You may have heard mixed reviews about working at an international school, but I'm gonna give you my honest and direct experience here working at one in Taiwan.
I'm tired as fuck.
It's an exhausting job. If I told my friends back home, they would be skeptical that an elementary school teacher would be so stressed. Especially when I work a normal full-time schedule of about 8 - 4:30. What makes it so exhausting?
Let me tell you.
Of those 8 plus hours I'm there, I am working almost every minute of it. I am either on my feet teaching, in my seat grading, or walking the hallways yelling at kids to stop running.
There really are no breaks. Those teachers that do take breaks leave much later because they can't keep up with the workload. I challenge myself to leave at 4:30 everyday (also known as the 4:30 club) and to do that I have to be "on" the whole time. I don't chill, I don't go on Instagram. I literally work the whole time. I take my 30 min lunch but that's about it.
I can explain it to my American friends that it's like working at a restaurant. Busy all the time, on your feet all the time. Super busy and like manual labor. And emotionally exhausting. But instead of dealing with drunk people or rich people, you're dealing with children, of rich people.
But back to the schedule.
Their 20-25min "big break" in the mornings and afternoons? Not a break. I'm checking homework or preparing for the next class. There's so many details and things that can go wrong that you spend a lot of energy thinking about a lot of things.
I think the biggest thing is that there's this nagging sense of pressure to perform and "high standards," which don't make very much sense because they don't actually make you perform better, they just make you paranoid. And sure enough, there's people watching. Admin walks by the big open windows of your classroom to make sure you're standing up and doing soemthing like classroom management or whatever. *** is the worst. She always has this scowl on her face like she's looking for something to report, and she'll linger by the door where you can't see her but you know she's there. It's so distracting. Literally nerve-racking. Such a bitch.
Anyway, you can see my frustration. And for the teaching? You're teaching class for 28 forty-minute periods a week. Plus their 5 minute short breaks in-between, where of course they're still in your classroom and you still have to watch them. That's about 20 hours total per week of teaching a full class of kids. Doesn't sound like that much at all?
As another teacher friend calls it: a cram school with bells and whistles. Cramming information. You gotta get through the curriculum each week, or else. I feel like a robot. Yeah, along the way there are some shining lights of funny anecdotes and creative ideas from the kids. But it's mostly cramming. I hate it. I want out.
And the kids? They get no consequences. Spoiled little brats. Parents have the say, you have no power, and you have this weight on you that if the student isn't performing that it's somehow all your fault. One of my head teachers repeats this phrase that if a kid is having trouble "then they're gonna go back and look at the teacher and ask you what are you dong blah blah blah." Ugh. What happened to you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make her think? Am I 100% responsible for what the student does? Jesus.
Admin? You have a Taiwanese boss and her ideas suck but you still have to implement them.
And too many meetings.
Ok, I'm getting ahead of myself here. Should I only say the negatives? Are there any positives? Only two: the pay, and coworkers.
The coworkers are great and I've met the coolest people. People with tons of experience, and who are veteran teachers with great ideas. They're all mostly people I would want to hang out with outside of work. They're fun, funny. They also got your back, until they don't. I certainly have had awesome managers that keep us tight and good at our job.
For the pay: When we started in training, one veteran teacher came up and said the reasons you come to this school are good pay and good paid leave. Let me break down both.
For pay I make a base salary of 77,550 ($2,390 USD). Then there's a housing allowance of 8,000 ($247). A transportation stipend of 1,000 ($30). And a performance bonus of 4,000 ($123) each month with another 1,000 every three months ($30). Then there's a one-time Chinese New Year bonus of 15,000 ($462) (prorated if you've been there less than a year, so I got 7,500/$231) and then a completion bonus of 40,000 if you finish the year contract ($1,233). If you sign for another year then you get another 40,000 split in two with the second half after the sixth month.
What I see each month on my paystub is around 91,550 ($2,822) which comes into my account as 84,437 ($2,603) after taxes (4,627/$142) health insurance (1,428/$44), labor insurance (1,008/$31) and my parking fee (100/$3).
I plan on completing my contract, so I factored in that year-end bonus and CNY bonus, etc. to come up with the overall, into my bank account salary of $88,728 per month ($2,735) or 1,064,744 per year ($32,824). It looks better in NTD (New Taiwan Dollars). I'm a millionaire!
When you look at my cost of living, that's super solid. I'm able to save money every month while still visiting other countries and eating out all my meals, etc. Most fellow English teachers don't make as much and they're surprised when I tell them. That's why people look for this kind of job after a few years at a buxiban or cram school: the cash.
I made the jump after a year. But I made the decision because I wanted to grow as a teacher. If I had spent another year at that cram school, I wouldn't have learned anything new. And I don't regret my decision.
But there's one more reason: the paid time off.
I had never had a salary before, so this was new for me. At my previous job, we were paid by the hours of classes we taught. No classes, no pay. This became particularly crucial during Chinese New Year when the students are off for a month and you only get a few hours each week for these winter camps. That month I would make almost half of what I normally would. Ouch.
But here, I was off for three weeks straight and still got paid the same amount I was for my over 40-hour workweeks. I was in Japan drinking sake instead of teaching. Whoopee!
At this job you get 20 days of paid vacation, plus 10 if you renew your contract. So people typically take 4 weeks off in the summer to go home and 2 weeks off in winter to go somewhere cool like Thailand. We had a week off for CNY so I spent all 20 days over in Japan. Plus the random Taiwanese holidays here and there and that's not bad! Certainly better than any corporate job in America, with only 2 weeks off a year. Here it's a month!
That all being said, they really make you work for all that pay and time off. For instance, this week I'm grading mid-term exams, grading semester projects, observing presentations, teaching a normal week of curriculum with grading workbooks and homework, and then having to get all their grades for the semester in by Friday. It's a big week, and we are all just trying to get through it. I'm counting down the weeks left for the year, and I know I'm not the only one. 10 more weeks to go (death stare).
And maybe it's just the culture in Taiwan. Maybe this is actually one of the better schools to work at. If that's the case then lord have mercy. I don't know how anyone could be in this industry for so long. I think they just give up in their soul and accept it. Like another teacher friend has mentioned, when you look at photos of when we first started, you can still see the light in our eyes. It's no longer there.
P.S. I know this sounds hardcore and all and overbearing, but results may very. It was a good experience and I don't regret taking this job, but it definitely pushed me out of teaching. Maybe if I was at a more reasonable school, I would be teaching a little while longer. My old boss from my first year here, before I came to this school, told me that most people who go here only last a year. They end up leaving Taiwan and leaving teaching.
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Enjoy!