Job Discussion Forums

[Master]

[johntpartee]

Master, I asked this in an earlier post; I don't mean to be insulting, but I am curious. Is English your second language?

[Master]

[Master]

[Master]

[Master]

[Sashadroogie]

Dear Master

May I recommend a nice small Russian town just inside the Arctic circle. There are quite a few of them. Any one of them will be just perfect for what you need.

Sasha

[AGoodStory]

[johntpartee]

[Sashadroogie]

Reminds me of the Russian anecdote about the bumpkin student who tries to enrol as a literature student in the most prestigious university in Moscow. The assessors ask him what he thinks of Tolstoy?

"Never heard of him", he replies.

"Dostoyevsky?"

"Who?

"Chekov?"

"Who that?"

"Surely Pushkin!?

"Don't know him from Adam."

"How on Earth can you expect to enrol as a student of literature when you haven't even read our great classics!"

"Me wanna be great writer, not reader."

[spiral78]

ooh I see. Its easy for you to bring the barrier of bad news but not for you to actually say something helpful.

Ok, let's see how I can help. I've been living/teaching (and training and hiring teachers) in the Eurozone since 1998. You'd be tough to figure out where to place. Here are the issues:

The major market for newbie level teachers in this region is business English. This means the teacher goes to businesses (and may have a few classes based at a school, made up of businesspeople) and works with small groups and some individuals.
Consider who are the students:
range from secretaries to upper level management
adults
vast majority have university degrees
businesspeople and the business culture here tends to be more formal in general than in North America: social boundaries are more important here, and 'warming up' to a new teacher can take a very long time.

Now, here is the 'Master' as a job candidate:
No university qualifications
Written English demonstrates quite a few errors
Candidate states that he has no interest in upper education himself
Candidate indicates strong interest in seeking women


Hmmmm. What am I going to do with such a candidate? How can I present a possible teacher with less education than his prospective students? Considering his lack of knowledge of grammatical structures in English and errors in writing (writing is normally better than speaking in terms of accuracy), I can obviously only consider him teaching students with a low level of English. And as it's considered generally unprofessional to see female students as potential dates, I also have to consider not assigning this teacher to any class with young, eligible women in it.

You're a difficult candidate to place in the Eurozone, I think. Hope that's helpful - it is truly meant to be realistic. Moving abroad is a big step, and it's seriously important to have a realistic view of what you are facing.

I truly don't think the experience will be what you seem to expect. European women (from Netherlands and Germany to the Czech Rep, Poland, and points East) don't see English speakers as magnets - in the past decades, it was a common misconception in Central/Eastern Europe that guys from North America and the UK are all well-off and good catches. There have been too many disappointments - girls are far better educated about the economic standard of English teachers to fall over themselves to date one these days.

Employers and students in the Central/Eastern Euro region also aren't naive enough anymore to think that just because the guy is a native English speaker, he's going to be a good teacher/employee. It takes more: some genuine interest in the job, some related qualifications (a good 30-day on-site cert at minimum), and, lacking a university degree, a VERY professional appearance and approach to the work if you hope to land something.

Perhaps you can make it work somehow, but I think you'll need to significantly change your expectations and approach to the thing first.

[TeresaLopez]

[johntpartee]

Master, I gotta ask you: Is this for real?

[Never Ceased To Be Amazed]

[spiral78]

C'mon NCTBA. It's kinda fun, in a twisted way