. It's a foundation. The Delta, I daresay, will make you an actual professional who knows what they are doing. Besides being more impressive in interviews and demos, if you're going to be an English teacher for realsies, wouldn't you want to be the best one you can be? No matter where you live? Isn't self-improvement a good thing? I was impressed enough with the CELTA that I do believe a Delta is a good move in terms of professional development.

2.) It's affordable. It's cheaper than a Master's, and will count as credit towards that Master's. It's not dirt cheap, but that's OK. I felt that what I got from the CELTA in a highly professional center (ITI Istanbul) was well worth the tuition. I believe the same will be true for Delta. I trust the program. If you want to be an English teacher, a real, qualified one, it's a wise financial bet.

3.) It's practical. I will eventually get a Master's degree. I can't imagine not doing that. But Master's degrees in Education, Applied Linguistics and TEFL/TESOL tend to be theoretical, not practical. The Delta is a practical, in-service qualification and I value that over academic learning in this particular instance. Eventually I want both, but I place more value on the practical qualification first.

4.) It will prepare you for further education. Imagine if you were plonked down in a Master's program with a few years' experience and an initial qualification, and everyone around you seemed to know better than you what they were doing. I could imagine myself there, and I wouldn't welcome such a scenario (would anyone?). After the Delta I'll feel poised and learn-ed enough to enter a Master's program - a reputable one - with confidence. It also takes about as long as one semester of a Master's degree, meaning that if you choose the right university it'll count for a heck of a lot.

5.) It may not be recognized by the government, but foreign prospective bosses LOVE it. If your prospective boss is Taiwanese, they likely won't know a Delta from their butthole (well, that's a bit mean - some will. I'm really just drawing on my own experience at my last job. But in general it's true). This may or may not be their fault (it's their fault if they're one of those this-is-business-I-don't-care-if-you-can-actually-teach bosses, but not their fault if they are qualified teachers who, by dint of being from and educated in Asia, simply aren't familiar with it). But if your prospective boss is a foreigner - especially if (s)he's British - it won't matter what the government recognizes. You'll be gold.

6.) It's a good credential to have if you ever have to leave Taiwan but still want to teach. It's recognized elsewhere, and having it means you'll always be at the head of the pack when it comes to finding a job.

7.) It may someday be recognized in Taiwan. Don't get your hopes up, but there are people with a strong interest in seeing this happen. Maybe. Someday. One can dream.

8.) It can be done online. I know Taiwan doesn't generally recognize online Master's degrees, but I do hope that someday it will be different when it comes to recognizing a comprehensive Delta. After all, if you're in Taiwan there aren't many other options. You could go abroad for each module, but that costs a fortune.

Why are you pre-reading for this thing? Can't you just take it and read the books as they come up in the course?

Plenty of people have already blogged about why pre-reading is a good idea. I know you'll hate me for this, but I'm going to give you another list of my own reasons:

1.) Because there is a lot of terminology, and the sooner you are exposed to it, the better. It may seem silly to you now, but it counts.
2.) Because the course references scads of books, and if you haven't read any of them, you'll have to work your ass off. If you have read a few, life won't be so horrible for you.
3.) It gets you familiar with the sort of things you'll have to know to take the test (which is for-realz difficult, it's not a fluff course, nor is it a fluff exam).
4.) Because the rubrics are extremely strict, and you'll want to know that and understand how as early as possible so you can prepare appropriately
5.) Because if you're in Taiwan you probably had to order the books online, so you may as well crack 'em open. After all, this is not a course to take if you're not serious about teaching.
6.) Because I want to not just be good, I want to be great, fantastic amazing, whatever, and if I want to not only pass this test but shake it 'till I break it, I'll need to pre-read.
7.) Because although this is a practical qualification, there is an academic component. The sooner you get yourself re-adjusted to academia, the better. Academics generally don't go out of their way to write things in clear, concise, accessible ways.
8.) Because you probably won't have time to read every book cover to cover, but if you eventually go on to get a Master's, having done so will really help. A lot. A lotsy-lot.

And most importantly (so importantly that I'm putting it in hot pink):

7.) The Delta is aimed at people who have an initial qualification (preferably CELTA) and a few years' experience. The problem here is that they seem to assume that that experience came with things like "further training" and "support" and "a knowledgeable, qualified school staff". So they expect you to really know more than you did when you took the CELTA. Which you do, because you have more experience, but if you didn't get any further training or support, you won't know much more. So...if you're like me (zero training post-CELTA and the level of "qualification" of the office staff at my former company would be laughable if it weren't so sad), you'll need to pre-read just to feel like you can hang with the cool, experienced kids. You'll need to be Mike Wazowski in Monsters University, because you're not James P. Sullivan.

The Delta website recommends two years' post-CELTA experience. Other bloggers say it could easily, perhaps should be, more. But with no support or ongoing training, more time won't make me a better teacher. I've reflected as much as I can reflect. I work to improve, but feel a bit rudderless. With that kind of obstacle to overcome, knowing that even if I had more "experience" it wouldn't matter much, I have to pre-read.

OK, so what should I pre-read?

1.) Beyond The Sentence - this is discourse analysis. a fairly easy book to pre-read, you can plow through it without needing a course tutor to walk you through it. Also, totally fascinating and I don't mean that sarcastically. This is an especially good book for terminology - keep a notebook of new terms you come across. Stuff like deixis, parataxis, anaphoric reference, adjacency pairs etc.. If it sounds fancy and Greek, write it down like the good little nerd you are. These are very likely to be on the exam, and the sooner you are exposed to them, the better.

2.) Linguistics for Non-Linguists - I will be a linguist someday (DAMMIT!) but for now, I am not. I have not read this yet but Brendan either has or is currently in the midst of it, and says it's easy enough to read, accessible and interesting. I trust his judgment, so I give it a thumbs-up.

3.) About Language - I haven't read this but it comes highly recommended from several trusted sources, many of whom say "if you read one book before the course, make it this one".

4.) If you didn't read it for CELTA, read it now: The Practice of English Language Teaching. I am a very big fan of this book. Our CELTA course was basically a vehicle for inserting the knowledge, with practical use, from this book into our brains Matrix-style, and I ain't complainin'.

5.) Delta Module One Exam Reports - read, read, read, and note the correct answers and why the incorrect ones are so. Read more than one (just Google, they'll come up).

6.) Anything else that strikes your fancy on the reading list (varies by center).

7.) Blog posts like this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one and this one.

8.) Get yourself some Quizlets

There may be more - if so, I'll come in and edit this post.

WHERE CAN I BUY ALL THAT CRAP IN TAIWAN? ESLITE IS USELESS. JEEEEZUS.

1.) books.com.tw for pickup at 7-11. Most titles take time to arrive, they're not immediately in stock.

2.) http://www.bookdepository.co.uk - FREE DELIVERY WORLDWIDE!


Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Check back in later when I've actually started the course!