I love teaching but…

#5

Are English Language teachers disrespected by schools the whole world over or is it just some places?

Are we seen as cheap labour on every continent or is it only in certain countries?

Part of being a freelancer is being paid for the hours of effort you put into something and this makes up for the instability of not having a contract. Work hard and get paid. Do no work and starve.

In order to be the teacher I would like to be — helping people to love my language as I do, preparing for lessons and creating extra material ‘outside the box’, photocopying, arriving early to set up and then reviewing my lesson after the event — I need to bank on 3 hours of preparation per hour taught. And yet none of this is recognised — financially or in any other way.

It has turned me into the ‘cheap labourer’ I never wanted to be. Turn up on time. Love the time interacting with the students, but churning out the same old material yet again and then forgetting about it all until the start of next lesson. Extra schmextra be damned. This is not who I am. It is certainly not what I wanted to become. I have no truck with this ‘paying peanuts and getting monkeys’ mentality.

It has been good to see this in black and white. I think the writing is on the board!