Job Discussion Forums

[ExpatLuke]

[Ramen]

[LettersAthruZ]

[vabeckele]

[cb400]

I think being able to work in a Vietnamese environment (experience abroad) teaching experience and qualifications is important.

Everything is a balance.

[vabeckele]

To be stupid enough to get into this racket in the first place?

[skarper]

Personally I'm reconciled to the few pros and many cons. Frankly I lacked the talent and drive to do anything much else. And if you try to succeed in a more demanding field and fail you usually end up with all the debts, costs and downsides and have none of the rewards.

I am happy enough with my lot - but I know what I want out of life and I know what I don't want to have to do to get it ....

[ExpatLuke]

If I was teaching English for money, I probably would have stayed with that job in the States, finished my MA and settled down to a life of 8:00 - 4:00 every day, paying bills, getting married, maybe occasionally going on vacation.

I didn't come to Asia due to job prospects in the US drying up. I came here because I was bored with the status quo and wanted to live a little. I had no idea I'd come to Vietnam and fall in love with a local and with the country.

When I left my job in the States, the academic director told me that I would always be welcome back any time I wanted to come "home." (She's a family friend) I know that's not a guarantee, but it's nice to have possibilities if things go south here.

[Ramen]

[8balldeluxe]

It has always been like this in the world of ELT. First a country just needs English teachers. So some enterprising individuals, go there before anyone else and whether they have a degree or not they meet with great success and are well liked and provide conversation, or help with proofreading, or giving advice on how to talk or write about various subjects. They can also review basic grammar or what not. This suits the locals just fine and they pay the enterprising individuals handsomely , rewarding them for their decision to come to their country and work. At first all is well. These persons can come from middle or even lower class and it does not matter. Suddenly they have a well paying job with a degree of independence and are involved in a meaningful endeavor.
Then , word gets out , say five years later, and some tourists- usually business persons who are from higher stations in life, look at what is happening and see that the market for teaching is filled by persons who, in their own home countries would make far less than these 'business persons' or persons from more well-off backgrounds. They naturally become indignant as this upsets the order of things to see just anyone teaching and earning a decent wage, becoming advisors or teachers.. Besides, there is much more money to be made if these 'real' business persons could take their place.
So these more professional second wave of edu-tourists come determined to set things right. They, with their great supply of personal funds wine and dine locals and find out who is in charge and they put ideas in their ears about how to really run a school. They wow them with their lofty ideas of educational principles, or corporate connections and better school credentials. They say that the teachers they have are not really teachers, and then tell them that this is all wrong. They could make much more money if they left it up to them to show them how to run things. So the locals hire these new professionals and they immediately go about the business of setting up requirements and strictures to pay the original teachers less, and if they are lucky they can install some fairly arbitrary system of certifying these teachers, so as to have a way to identify who is who and pay even less. These new elite foreigners, who never teach, also take a sizable sum for themselves, by making a job for themselves and by reviewing teachers and making critical reports about them, and then replacing or training them, creating dramas though they may say "no dramas" and they tell the locals that this is how things are suppose to be done. Often these persons come from positions of authority in their countries, such as the police or military, or human resources- usually never education. As foreigners, they know the weak points and what buttons to push with foreign teachers, and thus they can stir up a lot of trouble very quickly and destabilize even the most solid itinerent teacher.

At first, the restructured schools do make more money, because it only takes a few of the foreign managers to really cut the pay of serval foreign teachers and scare them into compliance, and this happens while the ELT customer curve is still climbing. The managers introduce all sorts of gimmicks for marketing such as free backpacks with the school name and a general coporatizing of all the schools.
They also make a lot of work for themselves by creating workbooks , textbooks and materials, and claiming that this is the only way to teach English- useing strange new methods that locals have never seen before, and sure to mystify them. Methods like "pairwork" or " groupwork" or 'survey" . And they create work by monitoring the teachers to make sure they only follow this curriculum that they created exactly. They sell this curriculum and make a lot of money, and often cut the schools in on the profits form the sales of this curriculum by having schools sell these ,materials.
By this time locals have all but forgotten how when they first had foreign English teachers how satisfied they were, and how much they learner in the friendly easy-going mode of teaching that they first started with. WHich is how English can really be learner anyway, so no one is learning correctly any more.
And meanwhile this corporatisation of the Situation has made it so new teachers are dull, lifeless and uncreative, for that is the only kind that can survive in such a controlled system and not revolt. Some teachers resort to extreme measure like medicating themselves with beer to ease the pain of having to stifle so much of their inner creativity or just having their authority taken away in the classroom. This creates an opportunity for the foreign managers to point to bad examples of foreign teachers as a way to reinforce their authority.
And in the end when the ELT bandwagon trend begins to wane, and students drop in numbers, they focus on training teachers, and establishing even more strictures to measure teachers by. thus we have discussions that are so polarized such as whether or not a persons with a CELTA can teach better than a person with no degree?

[vabeckele]

[Professional TEFLer]

Go to Texas and try to make money teaching TEFLing at a community college. Won't happen. I was teaching part-time at a community college and was making 24 an hour. That was the going rate for ESL teachers back then. Usually got around 13 hours a week.

Now? I was in Texas in 2011 and 2012 and there were almost no ESL classes at the same community college.

[vabeckele]

[Anh Dep]

I am one of those people that couldnt find a decent job here, so I tried teaching English. I owned and operated a business in Saigon for two years, but found it to be one of the most frustrating things I have ever done.Seeing as I couldnt get a job in construction, due to the fact I didnt have an engineers degree, I was asked if I would like to teach some people privately.

To cut a long story short, I did some work at some small schools and then thought, I need to do some courses to learn how to approach teaching more professionally. I would never ever tell someone I am a teacher, it would be insulting to professional teachers. What I can say is this, I have had many jobs at private companies and at present I am working for the two biggest companies in VN. The reason I get these jobs is that I have a background in business. I owned and operated a construction business for 15 years. This seems to be very helpful, as most of the private clients want to learn conversational skills.

My writing is crap, I am terrible at grammar, but all my jobs have said one thing,I made the classes very interesting. I gave up a job at one of the largest privately owned businesses here in Vung Tau, the class asked me to come back as they were so bored with the new teacher. At the end of the day, I think that its different strokes for different folks.Jobs such as mine I can get away with a hell of a lot, I would never be able to do that as a professional teacher in a professional enviroment. So I would put myself in the entertaining bracket of teaching, I know that is where I am comfortable.So I think there is a market for people like me, in certain places.As far as working in a professional enviroment, I will leave that to the professionals.

[vabeckele]