English Teachers Wanted, Dumb A%$es Need Not Apply

I am, like most of my friends, a professional English teacher. I teach English as a Second Language in the US and Canada, and English as a Foreign Language in other countries, including China. For this I have basic teaching certification, an ESL endorsement, and not one but two Master's degrees in the field. I've worked in many countries in many different situations: universities, cram schools, private tutoring centers, high schools, grade schools, and so on.

However, this is a field filled with imposters, and in China, there are virtually no standards laid down by the government as to who can teach. An 18-year-old recent high school graduate was offered THE SAME JOB I HAVE at the SAME HOURLY SALARY. (Technically, he SHOULD be a college graduate, but someone pulled some strings.) He's perhaps six months older than one or two of the students. He showed up for work yesterday and I thought he was an exchange student at the school--we have a few of those. Our Program Director spoke highly of him: they hired him because he can speak some "very good Chinese" and can therefore "explain what is meaning" to students. I sat in shock. I know the kid they hired. His Chinese is limited to negotiating for cheap beer and smokes, and he can't tell you in English, let alone Chinese, what a verb is. ("I don't know, it's like, grammar, or something?" he responded when my tart-tongue boss asked.)

Who else applied? A fifty-year-old person I know who has two Master's degrees, teaching certification,  a CELTA certificate from Cambridge University, and FLUENT CHINESE. Needless to say, this person isn't as "cute" as the blonde surfer dude, although a point in her favor is that she doesn't have acne. At a Quiz Night a few weeks ago--when I met Surfer Dude--he told me he was planning on taking some "high-paying" teaching job for a month or two to get enough money to "do" South-East Asia because it had, like, culture, and the grass was really cheap. (Hey, there's a winner for you!) Now, I could tell my boss that, or I could just wait for the fall-out... 

Several of my friends who teach are facing a similar problem: a LOT of people quit during the long holiday and schools are scrambling to replace them with any white body they can find, qualified or no. My friend Suzie Q, who will kill me if she reads this, found out last night that they lost half their department. As she said to me on the phone--between sobs and fits of anger--- "If they expect me to whip a decent curriculum OUT OF MY ASS with NO PLANNING TIME and without so much as a full set of textbooks, they are frickin' DREAMING!" And yet--Surfer Boy walked into his classrooms that day completely unprepared, told the students to look up words in a dictionary and write the meaning in Chinese, and his students obeyed, enchanted. Afterwards, they snapped pictures of him with their cell phones. Curriculum? Just play games. Scope and sequence? Just play games. Vocabulary? That's what dictionaries are for, right? He's there for the photo op.

 There's a lesson here: good schools with good management can retain their staff throughout the contract period, no matter how unhappy the staff might be. If a teacher decamps without warning, it's a sign that something seriously wrong is going on. If you are stepping into a position that has been suddenly vacated, don't tap dance through the minefield. Stroll. Quietly. Collect your pay. Don't make eye contact. Get out while you still have a soul. Then send me an email and tell me why and how you quit. Did you make it through the contract period?

UPDATE: Hooray, hooray, Chinese public schools in  major cities now require teachers to have degrees and many require teaching certification! I had a degree in English but no teacher training when I started out and I was AWFUL. Thank God I was only teaching adults conversational English--no damage done to kids.  Teacher training helps the teacher to do the job.  Would you want to go see a doctor who had never gone to medical school? Would you send your kid to one? Bless China for upping the standards.