Gary, an ESL teacher heading into his 10th year in Asia, shares why he's keeping grammar books closed for week one and why a TEFL cert no longer guarantees a job.
My summer got cut short by two days. I was still traveling when the message landed: summer camp starts Monday, come in. So here I am, interactive notebooks spread across my desk, about to head into my tenth academic year teaching ESL in Asia, and I've already decided a few things are going to look very different this time.
I keep seeing it on TikTok and YouTube: get your TEFL, travel the world, teach in Asia. I'm not here to attack TEFL. Having some training is better than having none. But the idea that a certificate alone guarantees you a well-paid job at a reputable international school? That's not the market I'm looking at right now.
Cambodia was probably one of the last places in Asia where you didn't need a degree. That's shifting. The schools with stronger contracts, the ones that actually pay on time (and yes, there are schools here right now still owing teachers from last academic year), are increasingly asking for degrees, teaching qualifications, and real classroom experience.
"People are arriving with a TESOL or TEFL to be then put onto a heap of CVs of others with exactly the same thing. Who rises to the top? The ones with a degree."
If you're sitting at home planning to do a free online TEFL course and jump on a plane, please look at actual job adverts first. Look at what the schools in the country you're considering are asking for, not what the company selling you the course says.
Last year I spent a lot of time firefighting. Students not meeting deadlines, taking a zero rather than submitting a project late, not understanding what a timed activity actually meant. I'd give an hour-and-a-half quiz and still get asked for five more minutes. That pattern didn't start in term two or three. It started in week one, when I let it.
So this year, the grammar books stay closed for the entire first week. No racing into unit one because someone thinks we need to clear three pages before Friday.
I'm your teacher, I'm not your bro.
What I'm teaching instead is how the classroom works. What I expect from students, what they can expect from me. How we enter, how we work together, what happens when a deadline passes, what acceptable behavior looks like, and what happens when someone chooses not to follow an instruction. If I don't establish those things in week one, I spend the rest of the year trying to fix them. Last year proved that clearly enough.
New teachers often think classroom management means getting students to like them. It doesn't. A teacher I know walked into an international school here in Cambodia, nervous, keen to connect, and started sharing personal things about his life on his first day. Things that probably should have stayed outside the classroom. One student took a dislike to him. When a disagreement over homework escalated, those personal details got used against him. Eventually the student threw a chair. The teacher lost the job.
Nobody needed a dictator. Nobody needed students sitting there terrified. But there's a huge space between being everyone's best mate and running a classroom well. That's where good classroom management actually sits.
Clear expectations, consequences, respect, humour, relationships, and boundaries. It works both ways.
Students should know what's acceptable from them. They should also know what's acceptable from me, the educator. And parents are part of that contract too. "Please don't tell my child off" is a sentence I heard a lot last year. I understand the instinct, but students need to learn that actions have consequences. That doesn't mean shouting or embarrassing them. It means: you choose not to meet a clear expectation, something follows from that. That's not punishment as an end in itself, it's how the real world works.
The phrase I kept hearing last year was "they're just bad at time management." Maybe. But I've started asking a different question: have we actually taught them how to manage their time?
We give students a project and say it's due next Friday, and assume they understand what that means in practice. What I saw instead was students starting Thursday night, everything suddenly becoming an emergency, and then somehow that became my problem to manage. If you've got seven days to complete something, what are you doing on each of those seven days? What's important, what's urgent, what can wait? These aren't instincts, they're skills, and they need to be taught explicitly.
"Experience shouldn't mean repeating the same academic year ten times."
One thing I'm genuinely excited about going into year ten is interactive notebooks. I've been experimenting with them through summer camp, particularly with younger grades, and the difference in engagement is real. Instead of opening a grammar book, answering ten questions, and closing it again, students are cutting, folding, moving pieces around, and building sentences physically. Grammar becomes something you do rather than something you observe.
Not every idea I've developed for this year will work. At some point I'll look at something I've created and think, who thought of that? But that's teaching. You try something, watch what happens, adapt it, and try again.
Going into year ten, having taught in China and Cambodia, in training centers, international schools, and online, I'm still looking at what happened last year and asking how I can do it better. Experience shouldn't mean repeating the same year ten times. Students change, language changes, schools change.
This year I'm going in with clearer expectations, stronger boundaries, more interactive learning, and better systems for projects and deadlines. And an entire first week where the academic books stay on the shelf.
We learn how the classroom works first. Then we get to the grammar.
