I didn’t go on any trips today. I didn’t do anything special. Nothing exciting happened at work. In short, it was an ordinary day that would be easy to forget. But somehow, it was wonderful. I woke up around 11AM to my alarm clock playing a song I like. [...]

Summer is here, and business is booming at First Step. More students have signed up for my first and second grade classes than I can teach, and fifty more are on a waiting list for our normal classes. Nearly every day, more students and parents are visiting or asking about our school. [...]

My second grade class just finished book three of Up and Away yesterday. It’s the last book of the series they’ll do, since they’ll be third graders and switching to the normal buxiban classes soon. In my normal classes, we really don’t play games much. With 30 students per class, they just [...]

One thing I’ve noticed about the more successful bŭxíbān owners I’ve worked with is a certainty that kids need their schools or else they’ll be ruined for life. I can understand how the idea that people who don’t learn English will never be anything more than garbage truck drivers would motivate a school owner [...]

My old boss, William, is currently looking for an English teacher at his Tomcat school. I can say from personal experience that William is a good boss and a great guy. His school doesn’t have huge student numbers, so it doesn’t pay as much as some of the other HFRBs, but outside of [...]

Tonight was a frustrating night at work. It was my new class. Most of the class is pretty good, but there are four students who make it particularly trying. One is a girl called Wendy who never does as much homework as she’s supposed to do. She’s the only girl I’ve [...]

On Friday, my boss and I were talking about the first and second grade program at our school. Since I laid out the whole curriculum without much of his input, and he’s never seen any of my classes, he’s understandably curious to know how things are going. My second grade class is going [...]

While surfing before work this morning, I stumbled upon a truly terrifying article about TEFL, called The Slavery of Teaching English.
Sure, you dress it up a bit, you produce your own handouts, you try to have a bit of fun. But you are basically a busker playing the same tired old tunes. Even though most [...]

I finally have some video from my classes I can put up here, thanks to Patrick. Here is a clip from an oral spelling drill. This isn’t rote memorization. None of the words I ask the students to spell have been previously taught; they have to use phonics rules to figure out [...]

One of the most frustrating things about living in Taiwan (or anywhere as a minority) is all of the racism one sees. One of my good friends when I first showed up, was a black guy. He graduated from a school pretty much equivalent to mine, had good grades, and a degree [...]