Job Discussion Forums

[rbos]

[veiledsentiments]

What you have heard is true. Your qualifications are exactly zero. You have no education and no teaching experience. Would you want to be paying for classes from a teacher like you? Someone who knows nothing of the field and nothing about teaching? What kind of an employer would hire someone like you?

The only possible jobs are absolute bottom feeders where you will be lucky to be able to provide housing and food... no less money to send home.

At least get a CELTA and head to the local adult education in your area and volunteer to assist some real teachers in ESL classes. It will help you to avoid making a complete fool of yourself in front of classrooms around the world.

As to non-ESL jobs, you may have to google up some other advice board. We are all in education here.

VS

[Bebsi]

As the original posting appears to have been severely edited, I don't know anything about the poster.

However, VS, I think you are overestimating the TEFL industry, whose worst excesses are very bad indeed, and whose standards have been known to drill holes in the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

Nothing is surprising about some of the people who not only want to get into the business, but who are actually in there and thriving.

Just how bad can the OP be? It's truly scary.

[veiledsentiments]

It was the usual... just completed unrelated BA, no CELTA or intention to get one, and absolutely no teaching experience. Then they don't like it when you point out that they won't be able to get anything that pays them a liveable wage... oh... and he also needed to pay bills back home.

VS

[Bebsi]

So...???

He is a native speaker, isn't he? And I bet he has had some international experience? Backpacking around Thailand would qualify him, surely?

I think BAe, Aramco, or any of the better unis would snap him up...and if they don't, they don't know what a great teacher they're missing out on.

Plus, Saudi owes him a living. He's got bills...no-one else has those, so yes, they should all make him an offer so he can pick & choose!

Some people ...

[veiledsentiments]

No, he wasn't quite that sort... though we do get them rather often. But, "people" had told him that he wasn't qualified for anything, though he was convinced that was wrong. Of course the problem was the bills back home. He could probably support himself in the language schools of North Africa or the Levant if he hustled (a couple jobs plus private lessons), but sending money home is impossible at that level.

Ah to be young again, eh Bebsi?

VS

[Linguist]

Veiled, I believe Pepsi is right.

The ELT profession in Saudi, and largely in the Middle-East, is McEnglish. Just look at the people in charge of the ELT programmes and worse, the teachers. Majority have no qualifications related to the field and the only gibberish that they can spew out is they are native-speakers with Brit/American/Aussie passports.

ELT will get better when we stop hiring crooks as managers, supervisors, coordinators and teachers. We need qualified people who can represent the profession from all nationalities and races.

To all backpackers: getting proper qualifications is the only way that you can get and stay in a job. If you are not ready to do that, stay away from a language classroom.

[veiledsentiments]

The only employers that I have read of here taking someone with zero educational credentials and zero experience has been places like the slave pits of Berlitz and that other chain whose name escapes me.

VS
(BTW... Bebsi was being tongue in cheek about the possibilities of a job )

[Mikalina]

Hey, we need a new generatiin of cynics when you two are long gone.

How else will we get them without the newbies crashing and banging around the world?

From a new poster who is a developing nicely as a cynic - in Kurdistan without a contract or visa but with a megalomanical school administrator prowling the corridors of the school which also contains my living accommodation. Oh, and I'm female and alone - and no longer a spring chicken.

We are a bit further down the line In Kurdistan than the Afghanistan situation as described by vs but this has just left a hightened distrust of anyone not Kurdish by administrators, owners, etc. Dodgy deals are the only ones on offer so consequently they only attract the nutters and inexperienced, as discussed elsewhere.

So the old soviet accusation of 'mentally unstable' for anyone who dissents is added to the other disempowering techniques (no contract, no visa,intimidation, deskilling, isolation, etc, etc) to absorb the teacher into the tribal network where only one person has the power - and this person becomes the only one who can 'rescue' you........

Classic. So, if you are not a nutter when you arrive........

I'll keep posting. Please let me know if you sense a deterioration in my mental capacity. (Dry British sense of humour)

[veiledsentiments]

Will we ever be short of cynics among the old ME hands?

VS