Newsletter (2017-2018) November 2017 Newsletter | Seite 9

(approximately 93 HKD) per hour, while students pay
Hess 200,000 NTD (approximately 52,000 HKD) per
year. Even worse, if you work there as an intern, you
only get 150 NTD (approximately 40 HKD) for doing the
same job as other employees. The reason for that is
that they believe they are offering you a great
opportunity to learn so that you should be “grateful.” 
course but cancelling this system will not avoid
teachers teaching to the test just. More often, some
teachers are unwilling to change their teaching
methods, but they should adopt and develop new
methods of teaching. 
I was once eager to be a teacher, yet the education
system in Taiwan is so terrible that makes me wonder
Recently, Ms. Tsai and her Democratic Progressive
if it is worth it to become a teacher in Taiwan. Given
Party (DPP) has announced policies to cut monthly
that lack of respect offered to teachers, the low salary
pension payments for teachers and raise the
and terrible new policies, it takes courage to become
retirement age to 65. This is a total disaster. The
teachers nowadays. If you know anyone who is a
reforms make it such that senior teachers cannot retire teacher, please do not hesitate to give them support,
and new teachers cannot get official teaching jobs.
for being a teacher is not as easy as you think.  
Kids, as we all know, are energetic and like younger
teachers. So how could you suppose primary students
pay attention to teachers who are elderly enough to be
their grandparents? A new study by the National
Bureau of Economic Research shows that experience is
the most important factor in most professions, but not
in teaching. The report is not saying that older
teachers should retire because they are burned out.
However, from what I have seen in the classroom,
primary students need young teachers who are more
energetic and enthusiastic. Teaching young kids is a
truly energy-consuming job, so it is best not to have a
big generation gap between young students and their
teachers. Even worse, while we are learning about
innovative and creative teaching methods in university
like flipped or student-centered education, most
teachers in secondary schools are still teaching
students in a traditional way, such as giving lectures or
evaluating student performance on tests. To my
surprise, some even think that flipped education is a
strategy employed by schools that fail to recruit
enough students.
Sadly, the unthoughtful policies announced by
Minister of Education have caused the situation to
deteriorate. Last year, the DPP government allowed all
junior high school students to enter high school
without taking a standardized examination. It
common for teachers in secondary schools to teach
their students to pass exams because of the streaming 
NOVEMBER 2017
|
09
Julie is an exchange
student from Taiwan,
majoring in English
education.