Reflections on Teaching English in Asia (DON'T MENTION CAMBODIA)
01 December 2016 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
hey I just had some questions about
teaching english as the second language in asia so for me teaching English as a second language has never been my career it's never been the main thing I was interested in but before I ever left for Asia I did get a certificate in teaching ESL in Canada obviously I also have a bachelor's degree mmm so I'm a fully qualified English teacher and I anticipated the teach English as a second language would be something I did in between other jobs or if I found a good situation it'd be something I could do while learning another language so at that time of course actually I guess at that time really my heart was set on Cambodia rather than Laos um various obstacles got in the way between me and living in Cambodia but eventually I did live in Cambodia I lived in Cambodia Thailand Laos Taiwan a little a little bit in Sri Lanka Myanmar is also a big part of my life although I've never lived in Myanmar and now I'm living in Yunnan China I lived here previously 2007-2008 um look the very end of my time living in Cambodia earlier I had been doing humanitarian research so research linked to the humanitarian sector which is tremendously important work in a lot of ways the research is much more crucial than the hands-on element if you mention work like the hands-on element may be handing out sacks of rice the hands out the hands-on element maybe just donating money to a hospital but then the research is going to be people finding out what happened to that money did it actually improve the hospital or did it get you know purloined or misallocated misfit was was the intervention effective and even with sacks of rice did those sacks of rice end up in the hands of poor people or did they get taken away by an armed militia who then sold it for a profit what actually happened the rice even in the simplest forms of humanitarian intervention there's a really important role for research in guiding that intervention correcting errors and ultimately in delivering the services that you as a charity are trying to provide so doing that kind of work up to a point and I quit on point of moral principle because of corruption corruption and incompetence but I quit for ethical reasons that job and then while we were figuring out what we were gonna do next we being me and my wife who is now my ex-wife I taught English in a university there in film fan and that job I mean the funny thing about teaching English it really is like babysitting children in a sense in that the core of the job is rewarding and meaningful and wonderful and nice you know and for that reason people will horribly under pay you and horribly exploit you and you deal with these horribly corrupt agencies and schools and institutions all the time you know now why do I compare it to babysitting you know babysitting is underpaid nannying work we lose afford every as we said they were saying nannying and said babysitting you know being a nanny is underpaid and that's been studied you know one of the reasons is it's a nice job people find it you know morally rewarding they take the people who really choose to be nannies and stay with the job they have other motivations yes maybe they they maybe it's actually just caring for the child that's rewarding but you know in Canada you know Filipina nannies they get permanent residency and then they can get Canadian citizenship also so they have careerist aspirations and it may also be the kind of person from spending time with a child caring for a child is tremendous a warning at the core of that job even in Cambodia as horrible and terrible place as Cambodia was to live it's terrible place as it was to be vegan it's terrible a place as it was to try to earn a living and that the universe isn't ly terrible I mean the core of that job the actual educational role of helping people is from he tremendously rewarding even in those circumstances true in some ways the worst the worst of circumstances and you know for the most part I had the worst of students my students were terrible in Cambodia it's not the only place I've taught I've taught English another another um I would walk every day in the pouring rain because it was the rainy season torrential tropical rain from the southwest corner of the city to the northwest corner of the city so I'm sorry I have not got a map here but that was many kilometres so I don't know let's say it was three kilometers in each direction I really forget but that was a long long walk they were from the one extreme edge of the city to the other and there are several university campuses there in the northwest corner of the Phnom Penh and I would walk on the main sort of highway there than the most important road because when it was raining like that that was the only Street that wasn't flooded any of the smaller streets you'd have rain up to your ankles or up to your knees or they would just be impossible to walk on so I would very carefully navigate my way with my umbrella up with the torrential tropical pouring rain every step of the way and then you may ask why didn't I take a taxi my wage was so low that if I took a taxi that was like 60% of my wage so the money I earned that day 60% of it would have been spent on going to and from my place of employment Cambodia like many post-war societies bouncing back from devastation had gone through a period of very rapid inflation so the value of the money in terms of purchasing power had declined that is normal in those historical and economic circumstances and I sat down with my boss at one point and you know I have a very good education in economics but I appealed to real-world examples I said to him when was the last time at this school you increased the rate of pay per hour and he very proudly said never we paid the same amount since the school's first open and I said oh I said do you remember ten years ago how much a bottle of beer cost here in Cambodia here infant on pan and he did remember he said yes I remember ten years ago he said I remember ten years ago when I just moved to the city a bottle of beer was only 25 cents or 50 cents some thought he said and now you know you're lucky to get a bottle of beer for three dollars there are four dollars and five dollars it was something like this this is from memory but it really was that kind of dramatic change in the economy and again many third-world post-war countries going through a period of rapid industrialization that is what happens to their currency beer used to be 25 cents and now beer is $4 a bottle or some of that especially and this is in the capital city if you're out in the remote countryside if you're out in a small town with no electricity maybe that's another story but the whole country bounce back and prices change and the economy was transformed the whole country was transformed very very rapidly so that's what happened and I said to him you're paying the same amount of money to your teachers but the cost of rent for an apartment has gone up exponentially it used to be that rents in phenom pen was $10 a month now you're lucky to pay $300 a month you could be paying five and dollars a month US dollars you know bottle of beer used to be 25 cents as you said it's $5 with him I just used some specific examples so that things he would remember I don't drink the round drink any alcohol there's just useful examples and I presented to him a completely coherent argument that you know ten years earlier really more like 20 years earlier that University was paying a very livable a living wage was paying a good wage she was professors but today it was a starvation wage today it was a wage that nobody could possibly live on and as I said I couldn't afford to take a taxi to work I had to walk in the pouring tropical rain and the rain was the best time to go to work because the Sun was worse in that heat in that climate the days when it wasn't raining that was much worse I preferred walking in the torrential rain because walking in the Sun you'd sweat through all your clothes and I used the same umbrella you know you'd use an umbrella to keep the Sun off you but it was really much more miserable to walk in the in the Sun than it was in the rain that's that Cambodian climate it'll kill you the only people who find the Cambodian climate Pleasant or the Nigerian immigrants there were guys there from Nigeria who were comfortable in that heat but the Cambodians themselves are not very comfortable and we talked to Chinese people people from anywhere else of course the Western world it's a punishingly hot climate especially now global warming has made it worse in case you hadn't heard um worse and worse and worse so in that context and look I'm not really the human context of it worse cambodia has a culture that combines the worst elements of Buddhism the worst elements of French colonialism the worst elements of communism and the worst elements of fascism when I say fascism I really mean it in the sense of feudalism the feudal heritage but you know I do mean fascism I mean feudalism as it has been reimagined and remembered in a modern authoritarian context which is an important part of fascism Cambodians or Aragon if you teach English as a second language in Cambodian your boss treats you like [ __ ] the other teachers the Cambodian born teachers treat you like [ __ ] at any excuse and your students treat you like [ __ ] out of sheer arrogance and I am the very rare personality type that finds that hilarious and it doesn't emotionally impact me at all but nowhere else in the world without you have a student like in Korea or in Japan you wouldn't have a student coming into class like a level one English student someone who really can't speak English worth a damn if someone whose really needs your help and telling you how to teach the class but in Cambodia that's routine the students come in and on their second day of class they tell you that you're doing it all wrong there was one little girl sorry I mean she was the same age so whatever she was probably 19 years old but she was really really small that's why I remembered her as a little girl which was a very very small scrawny 19 year old girl and I remember she came in and she shone with total confidence and total arrogance that what I was doing was completely wrong and every day what we should do in class is do crossword puzzles so no my crossword puzzle is it's a piece of paper with a bunch of lines and they fill in and the clap that class was supposed to be a conversation class supposed to be speaking and listening comprehension so I wasn't supposed to be teaching writing at all I wasn't supposed to doing writing or you know essay writing or that kind of testing that was their one chance to spend time face-to-face with a native speaker of English their other teachers were Cambodians who spoke good English and they would walk them through they would do more of those types of exercises writing exercises you know filling out tests on pieces of paper but the whole point what they were paying for with me as part of that program it was a comprehensive program was that was there time to hear my voice speak back to me to have that it was their only chance to try to get you know speaking and listening comprehension right with it with a foreigner with someone who speaks English as their first language I did actually teach grammar also but it was not grammar for SI right not in that class anomie a lot of other people would've found the and I've never stopped smiling and I was laughing a little bit as this young woman was telling me that was terrible teacher it's wrong hey Jill you know you don't that's a really interesting idea but you know and she thought that's really she knew every class was come in and do crossword puzzles and hand them in and I should correct them and then hand them back I said you know if you do crossword puzzles you never practice speaking in a whole sentence or a whole paragraph you just learn words so what I'm trying to do in this class is get you to speak in a whole sentence in a whole paragraph which of course for them is really the challenge it's not that hard for a Cambodian to memorize a word in isolation learn how to use it learn how to speak with confidence and proper or parentheses but you know in in many of these cultures definitely also in Hong Kong definitely also in Taiwan but in Cambodia most of all they regard the English teacher as lower than a babysitter as lower than a nanny even if you're teaching in university you're treated with real contempt and of course the pay the low weights of pay respect reflect that you're put in a position that most people if I denigrating and humiliating and off on daily basis and there's the rain and all these other things and just the poverty because once you accept that job if that's your only income you you are living in poverty as a teacher there in Cambodia I'll never forget there was one American guy and the first day I met him wasn't my first day of work but that that university can wait but on the first day I met him he said to me with with real passion convictions well she said this whole university is a joke this whole university is a scam and you know the pay is terrible and you know the education is terrible and you know and I replied to him looking him straight in the eye I wasn't upset by that I said to him if that's true why do you work here anyone can leave and that guy's been working there for years and he was still working there he kept working there after I left and he looked down and you know before he was so confident and brash and with the saddest expression possible on his face he said I like to be able to pay my electricity bills I assumed he was another one of these shipwrecked white men a white man who went to Cambodia with no money and married a Cambodian woman and settled down and he probably lives with his wife's family so he probably doesn't pay rents because that job does not give you enough money teaching English that university did not give you enough money to pay rent in phenomena didn't but if you live with your wife's parents in one wooden house if you all live together and share our share a bathroom then you're not paying any rent so then your salary goes further and as he said you get to pay the electricity bills and probably when you go home probably your wife's parents also are very arrogant and also treat you in that insulting and denigrating way as part of their culture um but the core of the job is still so rewarding teaching English is still wonderful and yes some people put up with it for bad reasons some people do have the wrong intentions there are guys out here teach English just because they sleep with prostitutes or just because they're trapped like that guy was trapped or just because they're drug addicts there are a lot of alcoholics a lot of drug addicts in the English teachings for sure there are terrible people but I mean the good people to be blunt the people of more reading the reason why they stay in the game is that it is really wonderful to sit down with somebody and work with them and help them and over three months to see their ability in the language improve and English as a language it's not just a language if you grew up only being able to read newspapers in Cambodian and now suddenly you can read newspapers or you can read news on the internet in English changes your life suddenly you have questions about history and politics and you have a totally different perspective a totally different so even health you know whether we're talking about veganism or not before you just had these weird stories your grandmother told you about what was healthy and what wasn't and now your English is progressing and you can start to read real science about human health in English because it's not available in Cambodian you can't get that information in Cambodia you know it's changing their lives in a way that you get to see day by day and yes a lot of the students are arrogant the majority of them can be by far but not all of them you know not all of them are so terrible and some of the students have you know career aspirations that you sympathize with and you want to support them and you want to see them grow you want to see them comfort their goals there's a core to what the job is and that really positive supportive nurturing relationship between teacher and student that I as a character in terms of my humanitarian instincts that I love and people a certain type of person would be willing to do that job for free even in the torrential rain even in the Sun even with your boss disrespecting you and lying to you getting lied to by buzzing and sadly that's why the whole industry is so exploitive it's an industry predicated on exploiting the ignorance and gullibility of the students and the good intentions and fundamentally parental nurturing instincts of the people who would become teachers
teaching english as the second language in asia so for me teaching English as a second language has never been my career it's never been the main thing I was interested in but before I ever left for Asia I did get a certificate in teaching ESL in Canada obviously I also have a bachelor's degree mmm so I'm a fully qualified English teacher and I anticipated the teach English as a second language would be something I did in between other jobs or if I found a good situation it'd be something I could do while learning another language so at that time of course actually I guess at that time really my heart was set on Cambodia rather than Laos um various obstacles got in the way between me and living in Cambodia but eventually I did live in Cambodia I lived in Cambodia Thailand Laos Taiwan a little a little bit in Sri Lanka Myanmar is also a big part of my life although I've never lived in Myanmar and now I'm living in Yunnan China I lived here previously 2007-2008 um look the very end of my time living in Cambodia earlier I had been doing humanitarian research so research linked to the humanitarian sector which is tremendously important work in a lot of ways the research is much more crucial than the hands-on element if you mention work like the hands-on element may be handing out sacks of rice the hands out the hands-on element maybe just donating money to a hospital but then the research is going to be people finding out what happened to that money did it actually improve the hospital or did it get you know purloined or misallocated misfit was was the intervention effective and even with sacks of rice did those sacks of rice end up in the hands of poor people or did they get taken away by an armed militia who then sold it for a profit what actually happened the rice even in the simplest forms of humanitarian intervention there's a really important role for research in guiding that intervention correcting errors and ultimately in delivering the services that you as a charity are trying to provide so doing that kind of work up to a point and I quit on point of moral principle because of corruption corruption and incompetence but I quit for ethical reasons that job and then while we were figuring out what we were gonna do next we being me and my wife who is now my ex-wife I taught English in a university there in film fan and that job I mean the funny thing about teaching English it really is like babysitting children in a sense in that the core of the job is rewarding and meaningful and wonderful and nice you know and for that reason people will horribly under pay you and horribly exploit you and you deal with these horribly corrupt agencies and schools and institutions all the time you know now why do I compare it to babysitting you know babysitting is underpaid nannying work we lose afford every as we said they were saying nannying and said babysitting you know being a nanny is underpaid and that's been studied you know one of the reasons is it's a nice job people find it you know morally rewarding they take the people who really choose to be nannies and stay with the job they have other motivations yes maybe they they maybe it's actually just caring for the child that's rewarding but you know in Canada you know Filipina nannies they get permanent residency and then they can get Canadian citizenship also so they have careerist aspirations and it may also be the kind of person from spending time with a child caring for a child is tremendous a warning at the core of that job even in Cambodia as horrible and terrible place as Cambodia was to live it's terrible place as it was to be vegan it's terrible a place as it was to try to earn a living and that the universe isn't ly terrible I mean the core of that job the actual educational role of helping people is from he tremendously rewarding even in those circumstances true in some ways the worst the worst of circumstances and you know for the most part I had the worst of students my students were terrible in Cambodia it's not the only place I've taught I've taught English another another um I would walk every day in the pouring rain because it was the rainy season torrential tropical rain from the southwest corner of the city to the northwest corner of the city so I'm sorry I have not got a map here but that was many kilometres so I don't know let's say it was three kilometers in each direction I really forget but that was a long long walk they were from the one extreme edge of the city to the other and there are several university campuses there in the northwest corner of the Phnom Penh and I would walk on the main sort of highway there than the most important road because when it was raining like that that was the only Street that wasn't flooded any of the smaller streets you'd have rain up to your ankles or up to your knees or they would just be impossible to walk on so I would very carefully navigate my way with my umbrella up with the torrential tropical pouring rain every step of the way and then you may ask why didn't I take a taxi my wage was so low that if I took a taxi that was like 60% of my wage so the money I earned that day 60% of it would have been spent on going to and from my place of employment Cambodia like many post-war societies bouncing back from devastation had gone through a period of very rapid inflation so the value of the money in terms of purchasing power had declined that is normal in those historical and economic circumstances and I sat down with my boss at one point and you know I have a very good education in economics but I appealed to real-world examples I said to him when was the last time at this school you increased the rate of pay per hour and he very proudly said never we paid the same amount since the school's first open and I said oh I said do you remember ten years ago how much a bottle of beer cost here in Cambodia here infant on pan and he did remember he said yes I remember ten years ago he said I remember ten years ago when I just moved to the city a bottle of beer was only 25 cents or 50 cents some thought he said and now you know you're lucky to get a bottle of beer for three dollars there are four dollars and five dollars it was something like this this is from memory but it really was that kind of dramatic change in the economy and again many third-world post-war countries going through a period of rapid industrialization that is what happens to their currency beer used to be 25 cents and now beer is $4 a bottle or some of that especially and this is in the capital city if you're out in the remote countryside if you're out in a small town with no electricity maybe that's another story but the whole country bounce back and prices change and the economy was transformed the whole country was transformed very very rapidly so that's what happened and I said to him you're paying the same amount of money to your teachers but the cost of rent for an apartment has gone up exponentially it used to be that rents in phenom pen was $10 a month now you're lucky to pay $300 a month you could be paying five and dollars a month US dollars you know bottle of beer used to be 25 cents as you said it's $5 with him I just used some specific examples so that things he would remember I don't drink the round drink any alcohol there's just useful examples and I presented to him a completely coherent argument that you know ten years earlier really more like 20 years earlier that University was paying a very livable a living wage was paying a good wage she was professors but today it was a starvation wage today it was a wage that nobody could possibly live on and as I said I couldn't afford to take a taxi to work I had to walk in the pouring tropical rain and the rain was the best time to go to work because the Sun was worse in that heat in that climate the days when it wasn't raining that was much worse I preferred walking in the torrential rain because walking in the Sun you'd sweat through all your clothes and I used the same umbrella you know you'd use an umbrella to keep the Sun off you but it was really much more miserable to walk in the in the Sun than it was in the rain that's that Cambodian climate it'll kill you the only people who find the Cambodian climate Pleasant or the Nigerian immigrants there were guys there from Nigeria who were comfortable in that heat but the Cambodians themselves are not very comfortable and we talked to Chinese people people from anywhere else of course the Western world it's a punishingly hot climate especially now global warming has made it worse in case you hadn't heard um worse and worse and worse so in that context and look I'm not really the human context of it worse cambodia has a culture that combines the worst elements of Buddhism the worst elements of French colonialism the worst elements of communism and the worst elements of fascism when I say fascism I really mean it in the sense of feudalism the feudal heritage but you know I do mean fascism I mean feudalism as it has been reimagined and remembered in a modern authoritarian context which is an important part of fascism Cambodians or Aragon if you teach English as a second language in Cambodian your boss treats you like [ __ ] the other teachers the Cambodian born teachers treat you like [ __ ] at any excuse and your students treat you like [ __ ] out of sheer arrogance and I am the very rare personality type that finds that hilarious and it doesn't emotionally impact me at all but nowhere else in the world without you have a student like in Korea or in Japan you wouldn't have a student coming into class like a level one English student someone who really can't speak English worth a damn if someone whose really needs your help and telling you how to teach the class but in Cambodia that's routine the students come in and on their second day of class they tell you that you're doing it all wrong there was one little girl sorry I mean she was the same age so whatever she was probably 19 years old but she was really really small that's why I remembered her as a little girl which was a very very small scrawny 19 year old girl and I remember she came in and she shone with total confidence and total arrogance that what I was doing was completely wrong and every day what we should do in class is do crossword puzzles so no my crossword puzzle is it's a piece of paper with a bunch of lines and they fill in and the clap that class was supposed to be a conversation class supposed to be speaking and listening comprehension so I wasn't supposed to be teaching writing at all I wasn't supposed to doing writing or you know essay writing or that kind of testing that was their one chance to spend time face-to-face with a native speaker of English their other teachers were Cambodians who spoke good English and they would walk them through they would do more of those types of exercises writing exercises you know filling out tests on pieces of paper but the whole point what they were paying for with me as part of that program it was a comprehensive program was that was there time to hear my voice speak back to me to have that it was their only chance to try to get you know speaking and listening comprehension right with it with a foreigner with someone who speaks English as their first language I did actually teach grammar also but it was not grammar for SI right not in that class anomie a lot of other people would've found the and I've never stopped smiling and I was laughing a little bit as this young woman was telling me that was terrible teacher it's wrong hey Jill you know you don't that's a really interesting idea but you know and she thought that's really she knew every class was come in and do crossword puzzles and hand them in and I should correct them and then hand them back I said you know if you do crossword puzzles you never practice speaking in a whole sentence or a whole paragraph you just learn words so what I'm trying to do in this class is get you to speak in a whole sentence in a whole paragraph which of course for them is really the challenge it's not that hard for a Cambodian to memorize a word in isolation learn how to use it learn how to speak with confidence and proper or parentheses but you know in in many of these cultures definitely also in Hong Kong definitely also in Taiwan but in Cambodia most of all they regard the English teacher as lower than a babysitter as lower than a nanny even if you're teaching in university you're treated with real contempt and of course the pay the low weights of pay respect reflect that you're put in a position that most people if I denigrating and humiliating and off on daily basis and there's the rain and all these other things and just the poverty because once you accept that job if that's your only income you you are living in poverty as a teacher there in Cambodia I'll never forget there was one American guy and the first day I met him wasn't my first day of work but that that university can wait but on the first day I met him he said to me with with real passion convictions well she said this whole university is a joke this whole university is a scam and you know the pay is terrible and you know the education is terrible and you know and I replied to him looking him straight in the eye I wasn't upset by that I said to him if that's true why do you work here anyone can leave and that guy's been working there for years and he was still working there he kept working there after I left and he looked down and you know before he was so confident and brash and with the saddest expression possible on his face he said I like to be able to pay my electricity bills I assumed he was another one of these shipwrecked white men a white man who went to Cambodia with no money and married a Cambodian woman and settled down and he probably lives with his wife's family so he probably doesn't pay rents because that job does not give you enough money teaching English that university did not give you enough money to pay rent in phenomena didn't but if you live with your wife's parents in one wooden house if you all live together and share our share a bathroom then you're not paying any rent so then your salary goes further and as he said you get to pay the electricity bills and probably when you go home probably your wife's parents also are very arrogant and also treat you in that insulting and denigrating way as part of their culture um but the core of the job is still so rewarding teaching English is still wonderful and yes some people put up with it for bad reasons some people do have the wrong intentions there are guys out here teach English just because they sleep with prostitutes or just because they're trapped like that guy was trapped or just because they're drug addicts there are a lot of alcoholics a lot of drug addicts in the English teachings for sure there are terrible people but I mean the good people to be blunt the people of more reading the reason why they stay in the game is that it is really wonderful to sit down with somebody and work with them and help them and over three months to see their ability in the language improve and English as a language it's not just a language if you grew up only being able to read newspapers in Cambodian and now suddenly you can read newspapers or you can read news on the internet in English changes your life suddenly you have questions about history and politics and you have a totally different perspective a totally different so even health you know whether we're talking about veganism or not before you just had these weird stories your grandmother told you about what was healthy and what wasn't and now your English is progressing and you can start to read real science about human health in English because it's not available in Cambodian you can't get that information in Cambodia you know it's changing their lives in a way that you get to see day by day and yes a lot of the students are arrogant the majority of them can be by far but not all of them you know not all of them are so terrible and some of the students have you know career aspirations that you sympathize with and you want to support them and you want to see them grow you want to see them comfort their goals there's a core to what the job is and that really positive supportive nurturing relationship between teacher and student that I as a character in terms of my humanitarian instincts that I love and people a certain type of person would be willing to do that job for free even in the torrential rain even in the Sun even with your boss disrespecting you and lying to you getting lied to by buzzing and sadly that's why the whole industry is so exploitive it's an industry predicated on exploiting the ignorance and gullibility of the students and the good intentions and fundamentally parental nurturing instincts of the people who would become teachers