Update (14 January 2009):
Do not come to Taiwan! There are too many applicants and too few jobs! Period!
In particular, note that an agent's promise that your job is locked-in, is meaningless: Upon arrival, you'll have the real interview and demo; if that doesn't go well, the school will turn you down, and you will have to find a job in this tight market. If you doubt me, just ask the agent to interview 3 different schools; see if they have that many!


Don't say I didn't warn you!

(Here's the original post:)

Here are several posts which I submitted to various on-line forums in November 2008. They concern my experiences, and lessons learnt, in teaching English in Taiwan—the good, the bad and the ugly of it. As at least one has been gutted, I have moved them here instead. These bring together a lot of information scattered about, as well as much information that I had never come across on-line or which I had found to be confused or contradictory, and some obtained directly from the Taiwanese government. I hope that they will be useful to you. The Bad & Ugly are not meant to scare anyone: I love being in Taiwan, but I just wish that I had access to these before coming.

TEFL in Taiwan: The Good

TEFL in Taiwan: The Bad

TEFL in Taiwan: The Ugly

P.S. I've been looking for a way of sharing info about schools. While there is a smattering of posts about schools, it is insignificant when compared to the number of schools and complaints out there. Websites' apprehension (towards law suits and loss of ads) is compounded by a tendency to lash out against critical complaints which (often hasty, and articulated for an assumed non-hostile readership) fall short of legal thresholds of proof! The transient, passing-thru nature of the complainants only adds to this: they turn their backs and never look back.

Pay-based blacklists won't work, methinks. I've looked at Usenet, freenet, mailing lists, etc. Would anyone be interested in bartering READMEs? I'm not looking for a rant, a forum, or for a list of the wrongs committed against you; just a brief, 1 page, bullet point, plain-text outline of the good, the bad and the ugly of a school. For now, I've written 2 such files. I'll barter them under the conditions that free bartering can continue, that the files are not to be modified, and that they must not be presented/posted for general access. Contact me at 'gbuswap' at this domain. The Subject line has to say "GBU Submission", precisely, plus the school's name. If the format/content within has problems, I'll send you suggestions.