He said that this was much higher than the teacher’s average of 539 in Taiwan.”
From:
“Taiwan’s mediocre results in English tests raise concerns” by Hu Ching-Hui for The Taipei Time Sep 21, 2008
Cram schools or "buxibans" are big business here. Common topics include English and maths. Most of the people I know in Taiwan are buxiban teachers. I did it for about six months and then went in search of an adult school. It’s a good thing I did, as Taiwan would have fewer children now, if I’d continued.
It’s not the children that would've caused me to rip off their heads, but the system to which they are subjected. It's glorified baby sitting with an emphasis on: making money, placating parents, daily spelling quizzes and making the students come back for the next course, to make more money. The place I worked at linked my pay raises to the number of students who returned for the next course. More about them later.
Message from someone in charge at a buxiban in Kaohsiung,I shit you not
They generally start at 4pm and most don’t finish until 9.30 at night. These kids go straight from school to buxiban to doing homework –they only get about five or six hours sleep and then expected to achieve academic excellence. It’s ridiculous.
The English cram schools rely on Chinese teachers to do the bulk of the teaching. Flair play, they do a pretty good job under the circumstances and get paid about half the amount that foreign teachers get. They are also expected to work for free, clean the school and do all the marking, in a lot of cases.
At the same time, expecting them to teach pronunciation is pretty unreasonable, when many of them I met have never been to an English speaking country. This is not too much of a problem, as from what I’ve seen, they teach mostly in Chinese. This goes against most of what I’ve been taught in regards to second language acquisition.
Mind you, I’ve been trained to teach English as a Second Language, which is better than most of the foreign teachers in Taiwan. All you need here is a degree, or at least two years of tertiary education. Taiwan has the lowest standards for English teachers I’ve experienced in four countries. Even Thailand, where they pay about a third of the wages here, expect more from their teachers.
It shows too. A larger collection of fresh-out-of-college Americans paying off their student loans would be hard to find anywhere else in the world. The numerous foreigner bars (mostly run by recovering teachers who’ve stayed too long and have to get out of teaching before they go insane) are filled nightly with bad facial hair, backwards baseball caps and inane babble.
Heaven help you if you’re a native English speaking Asian. Despite having the same passport, education and language skills as your Caucasian counterparts, the school will try to pay you a local teacher’s salary, on the grounds that parents don’t expect Asian native speakers – or at least that’s the story I’ve heard from a few people.
Parents don’t want dedicated educators, they want white monkeys to dance in front of their children in the hope they will better pass ludicrous vocabulary tests.
This has led, in part, to the deplorable state of English in Taiwan.
2 comments:
I cannot agree with you more on this topic, the education system here is absurd and it infuriates me that people only want caucasians to teach thier children. Parents are trying to make sure their children become bilingual by sending them to these cram schools with their ridiculously long hours, yet they discrimate teachers who can speak 2 languages because they are simply not "white." They should pick teachers based on skill not appearance. Thank you for writing this, it made me feel much better about my current unemployment situation.
from Emily - born here but lived overseas all her life and is angry at her own country for its lack of judgement
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