Hello All,
Hmm, awfully quiet...[in Taiwanese EFL Teachers' Yahoogroups list]
Anyway, hopefully this message [from Peggy] would spark the fire. I'm forwarding to you her message [with her permission, of course] because I think she has given me an insight of what's it like working in buxibans. My comments are inserted and put in between line breaks.
------------------------------------------
Dear Aiden,
I just post a message on the board. I agree with your opinion about buxiban. In fact, the purpose that I would like to held this conference is for the teachers in buxiban, not really for the teachers in elementary or primary schools. For the teachers working in buxiban, they are like working in the private company. The boss seldom gave them training lessons ,especially they like to hire the native speakers to teach.
----------------------------------------------
Aiden asks:
How many of you here on this list receive training sessions from your school? You don't need to name your school. How often do you get training sessions? If no, what do you think is the reason for not providing training sessions?
----------------------------------------------
Peggy wrote:
Most of the teachers in big chain buxiban are from American or Canada. The Chinese teachers can only assist them. But it doesn't mean they don't have the potential to teach. As I know, most of them major in English or forignal language. But it's the tendency to keep the native speakers to do the main teaching now. I think it's not really a bad thing for them, coz it will push them to improve their listening and oral ability.
---------------------------------------------------
Aiden asks:
Does it matter to you whether you're not given any teaching job assignments even if your job description states "English teacher"?
---------------------------------------------------
Peggy wrote:
Some of them left buxiban and started up their own after 3 or 5 years.
---------------------------------------------------
Aiden asks:
Do you see yourselves 2-3 years from now, putting up your own language school? Yes, no, maybe? If you do, I'll be your number one supporter ;-)
---------------------------------------------------
Peggy wrote:
Therefore, I found a very interesting phenomenon. The bigger size buxiban will have more native speaker teachers. The smaller size buxiban will have more Chinese teachers. But it doesn't mean the bigger one is better than the smaller one. For the small size buxiban, the teacher's personal style is a very important factor to decide the quantity of the students. I found, the small size buxiban, they are more creative and would like to try any new teaching idea. It's a lot of fun to work with them. They usually gave me many new ideas and questions to think about.
Most of them would like to learn profession skills in teaching.
-------------------------------------------------
Aiden says:
I agree, that's why you're here.
-------------------------------------------------
Peggy wrote:
But there is a difficulty for them, their working time is too long. Almost from 12:00pm to 10:00pm. For the bigger size ones, they might have 2 days off. But for most of the buxiban, they work 6 days a week. If I were them, I would feel exhausted after work. When I release this news to my customers, lot of them want to join. But they have to ask their boss coz it's still their working time. Luckily, since it's free, so some of the bosses just let them come.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Aiden says:
This comment was similar to what Aaron said in his message. Buxiban teachers are too busy, too exhausted, over-worked yet underpaid [?] Should any of these be a stumbling block for your learning and professional advancement? Should you give yourselves a little nudge and say, 'It's darn hard, but I've gotta do it for myself'
------------------------------------------------------------
Peggy wrote:
I will put ur url on my website. But I need to think how and where to put it on the website. You are doing a very interesting project. Frankly speaking, I prefer work with the teachers in buxiban to the teachers in public schools. It's more fun and they are really more creative.
Thanks for inviting me to join your group. It's nice to learn more even I am not interested in teaching at all. haha..
BTW, I have tried the reading group for around one year. It's doing pretty good. We have 3 different groups in my store on Saturday now. We didn't teach but just reading and share our opinion together. It's not easy at first for the kids who are are around 12 or 13 years old. But it's amazing that they are doing better now. Their parents are happy to see their kids to read the books automatically.
But I will close down the story-telling even in my store from this week. My store is too samll and I don't like to tell the story for the same kids every week. Therefore, I decide to go to the schools to tell the story for 30 kids instead of 3 or 4 kids.
It's like the experiments for me and I am having fun.
I will go to the group often to learn from you guys in the future.
Best regards
Peggy
--------------------------------------------------
Well, I hope you could tell me what you think. I call the attention of my subject pool [or those who are participating in my research] to start the discussion rolling.
thanks.
aiden
No comments:
Post a Comment