Job Discussion Forums

[biffinbridge]

Ha ha I just had to laugh.Have you seen International House Bydgoszcz's ad for teachers on TEFL.com?For the princely sum of about $550 a month,(awful by Polish standards),you are invited to apply for a position teaching at I.H. Bydgoszcz (in Poland) but only if you have a CELTA and are not an M.A. holder with no experience.Could it be that the D.O.S. is worried that his staff might be more qualified than him?I know I've knocked the M.A. in previous posts as it can be very non-vocational/theoretical but really this ad made me laugh.I worked for this outfit in 95 and man was it a guinea a minute.Apart from the fact that the D.O.S. was dating a boy 20 years younger,who also happened to be a student there, I really got the feeling that most of the development pumped out in weekly workshops was absolute rubbish.In general it was the new teachers who were giving the workshops while the senior staff talked ELT gobbledygook and sat around 'timetabling'.But seriously,I think that I.H. really has begun to believe it's own marketing.Soon they'll be selling one week intensive CELTAs and telling the world that it's a much better qualification than an M.A.What is this world coming to?I.H. are ,without a doubt,the lowest payers in Poland and they're really just trying to distract everyone from that fact.

[denise]

I've seen similar ads (don't know if they were from the same school), and I always got the impression that an MA + experience was fine, but not an MA with no experience. Seemed that the schools wanted people who had actually taught and learned things on the job, rather than having only learned from books.

Thus begins that whole nasty cycle of not being able to find a job with no prior experience and not getting any experience because you can't find a job.

d

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

[Rice Paddy Daddy]

It seems that most people are unaware that you don't need to teach a single class to obtain an M.A. TESOL or Applied Linguistics.

It's just wrong.

These 1 month CELTA courses prepre you better to be a classroom teacher than these Australian crap M.A. degrees.

General Rule of Thumb: The higher the degree, the worse the teaching is.

[ls650]

Uh oh, here we go again...

[Cleopatra]

As someone who has both an MA (Applied Ling) and a CELTA, here's my take on both qualifications.

If I were an employer confronted with two candidates of equal merit and similarly lacking in experience - the only difference being that one had an MA and the other a CELTA - my hiring decision would depend on my circumstances.

If I were running a language school where the teacher would only be expected to teach X amount of hours per week, providing little if any input in such matters as curriculum design or material selection, I would go for the candidate with the CELTA.

If, by contrast, I was hiring for an institution such as a third-level college which expected teachers to teach a fairly small number of hours per week, but did expect them to be heavily involved in curriculum design, materials selection or exam writing, I would go for the person with the MA.

Of course in "real life" things are never so simple as having two candidates entirely equal in all ways but one. But it's just an illustration of what I see as the essential differences between the two qualifications.

BTW, regarding the particular case of IH, remember that they have a vested interest in promoting the CELTA. One very lucrative arm of their business is the CELTA courses which they run in many of their centres. I don't think you have to be overly cynical to suspect that this might have something to do with the fact that IH turn away very well-qualified and experienced candidates simply because they have not done their one-month CELTA course. They even refuse to recognise the Trinity cert., a teaching qualification in many ways very similar to (though arguably better than) the CELTA.