Archive for the ‘TEFL jobs’ Category

So, my last thread (of five?) on the Rave’s ESL Au Lait Japan forum has been locked and that is that. There was lots of raging passion, some (but much less) civilised debate, a lot of chest beating and territorial pissing, and two or three people who were just there for a fight and ruined it for everyone. Although you have probably realised by now that I would hardly claim to be an academic, there seemed to be a lot of letters after names on the other side and the whole thing reminded me of a classic academic feud, of which you can see a recent example here:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/22/healthscience/21gender.php

Although the main reason people with more certificates than friends tend to get all het up about these things and keep those feelings for life are probably “they are human”, it amuses me to brainstorm some other reasons. And as this is my blog, that is what I will do! But first of all

Warning: If you have lots of letters after your name and are the kind of person to take slightly tongue in cheek generalisations personally, I would suggest reading no further. Unless all of that is true and you have also indulged in an academic feud or two, in which case this is for you:

Reasons why academic feuds happen more often and last longer than people-who-think-Aliens-was-better-than-Alien-or-visa-versa feuds:

• People with more letters after their name than in their name spend far too much time on their computers or at their desks and not enough moving around, so physical feelings of frustration and aggression build up and come out in flame mails
• They actually set too high standards for their personal behaviour in terms of things like not using offensive language  (being PC) etc. and so the pressure builds up until they burst
• As they were not jocks when they were younger, they never learnt the “have a full-on fight and then forget it” school of conflict resolution
• They got bullied at school and enjoy doing the intellectual equivalent to someone else in revenge
• Their self-image is so tied up with their ideas that any attack on their ideas cannot be seperated from a personal attack
• They spend so much time explaining their ideas in words of one syllable to the dumbed down youth in their university lectures that the last thing they want to do is more of the same in their free time, so any “can you explain that more” question is the snapping point (Stephen Krashen, this means you my son!)
• If they took all those qualifications and got a nice university job to get praise from their families, they are hardly likely to take anything but praise from anyone else
• After all that time and expense doing an MAPHDTESOLEFLSLA, they think they should get a bit of extra respect. If not, what was the point of doing that instead of watching tentacle porn?
• They do indeed usually get that extra respect, so they are about as unlikely as a North Korean leader to understand it when someone treats their opinion as equal to a man off the street
• That’s all for now

If you don’t agree, I would be glad to hear from you. However, please remember the comments policy of TEFLtastic, which consists of just four words: Try to be nice.

It’s an often asked question and I’m getting bored of answering it, so here’s absolutely my last word on the matter*

To CELTA or not to CELTA?- The “final” word

 I have been a trainer on 4 week certificate in teaching english to adults courses (similar to CELTA) where some of the trainees already had teaching experience before they come on the course but they decided it was still worth the money to work in better schools and/ or work legally (in Turkey, for example, you need a teaching qualification to get a visa).

All said teachers had got into very bad habits teaching without having training first, and most of them looked like they were going to fail the teaching practice part of the course in the first two or three weeks. Most finally came through quite well, but with on average with a range of marks only slightly higher than people with no teaching experience at all (who also often had the handicap of less life experience to help them). Certainly all the teachers would have been better at their jobs having done the Certificate first and then taught for a year or two rather than visa versa- without a single exception.

Ditto people with Primary school teaching experience and MAs in TESOL with no teaching experience

Conclusions:
1) There are jobs you can get without a TEFL Certificate in most countries, but there are more and better ones you can get with one
2)You will do your job better if you get training first, and it will also make your job easier on you
3) If you put off training until later, you will not get as full benefit from it as you could- quite apart from the wasted years of teaching not as well as you could have before that you get round to doing it. Teaching before qualifications will also not count towards the teaching experience that is added up to decide pay rises, becoming an EFL examiner, entering the DELTA/ MA etc.
4) It is expensive, and schools do become training centres partly for financial reasons, but you will soon get your money back if you choose your post-CELTA job carefully and/ or when you start getting promoted. Anyway, it’s much cheaper than any kind of IT, NLP or business training.
5) If you really think it’s such a great money making scam you will need a CELTA to become a CELTA trainer, and so get in on the game yourself

*(Ha, I’ll be lucky! Especially with the bits I sneaked in in the middle bit…)

Another example of foreigners who come over to Japan and can’t be bothered making an effort because it’s just Japan, as also seen with many British and American rock bands (e.g. Supergrass- in it (Japan) for the money indeed!)

Rants aside, here is the next part of my serious attempt at examining why there might be so many bad teachers in Japan. Having already examined why worse teachers might come out to Japan, now it’s time to examine:

Why do good teachers leave Japan?

Note that this is now the new, improved version of this post, organised by categories and with the proviso (as demanded by the punters on Rave’s ESL Au Lait) that it is possible that some bad teachers leave for some of the same reasons:

Personal Reasons

• Women often leave because of the lack of dating opportunities
• Those that don’t have this problem still find they lack female friends due to female friends leaving
• Lack of progress with learning the language and/ or making Japanese friends makes people want to try somewhere “easier”
• The lack of a summer break like most schools in Europe take means, strangely, that people are likely to think their time is up after a year and leave at the same time as all their friends do- usually at the end of a one year contract
• The difficulty of meeting new people, especially in big cities
• Wanting to be accepted as a local but realizing it will never happen
• Not wanting your children to go to a Japanese school or university

Career Advancement and Personal Development

• Many Japanese institutions have a visible or glass ceiling at how far non-Japanese can climb up the ladder, meaning people leave after reaching a certain level or don’t bother sticking around to get promoted because they know it can only lead so far
• Lack of opportunities to take further qualifications in Japan, e.g. even people in Tokyo who want to do a DELTA must do so by distance learning, inconceivable of in any other capital city I know, there are no CELTA courses available, and the local MA in TESOL courses often demand some level of Japanese and/ or don’t have a good reputation abroad
• A lack of people, even DoSs, with a DELTA who can help you when you take a distance course
• The lack of opportunity to become a trainer on such courses
• Workshops you can go to are often aimed at a very basic level of teaching knowledge and therefore unlikely to be of interest to experienced and qualified teachers
• The lack of a clear, obvious career path into other, better schools etc. University jobs, for example, are usually not advertised, the well respected chains like Bell and IH they people sometimes move up to elsewhere do not exist, and the British Council is shrinking its operations.
• One of the steps forward in terms of pay can be to take an Assistant Language Teacher job, but as this means teaching with another teacher it often doesn’t feel like a step forward in terms of your career
• You can earn and/ or save more elsewhere
• The lack of opportunity to teach exam classes other than TOEIC or to become an examiner (for example, the British Council in Tokyo is not accepting applications for IELTS examiners)

The other staff

• The negativity of the other teachers
• A feeling that “If all these people can do this job without complaints and/ or and get paid the same, maybe I should be doing something else”
• Managers who are younger and/ or have less experience and qualifications

 Not feeling at the centre of the “TEFL world”

• The materials used by schools are often 5 or more years behind those used in Europe
• Because Japan is not a big market for the UK and US ELT publishers, work like pre-publication testing is not often available

The students

• The fact that the students don’t seem so seriously interested in learning the language and so make limited progress- only studying half an hour a week, using company classes as a chance to relax because they are overworked, not doing homework or anything else in English outside class etc. etc.
• If students are happy just to be entertained you don’t feel like you are being pushed to improve

The materials and other resources

• The lack of teaching technology such as Interactive Whiteboards, or even sometimes OHPs and photocopiers
• The lack of quality of the locally produced textbooks etc. that you sometimes have to use
• The idea that even while your ability to teach Japanese students is improving, your ability to teach other nationalities is possibily getting worse

Not matching your training

• A lack of groups of 8 to 12 students that people are usually trained to teach on their CELTA etc.
• Very few classes with even one student who doesn’t have Japanese as a first language
• A lack of flaps
• A lack of preparation time or rest time between lessons
• A lack of a range of levels
• Having to teach a mix of ages

Miscellaneous

• The difficulties of working in a Japanese office
• Good teachers leaving becomes self perpetuating- because some good teachers leave the other good teachers don’t want to stay

Standard of living

• The chance to live in a more beautiful city elsewhere
• The chance to afford a bigger and/ or otherwise better flat outside Japan
• Being able to afford the time and money to fly home more often from other countries
• Lower tax and medical insurance in some places
• Not wanting to pay into the Japanese national pension system
• No high interest local accounts to pay your savings into
• The falling yen
• The difficulties in getting mortages (especially joint ones), credit cards etc.
• Because wages have been static at best for years, people who might have wanted to stay in teaching end up applying for management jobs to keep their wages climbing and then drop out completely due to the difficulties of being a manager and/ or not really wanting to be one in the first place
• The expense of exploring further afield in Japan and flying to elsewhere in Asia
• Although it is also experienced by most Japanese, the commuting, long hours, cramped accomodation etc. can be avoided by moving to another country
• Lack of provision for working mothers

If anyone has any suggestions on anything else I can add, please let me know. I should also point out that it isn’t as bad as the list above could make it appear- I am, after all, still here teaching in a big chain of language schools after 4 years!

According to Garrison Keillor, “92% [of young people] want a ‘flexible work schedule’, 96% want a job that ‘requires creativity’, and 97% want a job that ‘allows me to have an impact on the world’”.

And for my reaction I can do no more than quote Mr Keillor too:

“All I can say is, Wow. Good luck. And now you know why we need illegal immigrants to do the inflexible uncreative stuff that simply needs doing right now”

So, how does TEFL stack up as a job for Generation Y? If flexible schedule equals split shifts and having to work all over the city- check. If creativity includes trying to make a textbook listening with the guy who set up amazon.co.uk (no, not Amazon.com, they couldn’t afford him) interesting or thinking up a new way to keep all 29 teenagers awake for a whole 90 minutes- check. And for those who manage to have their debate on Japanese war crimes- check for “world impact” too.

So, if TEFL is the perfect job why isn’t the world even more swamped with TEFL teachers? And more to the point, why are so many of the teachers so unhappy in their jobs?

To start with, to Generation Y ”flexible schedule” obviously does not mean your boss making you finish 10 pm one night and then start teaching at 8 am the following morning. It means you wake up any time you like and then walk to your computer down the hall in your pajamas to telecommute. Quite what a company has to gain from offering someone a job like that is beside the point, it is of course young people’s birth right to be offered flexibility while not being forced to be flexible themselves…

Saddest of all, this self-indulgent attitude is even reaching Japan. Young people are refusing to take jobs until they are offered jobs for life, then refusing to buckle under to the demands that a Japanese permanent contract has always demanded and quitting after 2 years. Please ignore everything you have ever read about this Japanese generation being more individualistic and creative, that was the last generation- they just gave their dreams up for the sake of their children. This is the molly-coddled generation. God help us all, and sell all your shares in Japanese companies now!

agreement- Verbs matching their pronouns, e.g. third person -s. If students make mistakes with this you can prompt them using this technical term, e.g. Student “My sister she get up at six and thirty” Teacher “Agreement” S “Sorry?” T “Your verb and pronoun disagree” “Eh?” “I said, your verb and the word before it are having a bit of a row” “What??” “If you don’t change that verb ending soon it’s going to come to blows, I’m telling you” “This teacher, he explain very bad” “Oh dear. Agreement!” etc.

ALT (Alien Language Teacher)- a native speaking assistant teacher who helps give lessons in Junior High schools etc. Not to be confused with ALF (Alien Language Friend)- someone who gives informal English conversation lessons in cafes.

approximants- Sounds that are as close as your students are ever going to get to native speaker pronunciation of English, e.g. a sound that is somewhere between an /r/, /l/ and /w/ but is at least usually identifiable as only one of those sounds.

assimilation- A form of connected speech where a sound in a word is modified by its neighbours, e.g. by being forced to buy a computer operated sprinkler because the sound next door has one

back-reference- The technical term for bitching about someone when they are not there, e.g. “Have you heard the news? It seems he’s one of them too!”

CALL (Computer assisted language learning- pronounced /kal/)- An intermediate step on the way to TELL (totally electronic language learning) and HAL (hologram assisted learning).

CMC (Computer-mediated communication)- When everything the teacher says goes through the students’ electronic dictionaries before it is accepted as true

complexity- How much of a complex students have about using things like conjuctions and pronouns for back-reference

compound sentence- A sentence with two or more clauses, usually long like the protective wall around the foreigner compounds teachers in Saudi live in

compounding- A way of forming words by combining two or more nouns or adjectives. Not to be confused with “pounding“, which is the technical term for when a student makes endless identical failed efforts at pronouncing a word until the teacher screams at them to stop

concord- Another name for agreement, such as agreeing to add an -e onto the end of the supersonic plane name just to make the French shut up for a minute

connected speech- When the student who always starts long monologues about random topics manages, by some fluke, to say something perfectly connected to what you want to do next in the lesson

connotation- The good, bad, humurous, old-fashioned etc. associations of words and expressions. The word “connotation” is derived from the French word “con”, which is a nice way of saying “bloody stupid”

fricatives- Sounds that are produced by friction. The word “fricative” is derived from the eupheumism “fricking”, and was originally used only to mean the insulting “raspberry” sound produced with your tongue

hybrid language learning- When strong students help weaker ones not just by explaining grammar but by contributing some of their genes with the use of modern classroom cloning technology (as yet only available at the British Council)

Juncture- The age of the rule of the Junker class in Germany, who were famous for pausing between each and every word to give them all a suitably strong Germanic emphasis

liaison- When an extra sound between a final vowel and the first sound of the next word passes notes back and forward between those two sounds until they get together for some really hot connected speech

non-voiced- Negative feedback to using games in class that doesn’t come out until the end-of-course feedback form because they always seem to be having fun

plosive sounds- The sounds students make just before they explode with frustration, e.g. the first four sounds in “bu bu bu bu..but I DID do my homework!!”

schema- A scheme or plot that is very complex and intelligent, hence the use of Latin to describe it

vowels- Sounds that are made without any significant obstruction or constriction. The word is derived by shortening the phrase “v(ery loose b)owels”

(Full list of the Alternative ELT Jargon Dictionary available on the Articles page above)

(Come and teach in) Turkmenistan: A police state scourged by heroin

Okay, so if you clicked you’ve seen that it isn’t really a TEFL job ad, but the way it was written in the print edition of the International Herald Tribune really made me think of a typical starting line to a teaching job blurb for somewhere obscure. See the website “teaching jobs in paradise” if you don’t believe me. Got me wondering about other similiar ones:

Thailand: bloodless coup and little boys

Spain: red wine and coke and pissing in the street

Anyone got any more?