In a recent thread, it was suggested that teaching ESL (English as a Second Language) might be a viable way to travel and see the world on the cheap. I’m intrigued, and I’d like to know more about Dopers’ experiences doing this sort of thing. Thanks in advance!
In Japan in 1979-1980, I taught ESL (pronunciation only, they wanted the students to have the advantage of being able to attempt to imitate a native speaker), but it was under the table. I was there on a student visa, so I wasn’t supposed to be earning any money. I taught junior-high and high-school students, and also adults, in Tokyo. I had no credentials and was basically just a set of mouth muscles and a voice to them.
The kids were much better students, IMO, than the adults, who mostly seemed to be going through the motions. Especially the adult men. The kids were being taught extra English by a private tutor, who hired me to do the pronunciation exercises, so they were more motivated than average.
I only worked maybe 10 hours a week, for spending money. The pay was ok, but I don’t know if I could have stood it for enough hours a week to support myself. It was kind of boring.
Anyway, I got these jobs through contacts at the university where I was going to school. If you’re travelling around, I would expect that finding these contacts might be an issue. Also the visa thing might be more or less of an issue depending on the country.
On the other hand, if you do have credentials there are, I understand, a lot of jobs out there, but they would expect you to stay for a while, and the location you end up in might not be very desirable. For example, in Japan if you are hired with an ESL certification you might be sent to some country town where you are the only foreigner, where you will teach in junior high or high school, to potentially unmotivated students; very difficult if you don’t speak their language.
In my opinion, unless you like that kind of work, this is one of those things that sounds better than it actually is.
I taught ESL in Jordan for two years, '73-75. It was wonderful. I was with a private school that had a contract to teach adult students who were being financed by US government, since the official American School had been bombed a few years before and never rebuilt. I taught mostly adults, but during the summer months, we also had classes for high-school age students, whose parents wanted them to learn English. All of them, very very nice people, on my days off, I looked forward to getting back to my classes.
I had no previous experience, but I was already in Jordan with a residence card, and a friend of mine taught at the school I was hired purely on the basis of being a fluent and educated English speaker. The hours were wonderful, two hours a day, which during the summer expanded to four hours a day. Six weeks on, two weeks off, which is the way the classes were scheduled. I received about the same hourly wages as a public school teacher.
It wasn’t enough to live on, but my wife was a nurse, and worked full time at the prevailing local salary for nurses, plus a small increment for foreigners, so we made out alright. When her contract expired, I got a job doing the same thing in Madagascar, but by the time we got there, the government had cancelled all alien work permits, and the person who had hired me had already been transferred out of country, so that was the end of my career in ESL.
I knew a few people teaching ESL in Chile, but they weren’t making any money at all. I was offered a job while traveling in Brazil at an ESL institute which promised to pay enough to live on, but by then I was getting Social Security, and I was unenthusiastic about going back to work. From Madagascar, I thought of going back to Khartoum, Sudan, where I could have stopped and worked, but that would have been backtracking, so we continued on through Africa.
Things were very different then, anybody who could speak English convincingly could get hired to teach ESL. Nowadays, you have to either have the ESL degree, or at least be recruited from outside (e.g., Korea). Some American cities have volunteer programs where you can teach English to immigrants, and they will give you some basic training. Armed with a certificate or a letter of actually teaching, you might have a chance to talk your way into an ESL job in some countries. If you get stuck somewhere, you can always ask around and find a fairly affluent person who will pay you to be a private tutor, I did a little of that in Jordan, too.
This is my job here in Italy, has been for the last 5 years. You can make a living, but it’s hard to make a good one. However, if you just want to travel and live on the cheap, I think it’s enough. I also think the money is better in Asia than in Europe.
Mind you, I’m not sure how much travelling you could reasonably do, because most schools wouldn’t want a very short-term teacher so you’d likely be stuck in one place for at least 6 months at a time. It’s also harder than you think. You because you speak perfect native English, doesn’t mean you can also explain the rules and the grammar to students. The hours can also be anti-social, and you need to be careful with schools which exploit teachers with long hours, low pay, or pay that doesn’t arrive at all. I’ve seen all of these happening, if not all of them to me. Having said all of that, I really like my job.
When I was in college, my brother landed a gig as an ESL teacher in Japan. It turns out that there’s a lot of companies (and several major corporations) in Japan that simply require an applicant to have a bachelor’s degree and demonstrate a good (and grammatical) command of English. I had been a writer in high school and even edited the school’s annual publication full of student creativity, so I already knew my English skills were better than my brothers. So when I heard my brother had landed a job as an English Conversation Instructor, I knew I could do so as well, and added courses to my college curriculum to earn a Certificate in Teaching ESL. By the time I graduated (mid-1990’s), I was a shoe-in for an ESL job, contacted my brother’s former employer, interviewed twice and was offered an assignment while I was driving back home (through L. A. rush hour traffic with no cell-phone). I didn’t learn until the next day that I had gotten an offer.
----General Conditions
As I noted above, there are a lot of companies in Japan that hire people whose first language is English. Quite often the target applicants are fresh out of college – largely because such people are ready and willing to move and are mentally flexible enough to deal with immersion in strange environments, small living quarters, exotic foods, etc. However, my training group included an American retiree and a British divorcee who were eager to leave the Western World behind. The English-teaching companies bring foreigners over and have them teach for (usually) a minimum of a year, supplying a stipend and living quarters. Even the Japanese government gets involved through their Department of Education. Their Japan English Teaching (JET) program puts people on high school campuses (usually with an office and some amenities).
There are good and bad companies to work for and many towns will have multiple companies all competing for the same pool of students. In my little town, there was a recreation center where the English Teachers would informally gather and swap stories or teaching ideas (or spit#). One of the teachers in my town noted that he and his roommates slept officially two to a room in a 2-bedroom apartment, but in reality two veterans got the bedrooms and two newer teachers shared the living room. My company supplied a single studio apartment that was about half the size of a cargo shipping container (or the trailer of an 18-wheeler truck). Some of the JET guys bragged that they had single-room houses with real yards.
Teaching conditions will vary, as well. The guys sharing the apartment said they also shared an office and usually had back-to-back classes six days a week with a half-hour for “lunch” in the evening. I shared an office with one other teacher, taught five days a week and had an hour for lunch, plus about 20 minutes between classes to allow for student questions and preparation for the next class. The JET guys bragged that they had private offices and only had to work when a student requested a pass to visit them and get reinforcement lessons – which were usually only about 30 minutes per week. [“Ahh!” The rest of us would quip, “That government program gives you a lot of perks – but then again, we actually teach.”
----Grestarian’s tale
My personal experience was pretty good. I shared an office with a guy from Michigan whose views on life were diametrically opposed to mine, but we got along well enough. There was also a young lady from Utah who had her own office and when they started dating it left me as the odd man out for a while. I got over that soon enough, and ended up dating one of the native (Japanese) teachers. I also had distant relatives in Japan and when I was told I would be welcome to spend the holiday breaks with them, it was clear they weren’t taking “no” for an answer.
I quickly learned the layout of my little town [that’s a story unto itself] and it wasn’t long until I was eager to explore beyond it. I bought a bike with part of my third paycheck and had my sister ship over my old cycling shoes and other gear*, then took some long trips on my days off. There seemed to be a general rule that American teachers were not allowed to drive in Japan, but Brits and other foreigners who were accustomed to driving on the correct side of the road were allowed to rent or lease a vehicle. Rumor was that some JETs were provided a vehicle for their daily commute. I had no need to drive anyway, since I had my bicycle and enjoyed the exercise for local and semi-local trips and Japan’s train system is efficient enough to get a person just about anywhere in the country.
When my brother did his gig, his apartment was fully-furnished and fully paid, plus he was given a salary once a month. When I went over, my apartment was fully-furnished but only subsidized; the rent was a bit higher than the company’s standard dwelling allowance, so we had to make up the difference (though it wasn’t a whole lot, really) from our monthly salaries. But basically the school owned the living spaces so ‘ownership’ appeared stable over the years. Water, power, and gas came out of our salaries and some of the informal English Teacher guys helped us get telephones that included long distance service. I made enough money to live on and even close out a few credit cards. I even sent some extra funding back to my family. But it’s certainly not a job in which one could expect to get rich, even after closing out all one’s American debts.
Although I didn’t starve after my second month there (I even went home weighing more than when I left) I certainly did miss several American foods (and other stuff, too) that I took for granted. On the other hand, I was raised by a Japanese mother so there were a lot of familiar foods as well. Here’s a rough comparison to remember about food: If you live in America and want to eat authentic Moroccan food every day, then you’re going to spend a fair amount on importing authentic Moroccan ingredients. If you live in Japan (or Italy, or Morocco or wherever) and want to eat authentic American food every day, you’re going to spend a fair amount on importing authentic American ingredients – namely Beef. I ate rice and soba and tofu and more native foods and did just fine (but then again, as I noted, I was accustomed to such fare on a regular basis already). Nevertheless, my fellow foreigners and I would reminisce at least every-other month about relatively simple stuff like Pizza Hut and Arby’s and Baskin Robbins – which we had heard were actually available in Japan, but only on the military bases. In fact, a quick jaunt to Seoul, Korea was quite a treat even just for the abundance of American restaurants – but that’s another story.
Years later, when my brother and I talked about our experiences, he said his students really just came in and wanted to chat with an American – in English. When I was working, I had particular textbooks for different groups and either reused existing lesson plans or prepared my own new material. The students in my courses were quite focused on the lessons and often considered it an achievement goal to finish a textbook and graduate to the next level.
–G!
It was apparently somewhat common for homesick teachers to latch onto each other for comfort. A couple of the guys in the informal* Mokuyobi no yoru Eigo no Sensei* [Thursday Evening English Teachers’] group seemed rather predatory about that, and their behavior disgusted me enough (even the translated acronym irritated me) that I didn’t attend many weekly gatherings.
*I could have bought some with the bike, but I already owned some great gear and my friends and family were planning to send a care package anyway.
Thanks for the detailed synopsis, Grestarian, I appreciate the insight!
In Japan for a few months in 1996, I taught conversational English through a private school. I had a wide range of students - kindergarden children all the way to adults in their 70’s.
If I had been working for better people, I’d still be there. But unfortunately, the people I worked for didn’t want a teacher so much as paid slave: I was expected to do their dishes, babysit their hellion daughter, etc. in addition to my teaching duties.
Otherwise, I loved it. Sure there was homesickness and culture shock and all that, but Japan is indescribably beautiful and the people are amazing.
Bought a one way ticket to Bangkok from LAX that had stop overs in Honolulu, Tokyo and Hong Kong.
Taught privately in Japan in several places. Taught at a language school in HK for a few months. No teaching in Thailand or Malaysia (but ESL work was available.) After almost running out of money, found ESL work at a Girls High School in Indonesia (Yogjakarta). While in Bali, I heard one could make good money teaching in Taiwan, so off I went.
After teaching several months in Taipei, I was offered a teaching position at a university. This worked out great for travelling, because I had a paid month off in winter and another paid off month in summer. During these breaks, I was able to see the Philippines, Nepal and Burma. I even was able to take a semester off to travel almost 3 month in India. Ended up staying in Taiwan over 5 years.
In other words, ESL can be a great way to see the world, but don’t get stuck somewhere at the beginning of your trip. I was offered a good position in Tokyo and could have stayed in Japan for awhile, but my focus was on travelling. When I finally got to Taiwan, I had been on the road for almost 2 years and was actually looking for a place to settle down for a little while.
Just be “careful”. I thought I’d been gone about a year or so, but I didn’t make it home for over seven years.