I wasn't getting many bites when it came to the number of resumes going out, but I wasn't to worried yet. I had heard that English speaking people always have an advantage, that was before I realized that most Malaysians speak passable English, enough to get them a job that is, but not what we would call good English. Something like that uncle you have that used to say stuff no one understood, yeah your uncle from Newfoundland, well that would be considered good enough for most companies. Thats not to say that they think the English is bad, they actually think it's very good, but thats a topic for another post.
I did get a few requests for interviews, but they were all fishing, wanting to know what I was doing in Malaysia more than really considering me for a position. This became a little frustrating, but maybe to be expected. I was very disappointed by the salaries these companies were offering, $300 - $600 a month, no kidding. Things have changed since 2004, I haven't been asked to interview just so they could ask me questions about Canada lately.
So back to teaching English, one of my wife's friends asked if I had tried applying to the English schools, I hadn't even thought about them to be honest, me a teacher, in what parallel universe would that be considered right? At that point I was still unemployed and I figured that anything was possible so I started contacting English schools, I soon found out that you need a degree to teach in Malaysia, big shocker, but one of the people I contacted suggested a Japanese company called Berlitz International Language centers.
When I called the center the guy that answered sounded funny, like his tongue was swollen or something, turns out he was Canadian and from PEI, that explained the swollen tongue sound. I have to say Douglas was a great guy and he suggested that I drop in and we could have a talk. The next day I jumped in a taxi and went over to see him, we spoke for the better part of 2 hours, he explained how things were done at Berlitz and finally offered me a seat in the training sessions starting the following Monday. I was a little disappointed that he didn't offer to pay me for the training. This is how they do things at Berlitz, this was to be a phrase I would hear more and more.
A little about Berlitz International, the company was founded by a Swiss/American, Maximilian Berlitz in 1878. Berlitz figured out that if you can only hear the language you want to learn and speak or ask questions in that language you will learn the language much faster. This is now commonly called the immersion method, Berlitz started the "Total Immersion" program years ago and it is still very popular. OK, thats the short version, but is pretty much the Berlitz Method. So up to modern day, Berlitz in Japan was huge, teaching Japanese businessmen to speak English, the myth is that a very large Japanese company was spending so much money with Berlitz that they decided it was cheaper to buy the company outright, wether or not this is true, I'm not sure, but Berlitz was owned by a Japanese company when I worked for them and as far as I know still is.
So I got my training of about 2 weeks a couple of hours a day, its actually not that difficult, the main thing is to be open and outgoing, hell I always thought I was good at that, oh how wrong I was. The first class I taught was a private lesson with a Japanese lady, why don't I just say lady, you'll understand later. Anyway this lady was at a level 1, meaning she couldn't speak a word of English, I would later come to realize that these were the most difficult students. I found the first 5 minutes excruciating, I was sure this lady would be out talking to the Japanese director and "Disrequest" me. A disrequest is when a student refuses to have you as their teacher, this is very bad when you are only paid by the lesson.
Speaking about pay, we were payed RM20 ($6) per lesson, each lesson was 40 minutes long, so if you were not disrequested and willing to work as many classes as possible, then you could earn about RM5000 tax free, oh yeah we were all working under the table! Well I needed to work and Berlitz worked like that, it was the Berlitz way, and it worked for the first year.
Back to my first student, she seemed to be hating the lesson, I was plugging away at the lesson from the book without changing a thing, I thought she must be bored out of her mind going over the same lesson over and over. This lesson by the way was all about your home address and phone number in your home country, and then your local phone number and address. Most students don't know their addresses in Malaysia at that stage, because most of them just got here yesterday. At the end of the 40 minutes we took a break and another teacher would be teaching her, I explained this as best I could with the student repeating "Hi, hi" after every phrase I said. This means many things, but this time it simply meant "I will pretend to understand what you are telling me, all the while hoping you are not telling me the building is on fire" or more simply, "What the hell are you saying?". Japanese ladies are very polite, nice, shy and demanding as students, when a japanese student says "hi, hi" it could mean anything and often times it does mean more than one thing at the same time, it's like when we mutter "uh hu" but we really aren't listening.
After the break I return to the class and the same student is waiting, I excuse myself and ask the receptionist why, she said the student requested me. For the life of me I didn't understand. Still don't.
Well I finished that class and I was told the next day that I had been requested by that student for every lesson, I felt pretty good. At Berlitz you had to be very sure to keep your students happy and not upset them by telling them that they really suck at English and should take up knitting, not that they understand that. Seriously most of the students are very nice, the ones that I always hated teaching were the Korean ladies, honest this isn't me being prejudice, this is how they really are.
In Korea learning English is very expensive, so expensive that we had a lot of Korean, Chinese and Arabian students coming to KL just to learn English. Berlitz Malaysia was the most expensive language school in Malaysia, but the cheapest Berlitz center in the world. By comparison 1 40 minute lesson in KL was about $25 (USD) and in Japan it was almost $75 (USD), this is the single lesson price, not the package price. Berlitz was very busy when I first started and when I quit 2 years later it was still fairly busy. Korean women would come to live in KL with their children for 10 months at a time so their kids could go to International School, also very expensive in Korea. These Korean women are after a bargain all the time, in everything! Many students would ask us to teach their kids on the side, meaning they would save half the fees and the teacher would make more, but I never had time, I was always working. Some of the Korean ladies were also looking for an English speaking boyfriend, while their husbands worked they wanted to learn more English. I was approached a few times to go out with some of the students but I usually tried to keep it only at the school, this was not always possible, some students would turn up where you were having lunch. Some teachers referred to these ladies as the "Korean Stalkers".
The one exception to that rule were the "Samsung 4", this was a different group of guys in KL from Korea without their wives for a year. They were "Country Specialists" and were living in Malaysia for a year to learn as much about Malaysia as possible. Samsung did this for the 2 years I worked there and 3 years before and at least 1 year after. These guys liked to party, all the time! I went out with them a few times and we always had a good time. They were paid a lot to be in KL and their monthly allowance wasn't checked too much and they wanted to speak English as much as possible, so they would go out with the teachers and they were pretty lonely being in KL without their wives. One of the guy's, Daniel had the distinction of having payed for the most classes and not going to them, students didn't get a refund unless they canceled 24 hours prior to the start of the class. Daniel missed something like 150 lessons, do the math thats a lot of money! He didn't care, it was his companies money. I didn't care because when he was booked with me and didn't show up, I got paid and the lessons off to do what I wanted.
Back to the way Berlitz did things in Malaysia, I don't actually know if Berlitz does this in other countries or not, but Berlitz Malaysia didn't apply for working permits. This is very illegal in Malaysia and can get the employee deported immediately and banned from returning for 5 years. The companies have to pay huge fines and could actually lose their business license, meaning the company would have to leave Malaysia. Well to be honest, when I applied for the job, Douglas told me everything, including the fact that we wouldn't get visa's, I'm an adult and I accepted the conditions and decided that I needed to work, so I left the country every 3 months, I went to Thailand 3 times and Singapore once. This wasn't all that bad, I was earning a pretty good living by Malaysian standards, we were living in a nice apartment in Bangsar, a very nice area of KL and very close to my office. This lasted for about a year (Dec 04 - Oct 05), then it all came crashing down.
On October 11th, Berlitz's office was raided by the Malaysian Immigration department, not a lot of fun these guys. I was on a break that lesson, but instead of going out and getting a drink like I usually did, I was talking to Douglas in his office. A Malay guy walked around the corner and started taking pictures of Douglas and I, Douglas saw him first and asked him what he needed, the guy just started smiling. This was when we noticed he was wearing a pistol and a badge. I actually think I thought very fast and told the guy I was a student and I was on my way out, he just smiled and said "Mr. Clements, please sit down". I'm not all that smart, but even I figured out he knew I wasn't a student. We were all interviewed and asked how long we were working there, they already knew, they had a list of all the teachers names. We were then taken out to Putra Jaya, thats here all the Government offices are moving to. On the way we stopped at all of our homes to pick up our passports, I didn't want Shima involved, it would end up in the paper and make things worse. Putra Jaya is different, lets just say the place is out of place in Malaysia, the roads are wide, there are sidewalks and it is the cleanest place I have ever seen in Malaysia, cleaner than Singapore.
We were taken to a nice office and locked in. we waited for a few hours as the Director Keji Oshima, was being interviewed, or rather shaken down. A little about the director, he was Japanese, he spoke English worse than most of our students and he was addicted to online porn, yep in a glass walled office, in a school (20% of the students were kids) and he didn't think anyone knew about it, yep he was our director. His favorite phrase was "No choice" this would be used when we asked any questions. While we were being held by the Malaysian Immigration department he constantly said "No choice". We were released shortly after and we were taken home. We were told we wouldn't be allowed to work, but that we wouldn't be deported, at least not for a few days.
A couple of days after the raid we were all called and asked to meet Oshima at a lawyers office, this we were told was because we weren't allowed to go to the school, I had been there the day before. The lawyer who we met after waiting in their conference room was about 20 years old and as meek as a lamb. Since there were 5 of us that were caught up in the raid, we thought we should have a say in what was going to happen, because as the lawyer said, we should all apologize to the Government and be prepared to leave the country immediately, like as in the next few minutes. She also suggested we pack and bring our suitcases to the next meeting with the Immigration officials.
At the meeting we found out a little more about the raid, the Immigration Department had been tipped off by a former teacher that they stopped giving lessons to, they didn't fire people, they just didn't get lessons to teach, this was the Berlitz way. This lady, being Malay wasn't about to take no for an answer and told the director that if he didn't give her more lessons she would go to immigration, he ignored her, so she did as she said she would. A quick word about Malay women, they are passionate, to a fault and jealous, about not just their husbands but about everything, they also believe that revenge is more fun than just about anything else.
One thing I should mention is that I was told 4 or 5 months earlier that some teachers were going to be getting work permits, 4 or 5 of us that they deemed as full time staff. We had filled in all the paper work, copied all our documents and turned them into the director, who apparently, promptly put them in his drawer, never to be sent to immigration. The director claimed that an agent had taken all the papers and he never brought them back, the papers were all in his drawer when he was fired. The teachers caught in the raid were myself, a French girl whose husband worked for a large French cement company, a Filipino lady, her husband also worked for a big German company that makes electronic industrial switches and a Russian girl whose husband just started a company. All of these people were living here on their husbands work permit, this also means it's illegal for them to be working. Their husbands could have their permit pulled, this would understandably be bad for them in their companies, this was the big fear for them, me I was only worried about being deported and bad press for my wife.
After we all left the meeting with the lawyer we went to one of the girls places and tried to decide what to do, without the director, understandably we were all a little worried, but we were to learn later that we had very little to worry about. While we were at this informal gathering, one of the husbands told us that no one has ever been deported for teaching English illegally, it just wasn't done. We also learned that the director paid RM6000 per teacher working without permits ($2000 CDN X 12 teachers) or about RM72,000.00 as a fine, funny he didn't receive a receipt. Not a small sum really, but as a bribe, pretty big. The bottom line was that there was a new Director in the Immigration Department and he wanted to be tough on illegal workers, and white people make the news more than the Indonesians and he had us handed to him on a silver platter. We also learned that they knew all of our names and our passport numbers, where we lived etc. They had been watching us for awhile and had taken pictures of all of us, the teacher who turned us in went through all of our files to give the immigration department everything they needed incase we ran.
I was off work for 6 weeks while my working permit was processed, it was painless really. Because I am married to a Malaysian its not as hard to get a working permit, but if the people applying don't pay attention you could end up being asked to pay a bribe, we were but I pretended not to understand and my wife told them I wouldn't pay because I was from Canada, it worked. I'm sure I've mentioned it a few times, there are a lot of officials who want bribes and in a lot of cases they will be very direct about it and because I am a Westerner and my wife is a well known celebrity, the officials try to be discreet but still manage to get it across that a small payment will speed up whatever process they are handling, I never seem to understand them.
Berlitz was actually one the most enjoyable jobs I have had, there was no pressure as long as you did everything you could to help your students learn, this included the occasional night out for drinks with the students, it was an interesting time and I wouldn't have done it differently.
There were so many students that stood out to me, there was Sarah an 8 year old girl from Luxembourg, this little girl could already read write and speak German, French, Italian, Swiss (Rumantsch) and the language of Luxembourg and she was learning Bahasa Malaysia and Mandarin. If this wasn't all she was a very nice little girl with a sense of humour most adults couldn't keep up with. When she started she could already speak English fairly well, within 2 months she was teaching her mother and brother to speak English, a remarkable little girl.
There was the "Samsung Four", these guys were all very nice, friendly and lonely, they were hard to keep out as friends. There were 2 groups I got to know but the second group was a lot of fun and took studying serious but enjoyed it.
I had a group of older Japanese Ladies we called "Sunshine" they were all in their late 40's and early 50's, when they started they couldn't manage a sentence, but they worked at it, smiling and laughing the whole time. We called them "Sunshine" because they always brightened the day for whoever their teacher was.
I had a student from Iran who's father was a very wealthy businessman who sold something, I never did find out what, but no one thought it was entirely legal. I met his father who was a very serious little man who despite the smiles, he scared the hell out of me, it's what I imagine meeting John Gotti would be like, tense and exciting, worried but wondering what he might say.
I had a 20 something Japanese student who took her clothes off and put them on again as we went through the lessons, she always wore 4 or 5 layers of clothes, she was as insane as they come. I turns out that she hopped on a plane to Malaysia without a bag, a change of clothes or a place to stay. She was only at he school for a few weeks when she disappeared. We learned later that her parents had been looking for her and when they tracked her down they shipped her off to an asylum, sadly she took her on life the first night there.
There were the Korean ladies that were always looking for a discount, or free lessons. They all asked the male teachers at one time or another if they would like to go for lunch, they were looking for an English speaking boyfriend, their definition of boyfriend is much different than yours, they really mean friend, totally platonic, more than one teacher found out the hard way.
I had a set of twins from Germany they were about 15, the guy was a very nice respectful kid but the girl was the complete opposite, we called them "Hansel and Gretel". I personally called the the "Heaven and Hell" group, these were the only students I refused to teach.
I worked for Berlitz for 30 months and I taught an average of 10 lessons a day for 26 days a month, and 30 months, so I taught about 7300 lessons (I accounted for the time off given to me by Immigration Malaysia) so in the grand scheme of things I crossed paths with a lot of people and with only a few exceptions I enjoyed meeting them all. Most of the students I had were very easy to teach because they wanted to learn it, most of them weren't doing it for work, they just wanted to do it.
I said at the beginning of this post that I still giggle a little when I think about teaching English, its not that I wasn't a good teacher, because I was, I giggle because if I my old English teachers, Mr. Murphy, Sister Aldona or Mr. Althouse saw me I'm sure they would laugh if they happen to remember me that is. Before I came to Malaysia I thought about teaching TESL, but I was told before I came that there were no schools specializing in it, they were wrong, there are lots, but I didn't want to pay the $1000 Cdn, the TESL course cost, not to mention everyone told me you couldn't teach English without a teaching degree, on paper they are right, but like all things in Malaysia, what's on paper doesn't mean it's the way its done.
I am looking again to teach English, I honestly enjoyed it, it had a few scary moments but all in all I think I learned more than any one of my students did. We'll see.
In Korea learning English is very expensive, so expensive that we had a lot of Korean, Chinese and Arabian students coming to KL just to learn English. Berlitz Malaysia was the most expensive language school in Malaysia, but the cheapest Berlitz center in the world. By comparison 1 40 minute lesson in KL was about $25 (USD) and in Japan it was almost $75 (USD), this is the single lesson price, not the package price. Berlitz was very busy when I first started and when I quit 2 years later it was still fairly busy. Korean women would come to live in KL with their children for 10 months at a time so their kids could go to International School, also very expensive in Korea. These Korean women are after a bargain all the time, in everything! Many students would ask us to teach their kids on the side, meaning they would save half the fees and the teacher would make more, but I never had time, I was always working. Some of the Korean ladies were also looking for an English speaking boyfriend, while their husbands worked they wanted to learn more English. I was approached a few times to go out with some of the students but I usually tried to keep it only at the school, this was not always possible, some students would turn up where you were having lunch. Some teachers referred to these ladies as the "Korean Stalkers".
The one exception to that rule were the "Samsung 4", this was a different group of guys in KL from Korea without their wives for a year. They were "Country Specialists" and were living in Malaysia for a year to learn as much about Malaysia as possible. Samsung did this for the 2 years I worked there and 3 years before and at least 1 year after. These guys liked to party, all the time! I went out with them a few times and we always had a good time. They were paid a lot to be in KL and their monthly allowance wasn't checked too much and they wanted to speak English as much as possible, so they would go out with the teachers and they were pretty lonely being in KL without their wives. One of the guy's, Daniel had the distinction of having payed for the most classes and not going to them, students didn't get a refund unless they canceled 24 hours prior to the start of the class. Daniel missed something like 150 lessons, do the math thats a lot of money! He didn't care, it was his companies money. I didn't care because when he was booked with me and didn't show up, I got paid and the lessons off to do what I wanted.
Back to the way Berlitz did things in Malaysia, I don't actually know if Berlitz does this in other countries or not, but Berlitz Malaysia didn't apply for working permits. This is very illegal in Malaysia and can get the employee deported immediately and banned from returning for 5 years. The companies have to pay huge fines and could actually lose their business license, meaning the company would have to leave Malaysia. Well to be honest, when I applied for the job, Douglas told me everything, including the fact that we wouldn't get visa's, I'm an adult and I accepted the conditions and decided that I needed to work, so I left the country every 3 months, I went to Thailand 3 times and Singapore once. This wasn't all that bad, I was earning a pretty good living by Malaysian standards, we were living in a nice apartment in Bangsar, a very nice area of KL and very close to my office. This lasted for about a year (Dec 04 - Oct 05), then it all came crashing down.
On October 11th, Berlitz's office was raided by the Malaysian Immigration department, not a lot of fun these guys. I was on a break that lesson, but instead of going out and getting a drink like I usually did, I was talking to Douglas in his office. A Malay guy walked around the corner and started taking pictures of Douglas and I, Douglas saw him first and asked him what he needed, the guy just started smiling. This was when we noticed he was wearing a pistol and a badge. I actually think I thought very fast and told the guy I was a student and I was on my way out, he just smiled and said "Mr. Clements, please sit down". I'm not all that smart, but even I figured out he knew I wasn't a student. We were all interviewed and asked how long we were working there, they already knew, they had a list of all the teachers names. We were then taken out to Putra Jaya, thats here all the Government offices are moving to. On the way we stopped at all of our homes to pick up our passports, I didn't want Shima involved, it would end up in the paper and make things worse. Putra Jaya is different, lets just say the place is out of place in Malaysia, the roads are wide, there are sidewalks and it is the cleanest place I have ever seen in Malaysia, cleaner than Singapore.
We were taken to a nice office and locked in. we waited for a few hours as the Director Keji Oshima, was being interviewed, or rather shaken down. A little about the director, he was Japanese, he spoke English worse than most of our students and he was addicted to online porn, yep in a glass walled office, in a school (20% of the students were kids) and he didn't think anyone knew about it, yep he was our director. His favorite phrase was "No choice" this would be used when we asked any questions. While we were being held by the Malaysian Immigration department he constantly said "No choice". We were released shortly after and we were taken home. We were told we wouldn't be allowed to work, but that we wouldn't be deported, at least not for a few days.
A couple of days after the raid we were all called and asked to meet Oshima at a lawyers office, this we were told was because we weren't allowed to go to the school, I had been there the day before. The lawyer who we met after waiting in their conference room was about 20 years old and as meek as a lamb. Since there were 5 of us that were caught up in the raid, we thought we should have a say in what was going to happen, because as the lawyer said, we should all apologize to the Government and be prepared to leave the country immediately, like as in the next few minutes. She also suggested we pack and bring our suitcases to the next meeting with the Immigration officials.
At the meeting we found out a little more about the raid, the Immigration Department had been tipped off by a former teacher that they stopped giving lessons to, they didn't fire people, they just didn't get lessons to teach, this was the Berlitz way. This lady, being Malay wasn't about to take no for an answer and told the director that if he didn't give her more lessons she would go to immigration, he ignored her, so she did as she said she would. A quick word about Malay women, they are passionate, to a fault and jealous, about not just their husbands but about everything, they also believe that revenge is more fun than just about anything else.
One thing I should mention is that I was told 4 or 5 months earlier that some teachers were going to be getting work permits, 4 or 5 of us that they deemed as full time staff. We had filled in all the paper work, copied all our documents and turned them into the director, who apparently, promptly put them in his drawer, never to be sent to immigration. The director claimed that an agent had taken all the papers and he never brought them back, the papers were all in his drawer when he was fired. The teachers caught in the raid were myself, a French girl whose husband worked for a large French cement company, a Filipino lady, her husband also worked for a big German company that makes electronic industrial switches and a Russian girl whose husband just started a company. All of these people were living here on their husbands work permit, this also means it's illegal for them to be working. Their husbands could have their permit pulled, this would understandably be bad for them in their companies, this was the big fear for them, me I was only worried about being deported and bad press for my wife.
After we all left the meeting with the lawyer we went to one of the girls places and tried to decide what to do, without the director, understandably we were all a little worried, but we were to learn later that we had very little to worry about. While we were at this informal gathering, one of the husbands told us that no one has ever been deported for teaching English illegally, it just wasn't done. We also learned that the director paid RM6000 per teacher working without permits ($2000 CDN X 12 teachers) or about RM72,000.00 as a fine, funny he didn't receive a receipt. Not a small sum really, but as a bribe, pretty big. The bottom line was that there was a new Director in the Immigration Department and he wanted to be tough on illegal workers, and white people make the news more than the Indonesians and he had us handed to him on a silver platter. We also learned that they knew all of our names and our passport numbers, where we lived etc. They had been watching us for awhile and had taken pictures of all of us, the teacher who turned us in went through all of our files to give the immigration department everything they needed incase we ran.
I was off work for 6 weeks while my working permit was processed, it was painless really. Because I am married to a Malaysian its not as hard to get a working permit, but if the people applying don't pay attention you could end up being asked to pay a bribe, we were but I pretended not to understand and my wife told them I wouldn't pay because I was from Canada, it worked. I'm sure I've mentioned it a few times, there are a lot of officials who want bribes and in a lot of cases they will be very direct about it and because I am a Westerner and my wife is a well known celebrity, the officials try to be discreet but still manage to get it across that a small payment will speed up whatever process they are handling, I never seem to understand them.
Berlitz was actually one the most enjoyable jobs I have had, there was no pressure as long as you did everything you could to help your students learn, this included the occasional night out for drinks with the students, it was an interesting time and I wouldn't have done it differently.
There were so many students that stood out to me, there was Sarah an 8 year old girl from Luxembourg, this little girl could already read write and speak German, French, Italian, Swiss (Rumantsch) and the language of Luxembourg and she was learning Bahasa Malaysia and Mandarin. If this wasn't all she was a very nice little girl with a sense of humour most adults couldn't keep up with. When she started she could already speak English fairly well, within 2 months she was teaching her mother and brother to speak English, a remarkable little girl.
There was the "Samsung Four", these guys were all very nice, friendly and lonely, they were hard to keep out as friends. There were 2 groups I got to know but the second group was a lot of fun and took studying serious but enjoyed it.
I had a group of older Japanese Ladies we called "Sunshine" they were all in their late 40's and early 50's, when they started they couldn't manage a sentence, but they worked at it, smiling and laughing the whole time. We called them "Sunshine" because they always brightened the day for whoever their teacher was.
I had a student from Iran who's father was a very wealthy businessman who sold something, I never did find out what, but no one thought it was entirely legal. I met his father who was a very serious little man who despite the smiles, he scared the hell out of me, it's what I imagine meeting John Gotti would be like, tense and exciting, worried but wondering what he might say.
I had a 20 something Japanese student who took her clothes off and put them on again as we went through the lessons, she always wore 4 or 5 layers of clothes, she was as insane as they come. I turns out that she hopped on a plane to Malaysia without a bag, a change of clothes or a place to stay. She was only at he school for a few weeks when she disappeared. We learned later that her parents had been looking for her and when they tracked her down they shipped her off to an asylum, sadly she took her on life the first night there.
There were the Korean ladies that were always looking for a discount, or free lessons. They all asked the male teachers at one time or another if they would like to go for lunch, they were looking for an English speaking boyfriend, their definition of boyfriend is much different than yours, they really mean friend, totally platonic, more than one teacher found out the hard way.
I had a set of twins from Germany they were about 15, the guy was a very nice respectful kid but the girl was the complete opposite, we called them "Hansel and Gretel". I personally called the the "Heaven and Hell" group, these were the only students I refused to teach.
I worked for Berlitz for 30 months and I taught an average of 10 lessons a day for 26 days a month, and 30 months, so I taught about 7300 lessons (I accounted for the time off given to me by Immigration Malaysia) so in the grand scheme of things I crossed paths with a lot of people and with only a few exceptions I enjoyed meeting them all. Most of the students I had were very easy to teach because they wanted to learn it, most of them weren't doing it for work, they just wanted to do it.
I said at the beginning of this post that I still giggle a little when I think about teaching English, its not that I wasn't a good teacher, because I was, I giggle because if I my old English teachers, Mr. Murphy, Sister Aldona or Mr. Althouse saw me I'm sure they would laugh if they happen to remember me that is. Before I came to Malaysia I thought about teaching TESL, but I was told before I came that there were no schools specializing in it, they were wrong, there are lots, but I didn't want to pay the $1000 Cdn, the TESL course cost, not to mention everyone told me you couldn't teach English without a teaching degree, on paper they are right, but like all things in Malaysia, what's on paper doesn't mean it's the way its done.
I am looking again to teach English, I honestly enjoyed it, it had a few scary moments but all in all I think I learned more than any one of my students did. We'll see.
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