In Mill’s thought, the students were like prisoners. “They were prisoned at school, and were put into jail again in buxiban after school.” He showed a strong disapproval of the exam-oriented style of teaching. Mill did not want to pay so much attention to exams or scores, and said, “Didn’t I need to fight the attitude that students had toward English?”
Feeling disappointed in the exam-oriented goal, Mill concluded his teaching in Z
secondary school students’ buxiban as－“Repeat! Fake Game! Repeat! Test! Homework!”
When talked about GTM, Mill said, “The way I taught there was quite opposite to my teaching belief” because “The students were not happy!” He said the students went to buxiban with no purpose, and what teachers did there were just filling up exam skills for them. “I needed to compromise my teaching style and used GTM. That was my
sacrifice.”
Mill could not tolerate his working environment, so he only taught in the secondary school students’ buxiban for one year. He said, “I, as a teacher, turned myself into a machine producer. It seemed like I was not teaching English… and just like Chinese, science and math…English became an another subject.”
A passing-by teacher traveler－Teaching in an adult English learning buxiban
(up to now)
Having nothing in common with the secondary school students’ buxiban, Mill decided to move once again to an adult English buxiban. In order to get into the adult English buxiban, he took a lot of English exams, like the GEPT Advanced Test and TOEIC.
Having lots of English certifications was the basic requirement for entering an adult English buxiban. This is a way to show teachers’ abilities. Many teachers take the exam every year. We need to update our certification. We cannot use the certification
‧
that we took three hundred years ago. It is a whole new conception.
Mill thought there is a difference between a buxiban and a school teacher.
Our salary and our levels of education is not in direct proportion. The only way to increase our salary is based on the number of our students. And our salary will increase only when our students continuous presence in our classes. The high or low salary basically bases on our teaching performance.
In the adult English learning buxiban, teachers need to maintain their own
professionalism through passing different kinds of English exam. In other words, they need to keep learning English. “I think whether a teacher is professional or not can best be revealed through their experiences of teaching in an adult English buxiban,” Mill said.
“Most of the students there are adults. Although some of them are high school students, they are mature enough to tell if the teacher is professional or not.” Mill elaborated on his thought,
As teachers who teach in adult English learning buxibans, we need to make the students understand our teaching style. We need to care about every word we use and try to satisfy students from different levels and different ages because I don’t know if the student will come back to class next time or not. Maybe I thought the previous class was fun and he would show up next time, but he didn’t. And he was also absent in the following lessons.
Mill said teaching in the adult English learning buxiban is like in a buffet. “He [The student] can eat anything he wants. He can choose to take oral and listening lessons this time, and next time he takes TOFEL or IELTs. It’s a free market system.” Mill shows great assent of this kind of conception. “If he doesn’t like your class, he won’t show up
‧
next time.” Mill showed great confidence in his teaching by using metaphor eating at sushi-go-around to indicate that students have a lot of choices which made it difficult to teach:
Working in buxiban is like eating at sushi-go-around. We are those sushi dishes and the students are like customers. They can choose whatever they want. They come here autonomously. They can choose. They have the rights to choose, to quit and to complain. Students at school don’t have these rights. And they [school teachers]
can’t hear students’ real voices.
“How we teach is following how students react. No one teaches us how to teach (laugh). Everything is derived from students’ reactions.” In order to maintain his own English abilities, Mill constantly needs to prepare the English certification tests, and he needs to prepare for his lessons before class based on what the buxiban requires and what he wants to bring the students. “Based on the teaching material that buxiban give, I make my own teaching materials, including handouts or PowerPoint slides.”
Mill mentioned that in adult English learning buxiban, students seldom talk in class:
“The students seldom talk in class. They want to understand what teachers say in class.”
In that environment, he needed to talk all the time. No one would respond to him.
Actually, it is miserable. Now I do try to look for their “voices”. To be truth, this is funny. Actually, students’ voice are seldom heard in adult English learning buxiban because they think it is embarrassing to speak out.
I wish I can hear their voices. I often tell them “If you can, come and chat with me after class. I care about their voices a lot… However, only one in twenty will really talk to me after class… And most of them are not students [they are working now].
‧
That is…actually…pathetic because…the school teacher had destroyed them.
I asked him how he knew the students would understand his lessons. He replied,
“Just stand in their shoes.” He gave me an example,
When I am designing my lesson, I will try to guess what the students feel in this lesson. I will guess how they may react to every word and sentence that I say. I just stand in their shoes because in real teaching, a teacher is not the only one in the classroom. During the class, I might speak or talk unintelligibly and then observe their facial expressions and reactions. We need to be very patient, explain in a very clear way and try not to push them too hard.
In order to know the students’ feelings, Mill would go to his students directly after class and asked them if they understood the lessons and what their overall feelings were toward the class.
I ask them why they choose my class, and they say, “It is ‘Useful’!” They say what the teacher teach in class can incite their resonance [towards their lives]. (…) The students and I are in the same age, and we can understand what is going on in our lives and we can share our thoughts through this language.
Mill said he had some struggles. “Sometimes what the teachers do does not match with what the students need,” he said. He used to teach in an interactive way and tried to force students to think and talk in class; however, his students told him that they preferred something more direct. “They want answers,” he spoke in a disappointing way. Facing this kind of response, he said he tried to meet the students’ needs through his handouts and continued using his own ways to teach during the class. He did not force students to speak; instead, after he asked a question, he would stop and look around, and then, he
‧
would answered it by himself. “It’s just a compromise between dream and reality,” he said.
He said through teaching in the adult English learning buxiban, he wished to share his life values with his students. “What I want to bring to them is something they can use in their daily life.” He usually used his life experiences to encourage his students. To Mill, English learning is about showing perseverance. Just like studying for a master’s degree, which is the highest position in life that he wanted to pursue. “It is not what you can do or not, but what you want to do or not,” he usually told his students. He emphasizes,
“Everyone has his own professionalism, and just like my professionalism is English.” He said,
I’d never studied abroad and I didn’t come from a wealthy family. My father is a taxi driver and my mother just work part-time. And… I don’t go to buxiban… My family background might be worse than theirs [the students], but why can I become your English teacher right now? Because I invested a lot of time and will. And I believe in myself. I keep going even now.
Mill tried to encourage his students through his own English learning experiences, he told them, “English learning is a process, and it is not a result. It is a friend who can accompany you to become a grown-up. If you view English only as a result [like scores], you will lose your passion in [learning] English continuously.”
Being an English teacher in buxiban for eight years, Mill thought that he was trained to own an ability－how to make students learn English happily. This brought up a
memory.
There is a School F in Taoyuan. As everybody knows, F is an extremely suck school.
‧
And I tutored an eleventh grader who studied at F and his grade was very bad. His English scores were going downwards, from 23, 22, and then to 6. His parents were freaking out. But then, I quit the tutoring job! I told them, “It is useless to learn in this way.” I told my student that… he should learn from some magazines that would be easier for him to understand. If he continued studying like memorizing English words and grammar, it would only destroyed [his interest in English]. However, he did not want to listen to me! He still kept “memorizing” the vocabulary and learned English by rote. The way how he memorized the vocabulary was to bone up on all the vocabulary and sentence patterns at the night before the exam. It’s useless! I told him it was useless, and he could not accept. What could I do? He just could not get it! I spent a lot of time telling him my life experiences, but he just could not accept my thought. Therefore, I found a solution－move on, I needed to move on. I needed to learn to move on. Don’t make myself become a strict teacher, and that was a way to respect him. Not learning well on English doesn’t mean you would ruin your life, doesn’t it?
Mill said one of his international friend called him an educator when he shared his thoughts about being a teacher. His friend told him the way he spoke was like an educator.
And Mill replied him, “No, being an educator is too tiring.” He laughed and said it was nonsense. He said, “My initial goal for being a buxiban English teacher was just for making a living－I did not want to live a tiring life.”
Because it [being as an educator] is too tiring…The students just come and go. No matter how much we love our students, they do not pay attention to us. If they do not pay attention to us, why do we need to waste our time to be with them? I don’t want to be like…sunlight. I mean I don’t want to be a teacher like the sunlight shines on
‧
the whole world… I mean… I don’t want to love ALL the students. No! I think it will be easier to have some resonance with some of the students. That will be okay with me. If I don’t have resonance with you, good-bye, then. Please choose other teachers. It’s none of my business.
To conclude his feeling of teaching in adult English learning buxiban, Mill said, “I am just a passing-by teacher traveler. When time passes by, they will leave and I will leave.” “These students are passive learners. At least, this is a place for them to keep learning English. And through English, I can transmit my views toward life to them.”