Bad Things about Teaching in Taiwan: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs
I often rant about the evils of the Ministry of Education, but now foreign teachers have a new enemy; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
MOFA has implemented some new regulations governing the certification of foreign instructors. I am not certain what they are, but evidently they are even more complex and bureaucratic than the MOE requirements. Be warned that documenting your educational credentials may be very complex.
Another problem is the documentation of previous teaching history. When I was hired, the MOE asked me to produce proof that my resume was true. I have no idea why this was so, but they did. I had to go to a previous employer and ask for a letter stating that I had in fact worked for them during the time I had claimed. In spite of the fact that there's a tax record of this, they wanted more paper.
Another emerging problem may effect how much money you make. Some of the new teachers in my school have extensive teaching experience in other universities. In such cases, it is possible to negotiate with the schools to give you credit for this experience and pay you as if you had been working at their school for the same period. I am coming to understand that the amount of documentation and the difficulty of obtaining it overseas makes this virtually impossible to ever do this. If a school offers you this deal, even in good faith, it may be impossible to get the money for it.
While we can think of all sorts of 'culturally'-based explanations for this type of situation, the reason is more likely based in politics. The MOE has always been bad, but the badness it emanates these days is related to the DPP-government appointmentees who run the organization. MOFA, on the other hand, is a far more conservative group. Many of the bureaucrats that staff its desks are still appointees from the previous KMT government. They don't get along. My guess is that MOFA is making it hard for the MOE to do its job.
10:46:02 AM 
Bad Things about Teaching in Taiwan: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs
I often rant about the evils of the Ministry of Education, but now foreign teachers have a new enemy; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
MOFA has implemented some new regulations governing the certification of foreign instructors. I am not certain what they are, but evidently they are even more complex and bureaucratic than the MOE requirements. Be warned that documenting your educational credentials may be very complex.
Another problem is the documentation of previous teaching history. When I was hired, the MOE asked me to produce proof that my resume was true. I have no idea why this was so, but they did. I had to go to a previous employer and ask for a letter stating that I had in fact worked for them during the time I had claimed. In spite of the fact that there's a tax record of this, they wanted more paper.
Another emerging problem may effect how much money you make. Some of the new teachers in my school have extensive teaching experience in other universities. In such cases, it is possible to negotiate with the schools to give you credit for this experience and pay you as if you had been working at their school for the same period. I am coming to understand that the amount of documentation and the difficulty of obtaining it overseas makes this virtually impossible to ever do this. If a school offers you this deal, even in good faith, it may be impossible to get the money for it.
While we can think of all sorts of 'culturally'-based explanations for this type of situation, the reason is more likely based in politics. The MOE has always been bad, but the badness it emanates these days is related to the DPP-government appointmentees who run the organization. MOFA, on the other hand, is a far more conservative group. Many of the bureaucrats that staff its desks are still appointees from the previous KMT government. They don't get along. My guess is that MOFA is making it hard for the MOE to do its job.
10:46:02 AM [Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "commentLink" hasn't been defined.]
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