Teaching English by never using it

Sounds odd doesn't it? But this is exactly what goes on in the classrooms of most Taiwanese schools. English is almost never used by the Taiwanese ' English' teacher in their classroom, mostly because they themselves are unable to speak it, yet they continue to claim that only they are qualified to teach Taiwanese students English. This explains why Taiwan is ranked 17th out of 23 Asian nations in English competency.

The Taiwanese have tried to address this problem in numerous ways, the most common being the English buxiban(boo-SHE-ban), or cram school. This system is used all over eastern Asia in various forms, with varying levels of success. Here for the most part it is a cash cow, although there are a few who have hired real competent teachers(few and far between here) actually do manage to teach. They don't always last unfortunately as the parents expect clowns to entertain their children and when the kids complain they are bored...Yu no prayyy gaaaame....off they go to BoBo's Buxiban, where they can watch Miffy (with a marketing degree and minor in women's studies) juggle balls, dance and play hangman while she stays perky with her perkies looking forward to her next drunk that night..

The Taiwanese government has tried unsuccessfully to become involved in this process as well. Well, you all know when the government gets involved in something problematic things go from bad to "It's the end of the fucking world, run for the last three seconds of your life.!'. When a Chinese government gets involved, what I just described is the best case scenario.

When we first arrived here, the public schools were hiring foreign teachers to work in their schools...strictly under the table because someone realized that, hey we should be using people who speak the language to actually try and teach it. But even as the MOE (Min. of Education) was promoting this idea, the MOFA(Min. of Foreign Affairs) was conducting raids on schools, rounding up these teachers, and deporting their sorry asses of the island. They have gotten better now, but most of them still haven't got a tepid clue.

Moving to Kaohsiung was partially the result of my wife getting on with a new initiative involving the MOE and the British and Canadian governments. This suffered from Columbus Syndrome - didn't know where they were going, didn't know how to get there and didn't know where they were when they stopped. And being a government operation, it was all done on borrowed money. British, Australian and Canadian teachers were recruited and then like dropped in to remote and isolated communities around Taiwan. For some it was literally like Survivor. No books, no supplies, no access to groceries or clean water. For some it was a 4 hr drive down switchback(Taiwanese mountain roads defy an adequate explanation without experiencing them firsthand) to the nearest town that had shopping. It wasn't a big surprise that it failed after two years, fading into an oblivion that contains other bright ideas like Cop Rock, the Vogue dance, Sanjaya and Troll 2.