Job Discussion Forums

[Roger]

While we all have our bad days, we as expats are a lot more vulnerable and exposed to the abrasive mindset of our host environment. I think the duality of local teachers doing half of the job, and us doing another part of it that never fits onto what ourn local partners have created is a major stumbling block.
I have always found this job attribution as ridiculous, even the job description of "oral English teacher" sounds stupid to me.
Our students are unprepared for a real life situation in which English matters; this is the fault of our host countries' education systems. Surely if African and European countries manage to teach foreign languages without the need to create the illusionary oral English context with a "native English teacher", then East Asian countries could succeed too. But they don't, and won't - the mindsets here are set in stone.
It's no doubt to do with their darwinist superiority attitude that local teachers are too aloof of ever using a foreign tongue in their own classes. It's to do with their Confucian upbringing that they don'[t develop analytical skills. It's also to do with their communitarian thinking that there is no individuation taking place. These are societies of robots and uniform ants.
And into this cultural vacuum American educationalists have stepped with new-fangled teaching methods that probably never were tested anywhere else. The refrain I keep hearing from undereducated Chinese is "we don't need to be linguists" and "we don't need to study grammar so much, we need to practise oral English..." - from youngsters and adults alike, all having been brainwashed into accepting that you don't need to make your own effort, you can just start having fun wihtout sweat.
So, we are faced with young learners whose minds have been numbed by their own teachers who know no other method than the hammer-data-into-soft brains-method. These learners get turned off at a prematurely early age, usually from grade 2 on; anything NEW is beyond their grasp and needs to be spoon-fed into their soft brains by their own teachers; they are disinterested, fed up 9literally) and potentially xenophobic (don't like to study foreign lingos).
Yes, our lessons "must be fun!" And we don't need to enjoy teaching - we must entertain our clients. It's their well-deserved dessert after five to ten years of mind-killing nonsense!
We aen't supposed to tell our colleagues HOW THEY CAN IMPROVE THEIR OWN TEACHING; for them it's probably the first time they can knock on someone's head in their archaic pecking-order.
After all, they have been knocked into their misshape by their own system!