Job Discussion Forums

[Skrybe]

Gosh,

I've been away for a little bit, but I was mightily entertained by this whole "thread." It reminds me of this scene in the movie The Score, where one guy says "#$%& You!" to another guy, who replies in kind, and back and forth it goes until De Niro nearly slaps them both upside the head. Man that was funny! And in that vein, so was this.

I always love the underdog, so my natural instinct is to jump in on the side of Martin. Seriously, this is just a bit too close to slapping a dyslexic kid with Down's Syndrome just because he didn't read the VCR directions right. Would you yourselves tease a disabled person? Would you mock them for being differently abled? Of course not! Which is why it so puzzles me that you would do this very thing to Martin. Did he not tell you that he has a Ph. D in Physics? Though I abhor pedanticism, do not phrases such as "...the teacher should not make try to the student feel stupid for answering a question...", or words such as "selileptonic" (which we ALL know is not a real word, unlike, say, semileptonic) clearly enough sound out the warning that we are in the presence of a one legged pen? Paul, you are always well spoken, and wonderful to read, but in response to the "prove-your-pecker-is-bigger-than-mine" questions you sent towards Martin, I have but one answer for them all - "Google."

Remember...Jeebus lubs us, and I think we should all be more like Jeebus. So turn the other cheek, okay? Not so you can fire back a nasty smell, but so's you can send back a smile.

PLU,

Skrybe

[Nismo]

[king kakipi]

anyone know the name of the Good Doctor's upcoming book? I want to watch for it in the bargain bins, flick through a few pages, laugh, yawn and throw it back where it belongs......

[PAULH]

(From Scott Sommers Taiwan Weblog)


With Enough PhDs...


Back in the days of the Cold War and Ronald Reagan, some believed that with enough shovels, the devastation of a nuclear attack could be stopped. Ordinary people would be able to stop the fires storms caused by the nuclear blast by putting out all the vast number of smaller fires created in the initial explosion and thus prevent the spread of the devastation. In Taiwan, the MOE has a similar faith in the role that those with a PhD can play in building the nation's education system.

Some may have already noticed that Shih Chien University is advertizing once again. The add is pretty much the same as the ones they ran around September 11, May 23, as well another posting back on my old blog from April 22, 2003, so I'm not going to repeat any of this information here. The information that I most want to know, rather than contact info, is why the school seems so desperately to need English teachers. I'd like to speculate on some of these reasons. Of course, one possible reason is that it is a horrible place to work. A comment on the 2003 posting from Todd does caution us against working there.

I would warn against working at Shih Chien University in Kaohsiung County. Why? Terrible location. A few years back I taught at a junior college in this area, and the only way to get there from Tainan was a very dangerous mountain road. Unless you want to live the rest of your life in a wheelchair (or early grave), you DO NOT want to take this road to work every day. And if you choose to live in Kaohsiung County, you will be out in the middle of nowhere. Very few Western amenities, which means doing anything (laundry, grocery shopping, etc.) is a major hassle. And the only other Westerners out there are missionaries...


I feel compelled to say that there are many schools like this in Taiwan. I have heard similar reports about the road to the Huafan University which is stationed in Taipei County, but I also understand that it is a perfectly fine place to teach. So quite honesty, I doubt this has anything to do with the school's need for PhDs. A more likely reason is that prime force causing almost everything that goes on in private universities in Taiwan, the Ministry of Education. The MOE is the omnipresent force in the lives of Taiwanese universities, and ironically, it is even more present in the lives of private universities than public universities. 'Private' in this sense does not mean operating according to market forces. Rather, private merely means not fully funded by public money.

It was only recently that Taiwan emerged from a long period of martial law during which schooling was viewed as a major tool of government control over the island's people. The MOE became a powerful force in the government and the Minister of Education an extremely visible government figure compared with his Western counterparts. Little concerning this major role played by education in the governance of Taiwan has changed since the lifting of martial law, and the MOE retains a much more influential place in controlling post-secondary education than would ever be imagined by university and college professors in the USA, Canada, or Britain.

Almost everything that a private school in the ROC does continues to be moderated by the MOE. For example, the fees charged, the department and courses that can be offered, the number of students that can be enrolled, who they can hire and when those hired can be promoted, as well as the calendar that the school can keep. The MOE keep private schools under control by providing funding, but this funding is of course inferior to the money they provide for public schools.

And the MOE tells us that we need more PhDs.

Now what's wrong with that? Why shouldn't university teachers have to have a PhD? Right? It only makes sense, doesn't it? That is, except many departments don't actually need people with a PhD. teaching English. A PhD. is supposed to be a special degree. A PhD should result in its recipients not only having the ability to research scholarly and applied topics in their field, but the ability to pass this skill on to their students. In fact, that's the main of the PhD. It's a giant Ponzi Scheme where professors create more professors. And as a result, the PhD. has little or nothing to do with training students in skills or abilities that are not in the pursuit of creating more professors. To make matters worse, the MOE pressures these PhDs to publish scholarly research that has nothing at all to do with teaching skills and abilities related to workplace proficiency. One of the main criteria of the MOE's evaluation of research achievement in a university is the publication of research in journals listed on Thompson ISI indexes. It would appear that all the MOE values is the creation of research universities that publish the kind of research valued by top-ranked American research journals. In a way, the MOE is promoting a kind of academic colonialism -- but that's a whole other story.

This heavy emphasis on creating research universities is a serious problem for the schools that have a tradition emphasizing classroom teaching. For example, the stated purpose at my school for the existence of the English Language Center is the instruction of non-English majors in remedial English skills. Yet, we are still being pressured by the MOE to hire more and more English instructors with PhDs. So much pressure are we receiving these days that the unwritten policy has become that we will only hire applicants that have a PhD, even if all we want them to teach are these remedial courses for non-English majors.

Nor are we the only school with this problem. I have commented several times on the way in which tiny, specialized rural schools advertize for applicants with a PhD in American Literature or TEFL Education. Such ads are ridiculous. What could such schools possibly do with someone like that? And more to the point, why would anyone with this sort of qualification go to such a place - especially for the amazingly poor salaries that the Taiwan's MOE forces schools to pay? But such is the pressure of the MOE that few even dare to look for candidates with appropriate background and qualification to meet the real needs of their students. But what do I know?. If only Taiwan can get enough PhDs; if only those PhDs can be scholarly enough; then Taiwan can truly take its rightful place as the heir to China's educational legacy. That's right, the real problem isn't the pathetically poor salaries paid to professors and university workers, it isn't the horrible quality of buildings that they make us teach in, it isn't the poor leadership that the MOE has shown in policy development, no, no, no, it's none of that. It's the caliber of the teaching faculty, and they can fix that by just getting enough highly qualified teachers with that all important PhD. doing research on scholarly topics publishable in American journals.