Job Discussion Forums

[lanceevan1]

In fact you can teach without being a good speller. I have done it for years.

While I am not proud of it, I have never been a good speller. However I have taught with sucess:

1) ESL/EFL to Children, Teenagers and Adults
2) ESL for Bus.
3) High School Humanities (Language Arts)
4) Grade 3/4 (Including Math, Science, Language Arts and Social Science)

The important thing is to recognize when you can not spell a word, impower your students to help you AND make sure that BOTH you and the students are on a path towards lifelong learning.

Its that simple.

[hkteach]

A very admirable attitude, but one which won't cut it here.

May I humbly suggest that if you're thinking of coming to Hong Kong to teach, then you'd better do a crash course in spelling because people in Hong Kong (ESPECIALLY teachers) can't afford to make mistakes with English.
The locals don't like to make mistakes in ANYTHING actually (this is why it's hard to get them to try anything unknown) because mistakes, rather than being regarded as an opportunity for further teaching and learning, are regarded as failings and will be criticised accordingly.

I don't think a day goes by without someone asking me if their grammar, pronunciation or spelling is correct and why one grammatical structure is used instead of another. Mistakes cause loss of face.

1. Your students will complain about you if they notice that you make spelling errors.

2. Students' work is always corrected by teachers and errors are highlighted for students to correct.
If your worksheets or comments have errors the local teachers will complain about you.

3. In many schools, the principal collects students' workbooks once a term (to check if teachers are correcting 'properly'. Your principal will thus discover your spelling errors and your failure to correct students' errors and will not be happy about this.

4. Parents check their children's homework (and classwork) and will complain to the principal if you've made errors OR if you don't detect errors made by your students.

So you can see that you'll be in the firing line from all quarters.

As you say, you can inform them of your strategies and share them as ways to learn to spell, but HK education is still based on 'the right answer' so you won't make much of an impression on the locals.
Sorry, but that's just the way things are here.

[lanceevan1]

HKteach-

Thanks for the tips!

[hkteach]

"Wel---come"

[Smoog]

I have to say - if you're that thin-skinned that an offhand comment about your spelling in a different thread obiliges you to making an entire thread in order to justify yourself to a bunch of anomynous strangers you'll likely never meet, well...then I cannot see you enjoying teaching in Hong Kong much at all.