Reply to NoVa teacher with offers to teach abroad in Asia, Middle East, and Europe. WWYD?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "NoVa teacher with offers to teach abroad in Asia, Middle East, and Europe. WWYD?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]Teachers are actually respected more overseas. No nagging parents or disrespectful kids. I say go for it [/quote][/b]

I've been teaching overseas for 20 years.  Unfortunately, this is not true everywhere.  For example, I can tell you from direct experience that the wealthy elite of the Middle East generally do NOT especially respect teachers, and their standards for acceptable behavior when addressing the poors (servants, who are basically slaves, and school teachers, who are a step or two above the South Asian house servants in the ME, is...like something you have never seen in the US).  Consider too that the wealthy elite class in many developing countries got that way by methods/standards that are corrupt in ways you have never seen in the US, those families form a small society/community in which they all know each other and socialize only with each other, and they tend to view the teachers at the international schools as just a higher form of servant, someone they are paying to give their kids high grades.  I have never seen "grade inflation" like what I saw in "international schools" (now full of mainly wealthy local kids) in the Middle East and Brazil anywhere else (ie, school admin would regular change all grades of kids who were failing to As/Bs, and parents paid for transcripts to be altered and for "agents" to falsify pretty much everything for college admissions: and top US universities, including Ivies, routinely accept them).

Yes, Japanese/Korean kids are, in general, well-behaved and respectful, as are their parents, though.  I would not go back to Japan to teach, however, because the international school salaries/packages are very low there these days.  The most desirable locations with the best behaved local population kids have generally stopped offering teachers the kinds of packages that allow much savings these days, as there are a lot of teachers flooding the market as they try to escape the hideous teaching conditions in the West.  [/quote]

This is fascinating to me as I have taught foreign educated students in higher education in the US and the middle eastern students absolutely were the most disrespectful to me. I never thought of it as [b]they were treating me as the help, [/b]but now that your described it, that's exactly it. The Korean, Chinese, and Japanese were the most respectful. I found South Americans delightful to teach as well because they tended to participate a lot in class.
[/quote]

Does anyone have any other information on this psyche? As an American outsider, it's completely impossible to be "inside" this mindset that you're better because of your birth/family/money, somewhow. [/quote]
Look how many Americans treat Hispanic service workers, or service workers in general.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics