Types of expats in Vietnam: The teachers

Since I have some time on my hands due to coming back from my vacation I will admit that I did a lot of running around to see everyone almost immediately upon my return. I don't have a large group of friends but I do have a group of people that are pretty dedicated to hanging out with one another.

In Da Nang, the expat population is not as large as other cities in Vietnam or other places in South East Asia, but it is still pretty large. I think I have nailed down the major types of expats that exist here and with my near 20 years of experience in South East Asia I believe I have the major groups of types of expats identified. There are probably similar segments (or perhaps even exactly the same thing) that exist in other places popular with expats around the world.

We'll start with what is likely the largest group

Teachers

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I was a teacher for a short period of time when I lived in Thailand. I did the job on and off for about 4 years and while I was good at it, I absolutely hated the profession. I will wash dishes at a seafood restaurant for the rest of my life before I ever return to that job, but other people don't seem to mind it.

There are actually two types of teachers here in Vietnam as well as the rest of Asia: The qualified teachers who make big bucks and the ones who scrape by with a degree in anything and a TEFL

Qualified teachers

It's actually quite difficult to get these highly sought after jobs at international schools and it is easy to understand why: These highly expensive and highly prestigious schools wont hire just anyone and in order to work there you almost certainly need to have a degree in education or English and at least here locally, many of the teachers have a Masters degree in one or the other as well as many years of educational experience in smaller markets.

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For example: The above school is the Singapore International School. In order to work here you can't just rock up off the airplane with your backpack, a nice shirt, and a TEFL certificate. You need to be extremely well-qualified to even have a chance at an interview. The standards that are kept up at this school are basically world class and the students who attend this school normally go on to study at European or North American universities. Their parents pay a hefty sum to get them enrolled and excellence is required of the students. The same excellence is required of the teachers. So much so in fact, that I rarely see any of the people that work there.

This is not play-time job for drinkin' money, this is a real career. They can expect to make around $4000 a month and when you consider the cost of living in Vietnam, most or all of them are putting away more money into savings than they would be able to do if they were teaching in their home countries - which all of them are required to have the certification to do so anyway. Most of them have years of experience doing exactly that but just decided to move over to Asia one day. These jobs are TOUGH and are filled with the usual office politics as well. On the rare occasion that I do see the people that work here they seem exhausted and of course have plenty of complaints about how there are so many ever-changing rules as far as the administration is concerned. I guess that is acceptable because they are handsomely rewarded for their positions.

Now let's move on to the 2nd type of teachers

Run of the mill TEFL teacher

I mean no disrespect by using this as a term but there is a HUGE difference between the duties of someone that works at an internationally recognized school and someone who works at a government school or language center. While it varies from province to province, for the most part you can get a job at a government school or language center with simply a degree in anything and TEFL certificate. Sometimes you don't even need the TEFL you just need to exhibit the ability to perform what I call "crowd control" in the normally super-packed classrooms that exist at the lower levels.

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While these schools are not dumps compared to other government schools I have seen in South East Asia, they certainly lack the glitz and glamor of the highly expensive international school counterparts. They also tend to be very crowded and noisy and just from walking outside of a few of them during school hours I can't imagine how anyone learns anything in them given the constant noise. Perhaps this exposure to constant noise at a young age contributes to how noise just generally speaking is so omnipresent in Vietnam.

The teachers at these schools tend to not stick around very long because the jobs are not very good. They tend to get very little in the way of support and classrooms can be chaotic. The students are also not allowed to fail so grading seems irrelevant. The teachers that work here tend to do so for just a year or so because they honestly can't take it anymore and the salary is significantly lower than the international schools. A teacher at one of these schools can expect to normally make $1000-1500 a month and while Vietnam is an inexpensive country, this barely covers the costs of the average expat lifestyle.

Now that I've explained the two types of teachers lets talk about what the people in these positions tend to be like. I will be generalizing here so I don't want anyone to get their panties in a bunch because I am not trying to suggest that everyone in these jobs is like this but it just seems to be the norm.

The International School teachers have real careers and have extremely high expectations of them and their performance. Therefore, this lot tend to be a lot more responsible so if you see them out at the pubs at all it is either a school holiday, a weekend, or they are just having a few drinks and going home before 7pm or so. Their jobs are simply too demanding for them to go in hungover twice a week. Also, since their jobs are so competitive and highly sought-after, they don't want to screw up their relationship with their employers because these jobs are very difficult to get and if you stick around for a decade, you've got one hell of a nest egg in savings since taxes are low here and there isn't any good reason why they can't bank more than half of their salary every month.

The government school teachers and language center teachers seem, generally, to not really give a damn about their jobs because, and I quote, "the administrators have no idea what we are teaching the students anyway." This lot are good people, and they certainly have a timeline that they have to stick to, but since the jobs are basically a revolving door, the school will be very lenient towards teachers if they are less than the best, which they almost certainly will be.

I frequently see these teachers out at the pubs on weekdays and they are staying longer than I do on many occasions even though I don't even have to wake up at any particular time. If they lose their job (unlikely) at one school, there are many other schools that are willing to snatch them up. These jobs are considerably easier to get but have very small job satisfaction rates so while I know I am painting everyone with the same brush, it appears as though they don't really care about their jobs and find the experience overall to be kind of futile. Many of these teachers say they are only doing it so they can have a long-term visa and therefore they do the minimum amount of work to just not get fired and that's it.

There are only a handful of international schools in this country so there are very few internationally-qualified teachers in Vietnam. Here locally, the number of this kind of teacher is in the dozens. As far as language school teachers are concerned, they number in the hundreds.

So at least here in Da Nang, they do not constitute a very large portion of the overall expat population. One group tends to be happy(ish) and the other normally hate their jobs.

In my next installment, I will get into a much larger portion of the expat population: The retirees