METH - the moral and the margin

One major (moral) turning point for me happened quite early on when I made the decision to never treat the students like morons. Seems like an obvious thing to say, but if you listen to many teachers, they're not so much Making Input Comprehensible, but taking to a dog, or the students are they're 5-years-old. Not the same thing. So I made an active decision to grade my language but not the tone of my voice. Since then, I had to monitor many classes of other teachers and found again and again the students were being patronized. The vast majority of teachers didn't know they were doing it, but for some reason, having to grade their language fired up a part of their brain that wanted to speak to people who still believed in Santa. It was a moral decision for me that someone's English ability is not linked to their mental age and they should be respected. 

Of my experience in Japan and Korea, I found that my nationality marginalised me surprisingly often. Being British was more of a "this'll do" solution. The feedback from HR reps was usually along the lines of 'we learn American English therefore we need American teachers', despite the fact that the students were learning English as an international business language.

Johnston mentions a Japanese school where they only employed white, blond instructors. I experienced this first hand at NOVA. For the sales demo classes, they ONLY sent white instructors - the blonder the better. This was partially business driven - one blond, blue-eyed instructor had a 100% success rate getting woman to sign up for classes after his demo class. Most of the white teachers had good sales records, so the staff didn't want to risk lowering their bottom line with anyone darker.

One Korean Hagwon country manager infamously said during a meeting about instructor complaints that companies were specifying race and gender when signing contracts with the school, "it's like buying a phone - if you want a white phone, you get a white phone". I'll give you a few lines to let that little gem sink in....

... I've never once had a complaint, in TEN years, from any student who couldn't understand my accent. Obviously, I've had complaints as every teacher has, but never about not being able to understand me. Yet until I was Manager of Instruction at a hagwon (when I was automatically requested by upper management of companies) I was always second to the American teachers.

Only in Prague was being English an advantage. I was in hot demand as the only Brit instructor at the agency. Glory days indeed.

Anyway, in the big scheme of things, this nationality branding was marginal marginalisations and, overall, was never that bad.