Two good reasons not to teach English



All over the world, the Internet cafes of major cities (and more than a few minor cities) are filled with whining, griping, mewling foreigners, hysterically tearing at their hair as they zap off emails to friends, relatives, chat boards and their countries’ consulates.

What are they moaning about?

Their EFL jobs.

Check any website or message board related to the subject, and the vast majority of postings will be complaints and negative comments. “The school ripped me off. They didn’t get me a visa like they said. My accommodations were awful. I had to work unpleasant hours. The salary wasn’t enough to live on. The students were mean to me. The management was mean to me. The local people were mean to me. I couldn’t get the things I wanted and needed. . .”

Yada yada yada.

It all boils down to one thing: it wasn’t what I expected.

So with that in mind, read this carefully, and think about your motives in wanting an EFL job in the first place.

REASON NUMBER ONE NOT TO TEACH ENGLISH:
“I’ll make loads of money abroad.”

A complete and total load of crap. You are not going to make a fortune. Not in Japan, not in Korea, not in Antarctica, not nowhere. Not unless you are a very well-qualified and experienced teacher working in the Middle East, and perhaps not even then.

“Oh but I heard about this friend of my brother’s cousin and he was making $100 an hour teaching English in Japan. . .”

Yeah. Maybe in 1983.

“Oh but you can still make $20 an hour in Korea and Japan”

And a cup of coffee costs $6, too, a ticket for one to the cinema costs $25, a beer costs about $10. . .

In 1997, before the Asian economic bubble popped, I was making about $20 an hour in Seoul. I ended up with around $2000 a month. The school paid my taxes, but I was paying $400 a month to live in a tiny room with paper windows, sharing a toilet and a cold-water shower with 6 other English teachers, Fun in the winter, believe me. I spent approximately $!5 a day on food, having no cooking apparatus in my room, eating usually at a cheap Korean cafe and a Subway sandwich shop near my place, and maybe another $150 a month on miscellaneous expenses. Like all English teachers, I hung out at the cheap American-owned bars in Itaewon near the army base – most Korean nightclubs in fact would not let in foreigners. It was a pretty spartan life – I rarely bought new clothes and spent most of my free time reading used paperbacks, thought I did often indulge myself at the cinema (only $9!).

So, not bad, I saved about $10,000 in 10 months.

Pretty cool, huh? Makes you want to get up and go, eh? Man, that’s money!

A Polish friend of mine in New York last year worked as a waitress for 6 months in a busy Polish cafe in Manhattan. She was probably spending a similar amount of money on accommodation and food – maybe $900 or $1000 a month. Yet she lived in her own comfortable flat in Brooklyn, with her own shower with hot water and kitchen, and pretty much ate out or went to bars or clubs whenever she felt like it.

In 6 months she saved $20,000.

Last I heard, average salary in Korea was about $400 a week, though I think now they toss in a dumpy flat on the outskirts of the city with that. Japan, the Middle East, and practically every country in the world are seeing salaries and benefits go down, down down and the number of available teachers go way up. Add the expense and hassle of relocation, the chance that your school will end up not paying you anything or much less than promised, the high cost of living in those countries that pay well, and of course the several thousand dollars you might have to pay for a teaching certificate, and it does not necessarily equal a wise move.

In Thailand, salaries are down about 25 percent from the $800 of 1996, while costs are up at least 30 percent.

Working in Eastern Europe, you are likely to find your salary below $200 a month., although they do often throw in a really crappy flat far from the center you’ll share with some other slob. Schools are fond of telling you this is enough to live on, but don’t kid yourself. I’m a notoriously thrifty individual, but when I worked in Prague, I lost about $20 of my savings every month. The only thing cheap there is beer.

Working someplace like Bangkok or Moscow you’re likely to find that the cost of even a moderate amount of entertainment will drain your paycheck away quickly. And believe me, it’s hard to avoid a moderate amount of entertainment, in either of those cities.

So if it’s money you want, you would almost surely be better off working as a waiter or waitress in a busy restaurant. You’ll make loads of tips that you won’t have to pay taxes on, and then you can visit whatever country you want at your leisure. And you don’t need some four-week $2000 certificate.

Good idea?

Damn right.

REASON NUMBER TWO NOT TO BE AN ENGLISH TEACHER
“I’ll have an authentic cultural experience.”

Ah, yes, of course. Travel to a country and have an authentic cultural experience, while forcing another nation’s language down its throat.

Get real.

So what do you imagine? Sitting down to grade papers in a cafe in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower? Living in a mud hut in the middle of a village, the native kids greeting you with smiles every morning? Living in a Zen temple and every morning giving English lessons to the Dalai Lama?

As an EFL teacher, you are more than likely going to be living in the drab suburbs of a major industrial city, teaching people who need English for international business purposes, or the children of the wealthy. They will have very little interest in their nation’s cultural heritage. (Anymore than you have in your own.) Expect blank looks, sighs and moans when you ask them about their country’s culture. They’ll probably perk right up if you want to talk about mobile phones, pop music or sports cars though.

In Thailand, my modernity-obsessed young students often denied that they even ate Thai food – they claimed only to eat KFC and McDonalds. (The ultimate in cool.)

I could believe it by looking at most of them. Fat little bastards.

In Korea, my perpetually overworked students were mostly Christian rather than Buddhist. When asked why, they said that it was because Christian churches were in the city, while Buddhist temples were in the mountains, and this allowed them to save time.

Of course, you can’t live in another country without being exposed in some way to another culture. But in this day and age said culture is likely to be locked away tightly in a museum and displayed only for tourists for $10 a head.

You’ll probably get to eat a lot of local food, for example.

If you can stomach it.

Eating in a Thai restaurant in your home country and enjoying it will probably not prepare you for a daily diet of fried rice and noodle soup from street stands. Maybe you’d prefer fried grasshoppers and rancid beef in garlic pepper?

And what local customs that do persist are likely to offend your delicate liberal sensibilities anyway. Expect class divisions, ethnic and religious conflicts, prostitution, a quite regressive attitude towards women and even child abuse. This ain’t what they taught you at the University of Washington Woman’s Studies class.
Try to lead a group of Russian or Korean men in a conversation about cooking or shopping for food, for example. You will most likely be told that’s something for women and mothers to do. Expressing the idea that children should not be beaten to a Czech I got scornful laughter. “That’s why Americans are so spoiled!”

Now wouldn’t you rather be home watching the Discovery channel?

BaCK tO RamBLIngZ MenU