An ESL teacher in Asia, 9 years in China 🇨🇳 and now Cambodia 🇰🇭. What's it really like to teach in Asia?… I will tell you some tricks and tips. With a sprinkle of memories!
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Gary has spent a decade teaching English as a second language, first in China and now running a summer camp in Cambodia with roughly thirteen kids split across two grade levels. Saturday mornings that used to run back-to-back classes sometimes hold just one now, and he takes that as a sign that families are carving out space for something other than study. Teaching in China once allowed room to go off-script; friends still there tell him teachers are handed a textbook and expected to follow it precisely. Cambodia lets him teach Minecraft Education, where he walked a skeptical principal through
In 2016, I was unloading containers of chilli powder on a forklift in Felixstowe, six in the morning to six at night, living in a caravan, when one of my boxing students messaged from Asia: "I got you a job in China." I left with one suitcase, a backpack, an iPad, a phone, a passport, and £1,495 after paying for the flight. Getting there was its own ordeal. A 12-hour layover in Mumbai where I couldn't leave the terminal, a lost suitcase that contained my only clean boxer shorts, and a work visa process that involved handing my passport to a man with glasses and a brown bag at the top of an esc
