repeated question : I do NOT have a degree but I want to be...

I understand where you are coming from,but I have seen some really intelligent degreed teachers who were horrible!

I agree with Alan. I have also seen some degree-less teachers who have plenty of real-life experience and a passion to share it... They were wonderful. Teaching is an Art and some are gifted with the ability, while others are in it for the wrong reasons - then suck at it!

I read lately that a full 11% of United States children had been "Home Schooled" at least one year.
Presumably it was from a mother who had had little schooling herself. Now with 40+ years experience running a business I offer my experience to teach to others and am dissed for it.
I meet teachers in some of these Latin countries who do not understand about capitol letters and periods, and have never met a comma. I picked up a book that purports to teach English to children in Guatemala and it starts out "I have a poopy." the next page says "Your name is Snoopy." It continued on in the same veil for 64 pages, more than half having errors of that type. I can do a lot better than that helping to prepare kids for their confrontation with the real world.
I already have my pension so so I can take the job you’d turn down which isn’t working toward your pension.
Der Fish

I agree that it’s essential to know the subject you want to teach. Sure, those with Degrees should possibly be given preference but I’ve spent all my adult life in addition to my work in engineering, studying some course at College or Uni & in my experience just because someone has a degree, doesn’t mean that they can teach that subject. I went on a TEFL weekend course at Leeds in the UK, everybody but myself was Degree qualified, yet one of them couldn’t spell! I mentioned this to the tutor but she said it didn’t matter. What a Joker! However, in some respects language is just about communication, being understood, you don’t need the ability to hold a conversation with someone to get your point across but you do need vocabulary & grammar. I must admit, I have seen some comments posted by English teachers on various sites & they leave a lot to be desired.
I gained my Celta this year & applied for teaching jobs in China but a number required a Degree,
C’est le vie. Anyway Engineering is far better paid if I could get a job. Oh I’m native English, but we can’t speak English correctly, for reference see the film ’My Fair Lady’ with Rex Harrison, especially ’Why can’t the English learn to speak’.

Comparing a doctor and native-speaking English teacher is like comparing apples and oranges. We are teaching something that comes natural to us. I grew up in the USA. The best teachers I have personally seen have no degree, instead a lot of heart. My college degree has nothing to do with teaching. I did learn a lot in the TEFL Course, which I was required to take. My school has two properly degreed teachers and they think they are better than everyone else. Furthermore, they are very lazy with a poor attitude. Someone with no degree and experience will greatly improve if they really enjoy the job and have desire. I have been doing this for three years now. My teaching and classroom management skills have improved tremendously since day one.

How important are your students to you? What are you willing to do to insure success? As important as credentials are (and I think they are important!) - the answers to these questions are equally so. Attitude is paramount.

I read lately that a full 11% of United States children had been "Home Schooled" at least one year.
Presumably it was from a mother who had had little schooling herself. Now with 40+ years experience running a business I offer my experience to teach to others and am dissed for it.
I meet teachers in some of these Latin countries who do not understand about capitol letters and periods, and have never met a comma. I picked up a book that purports to teach English to children in Guatemala and it starts out "I have a poopy." the next page says "Your name is Snoopy." It continued on in the same veil for 64 pages, more than half having errors of that type. I can do a lot better than that helping to prepare kids for their confrontation with the real world.
I already have my pension so so I can take the job you’d turn down which isn’t working toward your pension.
Der Fish

I can claim to be able to "paper the wall" with teaching qualifications, Masters/diplomas/PGCE/Diplomas - yet two of the finest teachers I have ever known had no degrees and talent I could only envy. I had to "rescue" a "teacher" with an Oxford Ph. D in English, in an EFL lesson when he realised he’s got totally lost - some time after he’d utterly stranded his students. Look at the person, not their papers!

Renate
You obviously do not know what you are talking about. Lots of very qualified people do not have the ability to teach. I am insulted on my own behalf and on the behalf of qualified teachers who do not hold a first class degreee, most of whom are excellent teachers.
Hopefully you will crawl back under the rock you came out from under.

I think it depends on the situation. I have read many times that teaching Pre-K is more like babysitting than it is teaching. And in Korea at the high school I worked at, they liked a structured approach centering on textbooks that taught reading comprehension. Some teachers like the fact that my pronunciation was good so they’d have the students ’listen & repeat’. I would be given as many as 250 - 300 vocabulary words and the students would repeat words after me and then take a spelling test on any 50 words I chose from the list.

Therefore, a lot of what I have heard and experienced doesn’t necessarily require a college degree. Having that said, I saw a lot of papers written by college students at my university and I don’t understand how they made it out of high school.

In my opinion, you don’t have to have a degree to teach TESOL, you have to have your certificate and even with that it comes down to skills in the classroom and how well the person can relay the information, be engaging, and having patience with their students.

Renate’s writing is as bad as his dress sense and I find it hard to believe that someone with a language degree writes so poorly and can’t use simply past properly (the imaginary teacher of his children was not qualified in the past but is he qualified at the moment of speaking?). His argument is similar to the nonsense that only native speakers should teach English. Kenny, if you are employed, I wouldn’t want my children to be taught by you.
To answer the repeated question, if someone without a degree wanted to be an ESL teacher I would suggest doing the Trinity certTESOL (expensive but worth every penny) and working in countries where visa regulations don’t require a University degree. Or get a fake degree for visa purposes. :-)

I seriously have a problem understanding what you’re saying. Your language skill don’t suggest that you even know the language which leads me to think that you should be a baby sitter and certainly not and EFL teacher.

Thank you so much for your comment. This Renate person is most annoying really!

Renate ,

Unfortunately, your context of communicating the issue is clouded by your ability, (or lack there of) to write in a manner which would grant credibility to your concern. I suggest you represent yourself with getting some credentials ...it will also help your approach to writing English.

Well said David...

This cannot possibly be a legitimate post! Someone is goofing on us.

I hope you find a job teaching is a wonderful field.

Take care+
Bryan

Boo to those of you who resorted to personal insults. Is this the professional way to respond to an opinion with which you disagree?

I do not have a degree but have a lot of business experience and have been teaching for 11 years. During this time most of the graduates I have worked with cannot spell/don’t know their grammar, have no general knowledge of world history and geography and were distinctly lacking in ’common sense’. Did Einstein go to university?

I am a TESOL teacher. I took a tesol certificate course with a dutch woman with no degree who was by far the most effective teacher on the course. that being said, I have seen many well trained teachers who teach very well also. As it is, for schools that really want the best teachers need to look at credentials but also the teacher in action. the best schools will have the prospective teacher prove themselves. I plan to open my own school and will do just that. the proof is always in the action itself. Some uneducated people are smart and vice versa. if they have a gift for teaching, I will hire them.

As with all things human, nothing can be a perfect system, only God is perfect, but we try to employ some sort of test of those who will be in charge - and I still maintain, what I saw of classes run by ’’pretend’’ teachers (who were more concerned about their own ego than the pupils-) has made me certain of what I say! WHY DO THESE PRETEND TEACHERS NOT GO OUT AND GET A DEGREE and become specialists in their subject! Home tutoring parents are usually checked by trained teachers for tests and the material they use is usually derived from trained teacher sources! There is a whole list of pluses for the children besides just info. and as children spend MOST of their time within the classroom, certain standards should apply. Why don’t we all go the whole hog and not have trained hospital staff either or nurse training- Nurses don’t have to control 60-70 young, lively people, whilst getting them through exams. This is a peculiarly Chinese problem, too many young people in the system and not enough trained people, so they are having to use just about anyone. I know of some pretend teachers turned down by everyone except China, though I love teaching there-

Seriously? A thread specifically devoted to giving out about ’unqualified’ teachers and producing a litany of unfounded assumptions, all the while through the medium of a minefield of misspelling and grammatical errors. Fantastic Renate, great work. Glad to see the University time has paid off.

Re: Teaching w/o a degree.
OK, if you are really serious about this pursuit and have any degree of passion for this, you need to get proactive about it and get your university education and earn your degree. If you have any degree of understanding about how serious it is to have fully trained folks in front of students, you’ll understand why the responses to you are written the way they are: would you want a factory worker, trained for making shoes in front of students in a chemistry class? Have some respect for what education/educators stand for and get your degree and then you can teach!

Renate
such a spoil sport. My teachers were professionals through 17 years of school and most did not have the 1st clue about how to communicate much less apply creativity to teaching.
I now have a Spanish teacher with some spark and creativity
Jaime

Alexandra Chileen
November 7, 2011
Boo to those of you who resorted to personal insults. Is this the professional way to respond to an opinion with which you disagree?

Exactly. Some of this sounds like the political forums that are so popular with the uneducated.
I don’t know how my previous post got posted twice, but my internet gets interrupted often here and may have triggered that.
TEFL International claims that the world needs one billion English teachers. I found that laughable, Maybe 1 of that would be more accurate, but it still brings the number to more than the University educated can handle alone. And there are places where teachers are needed that those with degrees don’t choose to go. With your degree will you work for $228.00 US a month? I will. And my kids have as much a need, if not more so, than those who can afford to pay a teacher 10 times that much.

Renate, I have to agree with you on some levels. But the simple fact that someone goes to Uni and studies, learns, and took an exam to become a teacher does not mean that they will be a good teacher! Teaching comes from the soul. One has to have a passion for it more so than the what they have studied and read in text books. So you cannot say that one is better than the other. But rather one has a better CHANCE than the other and even there it would be dependent upon the individual who is the teacher or wanting to be. Learning the profession is of course an important element to becoming a teacher. But it is only an element and should not be seen as the only part of the puzzle that is a profession... any profession. The fact that there was "no pension" offered to you for those 4-years is sad enough but the reality that is today’s economic situation or even that of years gone by, is not a surprise. I mean come to the USA and here we are laying off teachers everyday and paying the price for that action that will have a vast impact over the next 10-years plus or so. Besides, who becomes a teacher for the money? No one. It has never been that way. Real life experience is not something that can be overlooked either. I have know many certified and well educated teachers in my 54 years of teaching who should have taken up digging ditches instead (no negative intended for the ditch diggers out there!). So, though you are right on the surface, there is far more to it than you stated. Sorry, but it how I feel.