Doubting to shuō

How do you find the best? Whether it’s an apartment, a tenant, a job, or an employee, I don’t believe the answer is classifieds. As I wrote a few days ago, classifieds tend to aggregate the worst of what a market has to offer, since the poor offers remain while the good ones are promptly snapped up and removed from the listing.

Two really cheap apartments

Taking this thought a step further, the very best of what a given market has to offer likely never hit the classifieds to begin with. A great example would be my friend’s old apartment. It was in an absurdly expensive part of Taipei, had two rooms a kitchen and a great rooftop patio, all for just 14,000NT/month (~450USD). Why was it so cheap? For one thing, his landlady wasn’t very interested in the hassle of finding tenants. The reason Martin knew about the place at all was that he was friends with Rob, the previous tenant.

Martin isn’t the only one, either. I have a great deal on my place too, and I found it through a friend of a friend. I had just gotten out of work and ran into him at 7-11. He told me he was moving out, and he just happened to live in the area I wanted to move to. As soon as I heard the price, I pounced on it. Like many other great bargains, it never even got advertised before it was off the market.

The important factor in both anecdotes is that it helps to have the right friends.

A really skilled programmer

My college friend, Tom Kerrigan, was at least a couple standard deviations above the average programmer. He started working on a chess AI when he was 14 and by the time I met him as a freshman at UC Boulder, he was already earning significant royalties from it. Simply put, he was smart and applied himself. So, did his resume spend much time sitting around on job wanted boards? Not that I know of. Intel took him on as an intern before I even met him, and Microsoft snapped him up before he was out of school.

Really talented people never seem to stay on the market that long, unless by choice.

How I found our last two hires

In my last piece, I wrote about my unsuccessful use of classifieds to try to find a top notch EFL teacher. I did find two suitable teachers, though. One is teaching my Up&Away based curriculum for 1st and 2nd graders, and Simon hired the other to teach our advanced classes. Both of these guys have pretty much the exact skill set it would take to do our most demanding classes– they have experience with language learning and teaching, they speak and read Chinese pretty well and they’re eager and take pride in their work.

The power of social networks

We didn’t find them. They found us. Both of them did look at classifieds during their job search, just as I myself did in my first couple of years in Taiwan, but what brought them in was this blog. As a result, they each had a decent idea of what kind of place my school was and what was involved before they ever emailed me.

In a sense, they were self-selected to have at least somewhat similar ideas about teaching and work just by the fact that they didn’t close their browsers as soon as they got here.

In a similar way, this site is the entire reason I ever partnered with Pagewood to begin with. If it hadn’t been for my writing here, Simon never would have known who I was or we had a good friend* in common.

Concluding thoughts

• Having a lot of friends helps
• Keep in contact with like-minded people
• Really great bargains don’t require much advertising

As a partner of Pagewood English school, one of my responsibilities is finding top-notch EFL teachers. We’ve hired two this year, and it wasn’t nearly as easy as I had expected.

In years past, the standard methods of finding English teachers were primitive at best. In bigger cities, a lot of companies sent people to the youth hostels to put advertisements on their bulletin boards. In Jiayi, where I lived when I first moved to Taiwan at the end of 2002, strangers on the street occasionally tried to recruit me! Some larger schools advertised in news papers. Now, the most popular option is online classified boards.

The advantages of classifieds boards

I like that classified boards range from free to cheap. I also like their reach. Thousands of people can see a single posting. Best of all, online classifieds are easily searchable.

With these thoughts in mind, I wrote up an advertisement for teachers, posted it to a popular site, sat back and waited for the resumes to come pouring in. And come the did. Within a week, I must have read nearly a hundred resumes and/or emails in regards to the job posting.

The problem

Unfortunately, out of all of those resumes, only a handful were worth responding to, and not a single lead coming solely from the classifieds lead to an interview. Some of the applicants were living in other countries and hadn’t even started learning Chinese. Some had never taught before. Others were backpackers looking for a temporary job to refuel their bank accounts before continuing on a tour of Asia. In short, nearly the entire endeavor was a waste of time.

This lead me to reflect further upon the nature of classifieds in general. Back when I was a college student in the US, I had used a classified board to find high school students to paint houses and it was reasonably effective. Why was it that the classifieds were such a failure this time? Was it just an anomaly, just poor luck?

Classifieds are fundamentally flawed

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to think that very design of classifieds bring the most exposure to the least desirable people, jobs, or apartments. The best bargains are snapped up quickly, leaving the boards full of average to poor offers. The poorer listings remain available for much longer since nobody wants them and tend to dominate search results. Furthermore, poor employees are more likely to be fired and end up right back at the classified board, as will over-priced apartments or poor job offers.

Classifieds, by their very design, tend to concentrate the worst of what the market has to offer.

The reason my search for painters went well is that I was looking for unskilled employees with little experience to differentiate themselves from each other. The distribution of potential employees was relatively flat. Now, on the other hand, I’m looking for exceptional people whose skills aren’t very easily quantified. For this, online classifieds are worthwhile only if they’re free, and even then they’re a long-shot.

Today, a prospective teacher who came in to visit my first and second grade class seemed genuinely impressed with the amount of material they’ve learned so far. They came as complete beginners, and they’ve been in my EFL classes for six hours a week for just under a year, doing the Up and Away series.

I made a comment about how one of my students really struggled with his reading compared to the rest of the class, and the visiting teacher told me that the kid was equivalent to third year students at his school. Then, he went on to ask me several detailed questions about how my students had made so much progress in a single year. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to answer everything before I had to get ready for my next class.

Sharing

I had planned to email my thoughts to him directly, but then it occurred to me that others might have the same questions. Undoubtedly, some readers will have differing opinions, and that’s fine. However, if my ideas help a few teachers and a few more students, then I’m more than happy to share them.

The Main Ideas

Don’t burden beginners with a 100% English classroom

This should be self-explanatory. With only six hours a week of class time, complete beginners need support via their first language. The goal isn’t to minimize the amount of Chinese they use in class; it’s to maximize the amount of English they use. This makes a huge difference and it’s worth it, even though it requires a teacher with more language skills.

Motivate the students

In many ways, motivation is the single most important factor in teaching. Every great teacher I’ve studied has been a master at it. If your students aren’t at least trying do to whatever class activities you give them, then the rest is a loss. Personally, I’ve gotten the best results from using a multi-pronged approach. If the kids don’t do what they should be doing, there are consequences. On the other hand, when they go the extra mile, there are rewards. Quick 1 minute motivational speeches here and there also go a long way.

Teach Phonics.. thoroughly

Teaching phonics takes time. There’s no doubt about that. Just getting students to the point where they can hear the difference between the various long and short vowel sounds, the “ar”, “er/ir/ur”, “or/ore/oar”, “air/are”, “ear/eer”, “ire/ier”, “ure”, and “ow/ou” sounds can easily take a couple of months. The “ng” sounds (i.e. “rang” v.s. “rain”) are a nightmare for many Taiwanese people. And after that, it takes dozens of phonics rules before students can reliably sound out most English words they see or spell out words they hear.

This time is well spent, though. Teaching phonics will help students improve their listening skills, will improve their pronunciation, and it will help them read unfamiliar words. Without implementing a serious phonics curriculum, it’s difficult to use Dr. Seuss books or other books for English speaking children. With good phonics, though, the kids learn a lot reading them and they love them.

Don’t make the students memorize huge spelling lists

Unfortunately, an obsession with spelling runs rampant through east Asian EFL. Worse still, it takes a lot of time to get eight year-olds to be able to accurately spell a list of twenty words. Rather than making an effort to do so, I just keep teaching them more material. Comprehension is necessary before I’ll go on. Perfect spelling isn’t.

Maybe while the students are on the Level 2 Up & Away book, they have problems spelling half or even two thirds of the words in the book, but a few months later, they’ll already be on book 4 and they’ll find they can spell quite a few more of the words from book 2. As their phonics skills improve, their mistakes become more and more like those of native speakers (e.g. misspelling “meal” as “meel” rather than as “mil”), and as they read more their mistakes become less frequent.

Get the students reading actual stories ASAP

I can’t emphasize enough how important reading is. It’s the single easiest way for kids to get more English input. It reinforces all the grammar and vocabulary they’ve learned, and they usually enjoy it, too.

Keep notes

If you notice most of your students have the same problem, then it’s probably your fault, not theirs. It doesn’t matter whether it’s related to grammar, pronunciation, reading skills, or even classroom behavior. If the majority of the class has the problem then it’s your job as a teacher to find a way to fix it.

Periodically reviewing your notes and looking for things to improve makes all the difference in the long run.

Recently, I’ve been getting more and more bogged down in my EFL curriculum work. It’s a very rough process, but even so it’s become unwieldy. The problem is the way I’m keeping track of vocabulary words.

Frequency is key

Whenever I create a new lesson, I have to choose vocabulary items to introduce. Rather than do so on a strictly topical basis, I’ve opted to focus on usage frequency. In particular, I do everything within reason to teach the headwords used for the Oxford Bookworms series of graded readers. Extensive reading is possibly the single most important part of our program, and it’s worth it to make a few sacrifices to get the kids reading actual books as soon as possible.

Spreadsheets can save time

In order to keep track of everything, I’ve made a big spreadsheet for all the vocabulary items in the curriculum. One field is the word itself, another field represents which lesson I teach it in, another is the Bookworms level in which it first appears. The Chinese translation is in still another field, and there’s one final one for any notes I might have about the vocab item. I can sort this spreadsheet by column headers to see the words taught in a given lesson, or all the adjectives taught between any given lessons, or any number of other useful combination. It’s great for making review sheets for my students.

Spreadsheets still aren’t perfect, though

So what’s the problem? The problem is that I started the list with only level one Bookworms words. Before, when I made new lessons, I used to look through the remaining level one words and choose the most appropriate group of them I could. After exhausting the level one list, things got a bit tougher. Now, when make a new lesson, that means adding new words to my master spreadsheet. Obviously, I want to add level 2 words, but sometimes there’s a word that just has to be added regardless of where it appears in the Oxford frequency lists. When that happens, I have to hunt through the list of words that appear in level two readers. If the word I’m looking for isn’t there, I have to look through the level three list, and then the level four list. It sucks.

Worse still, if I were to just copy the entire level 2 list into my master spreadsheet, there would be hundreds of duplicates, which would take hours to remove by hand. No good. Especially since the task would just become all the more unmanageable when it was time to add the level 3 list into my master spreadsheet.

Aha! I’ll just whip up a quick program to parse my excel file and remove duplicates!

Ha! What a fool I was! After spending hours pounding my head against my computer desk, I came to the realization that the excel file format is pure evil. It has decades of cruft that hark back to the days in which desktops had less computing power than my sports watch! And it won’t yield its information gracefully! Had the .xls file format been the result of one particular person, I’d have said his decision making skills rivaled those of Easter Island native who said, “I know! Let’s cut down the last tree and commit suicide because we need more identical statues!“.

Finally, I came to my senses, saved the list as text file and wrote a quick python script to read the vocabulary list into a few big arrays of strings, and then it was easy to remove duplicates:

for i in range(0, len(b2words)-1):
	for w in l2words:
		if w == b2words[i]:
			del b2words[i]
			del b2pos[i]

Then I output my list of level two bookworms (that aren’t duplicates of any words already in my curriculum) into a simple text file, and the part of speech information into another text file. Finally, I used my good friends cut and paste to add them into my master spreadsheet and I set the Bookworm level for the whole group to two.

Why, oh why couldn’t I have thought of that solution before 4 a.m.?

I’ve always loved our bookcase at the school. It’s functional, it looks nice, and it actually draws in our students. None of my previous English teaching jobs in Taiwan have had anything even remotely like it. Some schools have had a mostly ignored bookcase full of things that are way too hard for the students, but not books that the students actually read.

In some ways our bookcase was a symbol of my long struggle to set up an extensive reading program. Ron, to his credit, was the most open and reasonable boss I’ve ever had. He actually read the entire Day and Bamford book on extensive reading that I lent him. In the end, though, I wanted to take reading a bit further than he did. After deciding to move to Pagewood, I finally had the chance.

It’s also a nice bookcase. It’s wide, it can hold a lot of books and it lays pretty nicely against the wall. That’s why it was worth it for Simon and I carry it all the way from our old building to the new one and then take it up to the eleventh floor via the stairs. I must have sweat out 3kg water during the trip and my forearms still haven’t recovered, but look!

Our students have their old bookcase back.

Recently, I’ve found myself in a position to be hiring EFL teachers for the first time. While I did gain some management experience as the owner of a three crew house painting business back when I was trying to pay my way through college, this is mostly uncharted territory for me. With the house painting, training was brief, and I was only looking for short-term help throughout the summer months. Some degree of physical exertion was involved– carrying 30 gallon tubs of paint, climbing ladders, walking around on slanted rooftops and that sort of thing.

My current search for an EFL teacher, on the other hand, is nearly the opposite. I’m looking for a long-term hire, someone who will build up from part time into a full time position and stay at it for at least three years, there’s not much physical exertion involved at all, it’s far more intellectually demanding, and people skills are of primary importance.

The Applicants

I’ve started looking well in advance. We have some good teachers now, and they aren’t at a full schedule. It’s a good thing, too. This might be a lengthy search. I put up an ad both on this site and on a free Taiwan classifieds board, and the applications have been streaming in. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the people emailing me resumes have been woefully unqualified for the position. Of course, I’ll respect the privacy of all our applicants, but here are a few general examples:

People not even in the same country

It’s difficult for me to understand how someone living in Toronto who can’t speak Chinese at all, has no teaching experience and wants to “try Taiwan” could see himself as a good match for the following:

“Need a dedicated, professional Chinese-speaking N. American teacher. Long-term position.”

People unwilling to meet stated requirements

I can understand how someone who is a little weak in one area, but motivated would take a shot and hope for the best. An applicant with weaker Chinese skills could study intensively prior to opening classes and make it. Someone who only has 6 months of prior teaching experience rather than a year, might be able to make up for that inexperience through hard work. But if an ad says extensive training is involved and the applicants have to be willing to work Monday through Saturday, it’s a bit unreasonable to apply just for one class time slot and be unwilling to train first!

Short-term mercenaries

To an extent, I can understand why a prospective employee would want to get as much money as possible for as little work as possible from the very beginning. In general, everyone wants the best deal they can get. I suspect that the reason so many people looking for this job are looking for the best short-term deals they can get are due to the low-trust nature of the job market for teaching English in Asia. Local message boards are full of horror stories about bosses who promise the stars and renege once they’ve got leverage over their teachers. I’m sure that many of the stories are true, but it’s so bad that many foreigners I know living in Taiwan discount job bonuses completely when they evaluate potential schools. If people think the raise and bonus system is some sort of scam, they won’t be willing to put in the work necessary to get started. Maybe in a year or two, when I have a teacher making well in excess of 100k/month and telling his friends, then recruitment will be easier. For now, sadly, there isn’t much I can do to make applicants trust me.

The Interviews

So far, everyone who has actually come in for an interview has been a pretty good candidate. Obviously, no one has all the necessary skills before training begins, but I’m happy with the people I’ve seen so far. More than anything, they seem to have a genuine interest in education.

The difficult part will be finding someone looking for a long-term position. Most EFL teachers are understandably cautious about taking a multi-year position.

All this past week, I’ve been on summer break, minus a few entrance tests and other odds and ends to do in the office. Something odd happened while I was giving one.

Some Kiwi girl called the school and asked for me by name. I had never met her before and I had no idea how she had the school’s phone number. She said she was still in NZ and just wanted to ask me “a few questions” about living in Taiwan. Seeing as how I probably would have made a similar call when I was 22 and looking into working in Japan, I tried to help her as much as I could, but it was a little odd.

She had all kinds of questions– was it true that people of Chinese ancestry can never get EFL jobs? Where is a good place to live? Where can teachers find jobs? What are the types of cram schools? How is it?

I have to say I was a bit overwhelmed. I told her to save some money before coming and suggested she check out forumosa.com. I also kind of wonder if she found me through this web page somehow and if so, why didn’t she didn’t read any of the stuff I’ve written about teaching and put on the front page?

Update: I just realized she probably got the school number from the jobs page.

I’m exhausted. Over the last few weeks, my partners and I at the school have been negotiating an offer we received from a competing school, Ding’s English. It’s been far, far more time consuming and draining than I had ever expected. Finally, the initial steps are behind us and I can sleep.
continue reading…

One of the really great teachers I’ve worked with before has put up what appear to be training videos for new teachers at his school. Ross’s school could be the best 1st and 2nd grade English program in Taiwan.
continue reading…

I thought I’d seen everything in Taiwan’s English cram school market. Recently, I’ve had an experience that shows how naive I (still) am. I can’t really get into any details online, but here’s the gist: A school owner offered to sell her school’s students.

A school’s financial valuation

In general, when an English buxiban changes hands, the going rate is about the amount of tuition the students can be expected to pay in a single financial quarter. Thus, if a school is charging 3000NT per month and it has 200 students, then it would be worth 3000NT * 3 * 200 = 1.8 million NT. Location, curriculum and reputation obviously factor in as well, but these things are generally reflected in the school’s student numbers.

I can understand this. A school’s value is definitely dependent on the amount of tuition money it brings in, and while most schools lose some students as the result of replacing any teachers or making any other large changes, most students usually stay. Especially if the teachers stay, and the curriculum is left intact, it makes sense for students to continue. Why bother looking for another place to study if there’s a good chance that things will be fine?

Selling the students

I just can’t wrap my brain around this one. Say one owner decides to “sell” the kids studying at his or her school to some random other school owner who can’t attract students through conventional means. I suppose it’s possible to get them to go initially, if the first owner is pushy enough about it. If the first owner tells the children’s parents, “Sorry, we’re going out of business, but my buddy at another school will teach them for the rest of their semesters,” the parents would be justifiably upset, but they’ll probably take what they can get since they’ve already paid. The problem is, their kids will almost definitely get shortchanged educationally, and they’ll resent it. I can’t see that many staying long enough to ever pay tuition to the school owner who “bought” them.

I know education, even public education, is a business. But this is out there.