ESL Traveling Teacher

My summer got cut short by two days, and I'm already heading into my tenth year teaching ESL in Asia with a clear list of things I'm doing differently. TEFL certificates keep getting sold as a ticket to well-paid international school jobs, but that's not the market I'm looking at. Schools in Cambodia and across Asia are increasingly asking for degrees, real teaching qualifications, and classroom experience. A free online certificate puts you on a pile of CVs with everyone else who did the same course. The biggest change I'm making this year is keeping the grammar books closed for the entire first week. Last year I spent too much time firefighting, students taking zeros rather than submitting late, not understanding what a timed activity meant, asking for five more minutes on an hour-and-a-half quiz. That pattern started in week one because I let it. So week one now belongs to how the classroom works: expectations, consequences, what's acceptable from students and from me, and the difference between a teacher and a friend. There's a lot of space between running a tight classroom and making students feel terrified, and that's where good classroom management actually lives. I'm also going in with interactive notebooks this year, built around cutting, folding, and physically constructing sentences rather than answering ten grammar questions and closing a book. And I'm treating time management as a taught skill, not a personality trait. Most students don't know what to do on days one through six of a seven-day project. We give them the deadline and assume the rest. Nine years of teaching across China and Cambodia, in training centers, international schools, and online, has made one thing clear: experience only counts if you're actually asking what went wrong and changing it. Published on Subwave https://subwave.app/@e3113/post/my-10th-year-teaching-esl-in-asia-starts-differently

Seven hours on a train, an hour in a car with a 19-year-old admin assistant asking about chicken feet, and a seafood dinner in a seafood capital when I'm allergic to fish. That was my first 24 hours in Fuzhou. The recruiter had told the school I had an allergy. He had very obviously not passed that on. I ate the chicken and the spicy beef noodles and learned fast that Chinese food in China shares almost nothing with Chinese food in the UK, except that most of it is very spicy. The apartment search turned up five places, all with squat toilets, before I signed on a one-room flat five minutes from school with a shower mounted directly above the squat toilet and a fridge that could hold a chicken and a bottle of Coke. My training consisted of three days shadowing a teacher named John Hankin, a legend in Fuzhou who was leaving for a public school on Saturday. He handed me a notebook of games and one piece of advice: run one game across every class for a week, drop the ones that don't land, never retry a failure. That system carried me through two and a half years. My first night alone in the apartment, I came home to find the previous tenant sitting on my sofa, screaming intermittently because the landlord hadn't returned her deposit. I rang my teaching assistant Nana, who arrived, sorted it out, and guaranteed the deposit through the school. I never once got a housing deposit back in China. What I eventually learned to do was give notice, let the landlord expect a final month's rent, and simply not pay it, because they already had the deposit and were never giving it back. Published on Subwave https://subwave.app/@e3113/post/my-first-four-days-teaching-english-in-fuzhou

A girl sat through an entire graduation ceremony tapping her fingers on her lap, mimicking a phone game she'd played so many times the muscle memory had taken over. That image sits at the center of what I'm talking about today: what doom scrolling is actually doing to kids' ability to concentrate, communicate, and just be present in a room. Fourteen students at a classroom party, sitting in a row, silent, all staring at their iPads and saying nothing to each other. Social skills erode quietly, and the devices are a big part of why. Responsibility is the harder question. I know students whose parents made them earn screen time through good grades rather than handing over a device and walking away. That approach works. The problem is that young teenagers want adult-level freedom, and some parents give it to them before the limits are anywhere near established. Governments are starting to respond, with restrictions on gaming hours for minors in mainland China and bans on TikTok and similar platforms for under-16s in countries around the world. Whether those bans hold is another question, but the direction is clear. The phone itself is not the problem. Writing postcards, describing a place in real sentences, the physical act of forming characters by hand: these are skills that fade when digital becomes the only mode. Even in China, secondary students are showing up unable to recognize basic characters because typing has replaced writing entirely. A child who can't stop tapping their fingers even after the phone is taken away hasn't just developed a bad habit. They've never been taught that there's a time to put it down. Published on Subwave https://subwave.app/@e3113/post/phones-in-the-classroom-are-winning

Six or seven hours south of Hong Kong on a train to Fuzhou, I had no briefing beyond a WeChat message telling me to find a young woman holding a sign at the exit. I cover what WeChat actually is for people unfamiliar with it: not just a messaging app, but the infrastructure of daily life in China, handling payments, tax records, train tickets, hotel bookings, and food orders in one place. Fuzhou in 2016 was classed as a tier-three city, meaning no metro system yet, and the tier system works simply by infrastructure improvements moving a city up the rankings. None of that prepared me for what I saw out the train window: tower blocks, office blocks, a McDonald's, a KFC. The China I had pictured from the outside, mountains, rice fields, people in straw hats, had nothing to do with the China I was arriving in. A 20-year-old Mercedes S-Class was waiting in the car park, driven by a woman of about 19 or 20 who would be my chauffeur for the next hour. She asked me within minutes whether I had ever tried spicy chicken feet. I had not. My entire prior experience of Chinese food was chicken balls, sweet and sour sauce, and fried rice. She had never left China, mentioned London the way you would mention somewhere you had never seriously imagined reaching, and told me that for many people, especially older generations, the world beyond China simply was not something they knew much about. She told me to close my eyes and rest. I did not rest. Published on Subwave https://subwave.app/@e3113/post/my-first-day-in-a-chinese-tier-three-city

In 2016, I was unloading containers of chilli powder on a forklift in Felixstowe, six in the morning to six at night, living in a caravan, when one of my boxing students messaged from Asia: "I got you a job in China." I left with one suitcase, a backpack, an iPad, a phone, a passport, and £1,495 after paying for the flight. Getting there was its own ordeal. A 12-hour layover in Mumbai where I couldn't leave the terminal, a lost suitcase that contained my only clean boxer shorts, and a work visa process that involved handing my passport to a man with glasses and a brown bag at the top of an escalator in a Hong Kong underground station. I had a one-way ticket and no backup plan, so I handed it over. Two days later I had my passport back, a visa stamped inside it, and a WeChat message with a train booking number. My bags arrived at 2 p.m. and I needed to be at the border crossing by 3. Standing there, about to step into mainland China for the first time, I had no idea what the next ten years were going to look like. Ten years on, I'm writing this from a rented apartment in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, having just left China after a decade of teaching English as a second language. Published on Subwave https://subwave.app/@e3113/post/one-suitcase-to-china-on-1495