Job Discussion Forums

[naturegirl321]

As I was looking through job adverts I got to thinking. They always say how many years experience a teacher should have. But talking to other teachers, it seems like this can vary. For example is someone teaches 10 hours a week and the other 30, wouldn�t the teacher who taught 30 have three times more experience?

[madison01]

Difficult one this, somebody teaching 30 hours of one level and age group could arguably have less experience than someone teaching 10 hours of differing levels and ages.

When I looked at length of service as experience I looked at how continuous it was, and what a teacher taught during that time.

Some covering letters would talk of years of experience but the CVs showed that that was years of intermittent teaching, a month here a break a couple of months there and so on. They also showed that there had been narrow scope in the teaching, So, When I added the months up it looked more like a year or so and all of that time teaching the same thing over and over.

Essentially, if someone has worked consistently and taught a range of levels, ages and types of lessons a year is a year.

[jillford64]

I've been wondering the same thing. The entry requirements for some of the Master's programs I've been looking at say that they want you to have a year of experience teaching overseas. So is that a year (12 months) or an academic year (9 or 10 months)?

[ilaria]

jillford64 wrote:

[tedkarma]

[Glenski]

A year's experience is a year's experience, whether you put in 14-hour days or 8-hour days, and whether you taught 6 classes per week or 20. As long as it's called full-time, that is all that matters for the "definition".

Of course, your other remark is correct, that is, someone who worked 30 hours a week has more overall experience than someone who worked 10, but only if the jobs were equivalent.

I taught 17 classes per week at a conversation school, and I wasn't even required to be in the office other than for class times. Compare that to a major Japanese chain school NOVA, which has its teachers in the office for 8 classes per day. Who had more experience? At first glance, you'd say the NOVA teacher, however that school has its own format laid out for teachers, whereas my school didn't help a bit, so we had to create everything ourselves. Different story now about that "experience".

So, it boils down to the quality as well as quantity.

[ls650]

It's not rocket science. If the ad says "Minimum of five years of experience wanted," they don't want applications from someone with one year. It's a ballpark figure.

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

Someone with five years experience as a human tape recorder is less experienced than someone who has had to plan all their own lessons and deliver them for two.

The same can be said about teaching hours. Many ALTs have over 20hours a week, but have no lesson preparing at all, and don't actually contribute much. Some have only a dozen hours a week, but it's their class and the Japanese teacher does very little.

Then there are the eikaiwa people...

Then there are the people who have been human tape recorders for years AND have zero formal training so other than reading sentences out loud, their years of experience amount to not much more than paid observation....

ETA

Some people include their training time in their experience (usually because they've been told to by some career book or HR person) when they have 1+ years worth of training (so someone who went back to school for a couple of years to get their MA before working in Japan for one year says they have three years experience on their resume and cover letter beause they had a paracticum and did some volunteering stuff while they were doing their MA). Should that really count?

[rusmeister]

Agree - it's not rocket science.

Most of the time I report years because it's easier, but when it comes to that kind of nitpicking I just estimate hours in class.

I've always taught 38-40 hrs a week in class in private practice (8 years), while when I was in public it was only 25 (4 yrs). So whether it's 12 years or 13,000+ hrs doesn't really matter (but the latter sounds more impressive, I think).

Over that many years you've GOT to learn something, so I don't buy into the 'human tape recorder' theory too much over long hauls. If you've been teaching even only beginning English over the years variety is bound to creep in.

When you're a newbie and desperate to look good, you'll count whatever you can get away with counting.

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

[rusmeister]

[denise]

For me a year of experience is an academic year of full-time teaching. The majority of my teaching jobs have been full-time, broken down into 20ish (give or take) contact hours and 20ish office hours/prepping hours. Variety, in terms of different levels, different skills taught, etc., just gets built in somehow. If an employer really wants to see a summary of all of the hours that I've taught, then that probably isn't the right employer for me!

Rather than being nitpicky, I would say something like "over six years of full-time experience" in a cover letter. It's just easier than saying, "six years full-time, a summer program, and one year of freelance hourly work during grad school."

d

[dmb]

I think you also have to consider has someone taught 10 years or 10 X 1 year- the same thing year in year out.

[naturegirl321]

[ls650]