by Hot_Pink_Urinal_Mint » Fri Oct 11, 2019 7:08 am
My first tour of duty as a teacher was in South Korea and the decision was purely motivated by cold hard cash. In those days there was easy money there, not quite Saudi levels but if you could hustle you could bank big.
Next stop was Vietnam and although not quite as much cash as South Korea it was definitely more interesting. I worked for an Irish guy named Fonzie, who had opened up ESL schools in all the former/current communist countries. He will open the first privately owned school in North Korea and his connections allowed me to get fairly unrestricted travel there 10 years ago.
I had some really interesting students - government officials (including those at Ho Chi Minh University, which is where party members must study Marx and Hegel) embassy staff (including Libya, which drew the attention of the US Embassy) and staff from large Vietnamese State owned companies.
I learned so much about the American War from these students that I decided to focus my Masters on the rise of Communism in South East Asia.
Although I prefer teaching adults, the teenage Cambodians were some of my favorite students - so much fun and cheeky, which I like! But the low pay and rapid decline of working conditions at Cambodia's ''best' language school made me finally hang up my board marker.
After 6 years of not teaching I actually missed it and so now do a few hours a week of online IELTS prep.
In closing, ESL teaching was much more fun when it was run by the gay mafia.
My first tour of duty as a teacher was in South Korea and the decision was purely motivated by cold hard cash. In those days there was easy money there, not quite Saudi levels but if you could hustle you could bank big.
Next stop was Vietnam and although not quite as much cash as South Korea it was definitely more interesting. I worked for an Irish guy named Fonzie, who had opened up ESL schools in all the former/current communist countries. He will open the first privately owned school in North Korea and his connections allowed me to get fairly unrestricted travel there 10 years ago.
I had some really interesting students - government officials (including those at Ho Chi Minh University, which is where party members must study Marx and Hegel) embassy staff (including Libya, which drew the attention of the US Embassy) and staff from large Vietnamese State owned companies.
I learned so much about the [i]American War[/i] from these students that I decided to focus my Masters on the rise of Communism in South East Asia.
Although I prefer teaching adults, the teenage Cambodians were some of my favorite students - so much fun and cheeky, which I like! But the low pay and rapid decline of working conditions at Cambodia's ''best' language school made me finally hang up my board marker.
After 6 years of not teaching I actually missed it and so now do a few hours a week of online IELTS prep.
In closing, ESL teaching was much more fun when it was run by the gay mafia.