One Gap Year is Never Enough

I stumbled into English teaching by accident, a life time ago now, way back in 2000 when during a chance conversation with a work colleague I learned she was planning to go to Taiwan to teach English and she introduced me to her agent.

At that time, I was so sick of my humdrum life that going overseas to teach was a no-brainer.

Travel, check. Adventure, check. Get paid to do it, check.  

Forget Willy Wonka, teaching English overseas really is a golden ticket to the world anyone can find.

I knew very little about Taiwan or teaching English, but I didn’t care, I just wanted to go somewhere else and do something else.  I didn’t have any plan other than to go and see what happens.  What did I have to lose?  It’ll just be a year or so.  A small detour in my life.

Of all the things I thought we would do after landing in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second largest city, I wouldn’t have ever guessed the agent and his friend would whisk me down to an outdoor seafood market and eat seafood in the balmy Taiwanese evening before doing anything else.  As I know now, for the Taiwanese and their mainland counterparts it’s always eat first, business later.

That’s why Chinese friends and family often start a conversation by asking 你吃饭了没有？(Have you eaten yet?)  

I hadn’t travelled a lot before then and Taiwan was unlike anything I had seen before.  Everything was open late at night unlike Australia where cities turn in to ghost towns after 6 o’clock.

Even after the shops closed at 10:30pm, there was somewhere to go and something to do.  There were scooters were buzzing around like flies, night markets, delicious street food and neon signs everywhere.  It had an energy about it that was contagious.

After that we finally headed down to the school where I was meant to be teaching, which was a make-shift buxi-ban (cram school) located down an alley in an older part of town in a converted apartment.

In those days the Internet was in its infancy and they hadn’t even seen a photo of me, so they were rather surprised to find out that Julian wasn’t in fact a girl’s name. That’s not the first or the last time that people overseas have asked why I have a girl’s name.  

After the initial surprise, I read and signed the contract and was taken down to my accommodation.

Suffice to say that I didn’t have a good night’s sleep because the bed was as hard as a rock.  Taiwanese people also like hard beds!  

What the Hell am I Doing???

Teaching English really is your ticket to adventure but not just the travel kind.

The teaching was as much an adventure as the travel because I had never taught before and I had no clue what I was doing.
I was literally thrown into the deep end of the pool without any floaties when I was given some text books and lead into the classroom and told to teach classes of eager looking Taiwanese children who were staring up at me, many of whom had never seen a foreigner before.

Until you’re actually standing in front of a class you won’t know what you’re actually in for or how monumentally unprepared you are.

Fortunately, teaching young learners conversational English isn’t exactly rocket science. It’s a combination of flash cards, games, songs in which the teacher is more entertainer than educator, constantly praising kids for doing little more than rote learning a few chosen words and spoken phrases and getting paid to do it.

Wanderlust

After two years in Taiwan I wanted to try my luck somewhere else.

Bam China. Bam South Korea. Bam Japan. Bam Singapore. Bam Hong Kong. One place after the other. I loved going to new destinations, doing a year in one place and then a year in another.

In between, I found time to go back to Australia and get a teaching certificate which made finding work easier.

I was like an addict, going from place to place being my drug of choice.

After I saw most of what there was to see and do most of what there was to do in any particular place the initial excitement eventually wore off and as I came down from my initial high I craved another hit after my contract was up.

Unfortunately, the new and interesting always becomes the new-normal after a while as you settle into the inevitable routine.

Those pesky routines are what turn what was once new and exciting into the everyday merry-go-round of our lives.

The easy answer was just to go somewhere new and do it all over again.

However, after a while, each place, no matter how different or exciting, feels a lot like the place you just left once you’ve seen and done it all and settled into that eventual routine again.

Fast Food English

Just as there’s a big wide world of places to go and see there are many more schools, teaching different students of different ages and abilities, different materials in different ways. Unfortunately, educational isn’t the best way to describe some of it.

Fun is often the name of the game, using games and songs to get kids to basically rote learn new words and phrases, as if that’s how you actually learn a language.  In the beginning I didn’t really know what I was doing so I just jumped on the band wagon.

Let’s be brutally honest.  And I’m sorry if you’re doing this type of teaching, but this really is the ‘junk food’ version of English teaching. It looks good, tastes good, but isn’t very nutritious because it doesn’t teach what the kids really need, foundation skills.

The justification is always that kids learn best when they’re having fun.  REALLY?

Funnily enough it’s only Foreigners teaching groups of young leaners English that have to sing and dance for their pay.  Math or science teachers are saved the indignity.

Songs and games are all well and good for kindergarten kids, but anyone who has had to get a good result on end of semester exams will tell you that unfortunately being on an endless Ferris wheel of fun isn’t very conducive to academic success.

The myth that English classes should be fun has been created, firstly because the business of ELT relies on foreign teachers who, like myself are most often part of the problem, not the solution.

Most teachers, like I was, are travellers on a permanent gap year, with little experience, training or qualifications in the thing they’re actually being paid to do, Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

We don’t speak the native language of the students we’re teaching and we haven’t been trained to teach or understand how languages, especially how a foreign language is learnt or taught. And in most cases, we don’t even understand English grammar or would be able to teach it even if we did.

There is training. But these one month, TEFL certificates, usually designed to training you to teach adults, won’t realistically prepare you for what you have to do.  They look good on your resume though.

Many schools are afraid that if they don’t make things fun the kids will go somewhere that their friends are.  It’s easy and profitable and panders to the third part of the problem, naive, gullible parents, who think it’s wonderful when their little dear can rattle off a few chosen words and phrases on cue.

The irony is that parents think that their little dears will almost magically by osmosis learn English if they are thrown into a room with foreigners for these so-called conversation classes for an hour at a time, a couple of times a week. 

Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way.  Real learning is a process that takes many years of hard work to achieve.

I realised after a while that I was often little more than a paid entertainer, entertaining kids in the guise of teaching English.  This meant that I didn’t always like what or where I was teaching and sometimes where I was living.  I love going to new places but the teaching wasn’t very fulfilling professionally.

After a while I basically repeated the same experience over and over again, quitting my current job, going to a new one in another country and leaving again after a year when my contract was up to do it all again somewhere else.

Eventually, going to different places and different schools became my routine.

It was time to change.

I’ve Got to Get Off This Merry-Go-Round 

About 10 years ago I landed in Nanning, the scenic provincial capital Guangxi Province, in southern China.  I wasn’t working for anyone at the time because I didn’t really want to sign another contract and commit to another year of doing the same old thing.

It was at that time, by chance I picked up couple of private students.

It all started modestly in the beginning, but it wasn’t long before I found myself with over 50 students.

After working for myself, I tell you, I would never work for anyone else again if I didn’t have to.

Why teach for someone else when you can have the students come straight to you. You make all the rules and you keep all the cash.  You teach what you want, when you want and how you want and parents pay a premium for it too.

Chinese parents think that education is the key to their children’s future so they really value good teaching that gets results.  That meant I didn’t need to pander to the kids.  This suited both them and me because by then the thing I wanted to do most of all was to actually teach.

I found that I could usually get most students way ahead of what they were learning at school, so they often found school English extremely easy and they usually aced their end of semester English exams.

It was easy getting students for that reason. The kids did well and the parents were oh so happy to recommend me to their friends.
It was a win-win.

Frankenstein’s Monster

Professionally I was happier than I had ever been.

However, I was living in the old city centre and let’s just say it wasn’t ideal.  The old inner city is crazy day and night and after a while it drove me crazy too.  Unlike before, I was motivated to stay because the work was much more fulfilling.

However, I made a lot of compromises with where and how I was living that I probably wouldn’t have made in order to keep doing what I was doing because I loved teaching my own students and that trumped everything else at that time.

I had kind of created my own Frankenstein monster of a situation which I didn’t want to kill off.  I was afraid that if I changed too much or moved too far away I would lose most of my students and that would be the end of that and I would have to go work for someone else again, so I put up with a bad situation for longer than I should have.

Embrace the Change

Eventually though I had enough and one summer vacation my lease was up and I just wanted to get away.  I had the rest of the summer holiday left so I took the opportunity to go home, which I hadn’t done for a long time.

Instead of just taking a break, I arranged to teach my students online. The amazing part was that every single parent agreed to have classes online even though they never would have considered learning online before.

Teaching online was kind of cool too.  In the internet age as long as you have the right gear and a fast and stable internet connection you can teach remotely, which was really liberating.

I did that for a while.  But after being home for a while I rediscovered what the problem was, changing location doesn’t necessarily solve your fundamental problems.

So, I went back, but I knew things had to change. I couldn’t just pick up where I left off.

I checked into a hotel and looked around for somewhere to set up shop.  So, I moved into the brand-new side of town in a gated community with gardens and a pool, close to shops and parks.  For me, it was near on perfect.  It had everything I needed and more.

Even though I had moved over the other side of town to where I was originally, I only lost a single student because parents were willing to travel to keep me as their teacher.

Living somewhere I really liked was a real a game changer too.

But I knew that it wouldn’t be long before I was stuck in a routine again and if I didn’t fundamentally change things it wouldn’t be long until I wasn’t happy again.  I was tired of going to new places to look for something that wasn’t there.  And I didn’t want to wait till I went on holiday or till retired to live the life I wanted to live.  I needed to change the way I lived from day to day.  

You know what my idea of a wonderful time is?  Sleeping in for starters.  I loooooooove laying in.  Laying by the pool on a lazy summer afternoon.  Drinking good coffee.  Eating delicious food.  Shopping.  Nightlife.  And most of all … sharing it all with those I love.  The best part was that I could do everything I loved any day of the week.

I realised the problem had to do with the routines we find ourselves slaves too.  

So, I decided to create a routine that I love because it allowed me to live the life I want today.  Doing work I like, living somewhere I like, in the way I want to, without making compromises to do it. 

Travelling is great. But its experiential. That means its only great while you’re there. Once you leave and go back to your regular life it fades into memory like a long-lost dream and you’re left again living your regular life again.  That’s what needs to change.  the way you live you’re regular life.

Travelling won’t save you from yourself.  Only living the life you want today will.

And for me, that’s what the true adventure is … figuring out what I really want and need and giving it to myself as often as I can, whatever that is. 

So, I’m on this constant adventure looking for ways to make things better.  If it gets old or stale then change things up.  Try new things.  Find new favourites.  Treat yourself whenever you can.   

And then get up and do it all again the next day.    

It might be a cliché, but life really is what you make it.  

Why Write a Blog?

There’s nothing nefarious about it. It’s a bit of fun really.

I wish I had started blogging way back when I first started this gig nearly 20 years ago.  You know what they say, it’s never too late.  

That’s my advice to you, go and teach, and blog about it too.  Have experiences and find out what you like, what you need.  But most of all, enjoy the life you’re living today.

Enjoy the time as well.  It’s literally flown by.

The best part of that of course is that nearly 20 years and counting now, the adventure goes on … and has no end in sight!