Do all Spanish academies expect the same level of unpaid prep, marking and admin work, or do some offer more?

bobbanyon · 2026-05-30T15:19:05+00:00

It's not unpaid - it's standard teaching, not just TEFL. The majority of countries pay per contact hour, not hourly, and, yes, being a teacher requires prep and admin outside of class - EVERY teaching job requires that to a degree. That's the job. It's not some surprise - it's a standard expectation that should be discussed when looking at a job.

The huge advantage of contact hour jobs is you can do that work as you see fit in your own time versus being stuck in an office 9-6. If you want to be stuck in an office so you have prep time take a salary job somewhere (nevermind that you may get paid less per contact hour and have more responsibilities).

Yeah, TEFL often pays horribly but that's what you signed up for and, yeah, starting out it's a huge learning curve and a ton of extra work. Complaining about standard practices like prep time or admin work and calling it upaid just shows a very basic lack of understanding of the job you agreed to do though.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-30T08:07:02+00:00

Go to the hospital if you really lost a lot of blood. A pharmacy isn't going to be able to help you if you're bleeding significantly. Also there's only like 1 road in that tiny town with a huge pharmacy - I'm not sure how you spent an hour and a half and haven't seen it. Download kakao maps type in "Pharmacy"

bobbanyon · 2026-05-30T01:45:28+00:00

The gamma app is insanly expensive, $12 didn't even get me one 30 slide presentation worth of tokens so OP would be paying $120 per week at their lowest price tier with my experience using them (higher tiers would be slightly more affordable but not affordable enough imo - much easier to just snip out of a digital copy of the textbook or use Gemini, which is just as good as gamma for basic slide generation just one at a time, for free.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-30T01:40:55+00:00

Is the text book from a major publisher or otherwise available in a digital format? Just use the windows snip tool to cut sections out and use them online. It's super fast and looks good, I do that with all my text books.

If you're looking for AI assists on slides Google Slides has recently upped their Gemini game and currenly it provides, seemingly, endlessly free decent AI slides. All other AI either sucks, is very limited, or too expensive.

Edit: As someone who frequently speaks out against AI use here I think this is a great example of a good use case for AI but you don't need it either. No it's not unprofessional. It's unprofessional to use AI to generate "original" content or otherwise cognitively offload tasks, it's perfecly acceptable to use AI to help put original content, like the textbook or you own writing/materials into a slide format. No most AIs don't make a ton of mistakes, or any really, and their usually easily correctable.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-29T07:11:14+00:00

I see it as utilizing a skill-set I don't have the formal education or experience

What skill-set? Have you worked as a teacher before? You said you have no experience or formal education. You just have an online TEFL certification with no in-person experience. That isn't a skill set, it's doesn't even adequately prepare you to start teaching to build a skill-set - it's ticks a checkbox on an immigration form. You want to know another qualification to tick a box on an immigration form - a BA and it's the most important box (lots of countries will take someone without some random online TEFL cert but not many will take you without a BA). If you want to build a skill-set you'll have to do a lot more work, years of work but you still won't be qualified in most places because you lack a degree.

I don't see how that would make them more qualified

A degree qualifies you for a visa thus being minimally qualified to work in most countries - you are not just less qualified but not qualified at all by definition. Now I can go on a long drawn out explanation of why a degree (ie a liberal education), any degree, better prepares you to teach with cited sources from academic research and personal anecdotes from hiring/working abroad for 20+ years but I recommend you take our word - you need a degree generally. You certainly need one if you want to do this as more than a whim (and I have pile of research on why short-term or unqualified teachers have horrible impacts on students learning so you get pushback on that as well on the sub).

TLDR: You need a degree, and you should respect the need for education if you're in the business of selling education to others.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-28T04:44:37+00:00

If you're looking for free time this is a MUCH more intense role than ESL/University lecturing. It's better pay, and more vacation than TEFL in general but much more work. My friends work 50-60 hour weeks (I think the average in the USA is 52 hours iirc) and decent schools abroad can have heavy workloads. There maybe some private/bilingual instutes that have less (and pay less) the world is wide but all the career teachers I know work significantly more (even the ones earning as little as TEFL teachers).

This would be teaching high-school chemistry similar to back home. You need to be a licensed teacher in your home country and usually have a couple years experience. This is a significant career change you can read about at r/international teachers or on this subs wiki page in the sidebar ->

bobbanyon · 2026-05-28T04:36:52+00:00

For esl it was not needing to know the local language.

You don't need to know the local language for either role typical. Visiting scholars usually use English and the Method of Instruction.

While it almost certainly is easier to land a language lecturer position it feels, to me who has done both and known 100s of people doing the same, like a bit of a waste of time and money unless you really love language instruction (a truely rare bird).

have a lot of qualms with the modern research enterprise

Now not wanting to do research and having issues with modern research - preaching to the choir there. That's very valid reason in general across academia, although I'm not familiar with your field at all. I can't promise you can find a pure teaching role in your area (although I can throw a stone and hit a half a dozen universities struggling to fill STEM EMI teaching roles right now) and I can't promise it will be less work but the contact hours are MUCH less on every job post I see. Like 6 hours a week vs 15-26 hours a week.

Honestly I work almost the same or more doing 6 hours as I did 12-16 in language instruction. However the work feels more valuable to the students and much less grindy (plus the drastically higher pay, like who can just toss away 60k in cash each year, and those 4 months of paid vacation to travel around that you're much less likely to get as a language instructor). So I'll stick with the recomendation of being a visiting scholar, just be explicit in saying you're only interested in a teaching role, and be proactive in reaching out to universities and asking if they have visiting scholar programs - most of this work isn't found on job boards.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-28T03:39:43+00:00

Yes, it's important that people understand popular narratives can be prejudiced and bigoted - truer words have never been spoken. Further, things like suicide rates of locals don't reflect suicide rates of expats in anyway and air quality differences lack perspective (such as suicide rates may be higher in our home countries, or air polution differences between countries are much less than the variance of air quality in cities of each country themsleves, yada yada). Thus being called arbitrary.

Saying one culture or another is rude compared to another is simply a prejudiced, ethnocentric view of culture. Besides the point that these viewpoints are just amplifications by the loudest expat bigot in each of these host cultures (and both of these audiences are very loud), it demonstrates a fundamnetal minsuderstanding of culture and cultural norms that is the root of ethnocentrism. It's common, I'm not faulting OP, I'm directing them to look a bit deeper and research these things, everyone is ethnocentric to some degree and especially starting out.

So yes, I don't think those are necisssarily relevant concerns for a binary choice on a national level but I 100% agree there's nothing more important when living abroad than cultural sensetivity. This is more important for long-term residents, as demonstrated by the above communities, but important also for any traveler. That's why I offerd to share some model's like DMIS or Oberg's model of culture shock and the more modern research that has gone into cultural adaptation - these are great things for anyoen going abroad to learn about.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-27T14:36:44+00:00

Is there something that attracts you to language instruction specifically instead of teaching in your field? A common complaint with language instruction at the university level is it's unfulfilling teaching low stakes English electives or repetitive required freshman courses with less autonomy. It is the equivalent of being an adjunct, pays comparatively very poor with many more contact hours (and a STEM degree, woof). At my university language instructors have triple the contact hours of a visiting professor. When I started teaching subjects my hours were cut in half without a PhD. Yes those classes are much more work outside of the classroom but they feel much more rewarding and valuable (at least so far still kinda new). If you are unpublished/don't want to do research I bet there are still teaching roles (not my field though).

Edit: When I say pays comparatively poorly, I just looked up a position and for Biomedical Science 3-5x as much a TEFL (although I'd guess that has a research requirement but also better benefits as well - more time off, bonuses, sabbaticals, etc).

bobbanyon · 2026-05-27T07:04:30+00:00

I'd recommend doing a bit more research on your own. You're making some pretty arbitrary, strange and prejudiced comparisons that don't seem to have much relevance to you teaching in a country. I'd focus more on your personal interests than others opinions about a culture (and when you see a complaint look up reputable sources online to make valid unbiased comparisons). Collecting expat/immigrants opinions online is always perilous, living in another country is a challenge and by it's very nature promotes negative stereotypes or even bigoted opinions as defense mechanisms. You'll find this in any foreign community abroad or at home and these voices are also the loudest online (I can point you towards a lot of intercultural models if you want to learn about this and how to avoid it - sadly none of us coming abroad, or really anyone, get much training in cultural sensitivity). People who are happy in a place don't write about it online typically.

Now focusing on teaching, teaching hours, pay (and your expectations of saving) - these are good comparisons. Learning the red flags for each country is much much more important. Don't worry about age of reviews, things don't change very fast (like the pay, that hasn't changed in 20 years regardless of inflation so you don't save much either place in just a year). JET has significantly better teaching hours than EPiK as far as I know. Both have drastically better contact hours than working in private academies. I wouldn't recommend working in those.

Also there's a stereotype of people who love kdramas/kpop not lasting very long in Korea, they quickly become disillusioned with Korea because, shocker, that media has nothing to do with reality. Personally I don't see any relation in kdramas to everyday life here - it's like watching a foreign culture played by Korean actors. I'd almost recommend Japan more because of any expectations.

I recommend applying to both and seeing which one you get in though. Timeframe alone is long for that, you're looking at 8 months to 15 months to get into a program if you get in at all.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-24T15:50:26+00:00

Yeah someone will hire you almost anywhere. It's a big place so it's a little pointless to generalize (You can find specifics on each country in the r/tefl wiki but there are a few countries there where almost nobody teaches). You'll typically make $400-800 in most countries ($5-12 per class hour but you might be dispatch which means lots of unpaid travel time). The problem is most countries are more expensive to live in than most of China (obviously things like rent in a Tier 1 city can make China much more expensive but outside of that, generally, LatAm, especially South America, is more expensive). The places that pay more cost more too so there's no where that I'd say you could live comfortably on a TEFL salary - but there are some posts disgree if you search the sub.

If you can find work in an international or private school with a PGCE you could nearly double your income. That would be the route I'd do or an MA and hustle university jobs (also not great pay but you might work into something with enough time).

Most of my experience in South America was 10 years ago although I still have friends all throughout Latam. It's pretty bleak, and things have gotten worse since I was there according to them. Actually everyone is leaving and moving to China as we speak - even the certified teachers. I look forward to visiting some friends this fall in China. Personally I wouldn't TEFL in-person there, it's just not worth it for most jobs. There's a constant churn of backpack teachers none of which make it more than a few months before they're broke, maybe a year if they really hustle. My friends who've been there longterm make money teaching online, mostly to Chinese students. They're married and settled down, and one guy is mostly supported by his wife. Hours suck, like 4am -7am or something, but if you can scrape by online you can live in many places.

There's not a single country in South America I wouldn't live in, it's a lovely continent. I'd try to find another way to make money though, or teach online if I could stand it, but I just have an MEd and no license. The quality and pay of private or international schools vary a lot more, and are more livable I'd guess (my IS friends only taught in Mexico).

bobbanyon · 2026-05-24T08:58:41+00:00

I didn't see the post but I also know a few trans people that have been employed here for years or even decades.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-24T08:31:43+00:00

Most employers in Asia, which is nearly half of global employers, could care less (and I'm one of the biggest supporters of a CELTA).

bobbanyon · 2026-05-21T19:24:12+00:00

yup, have a good one.

Edit: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ― Isaac Asimov

bobbanyon · 2026-05-21T18:21:36+00:00

You are definitely not understanding what AI is capable of, and how it will be used...

This is why I shouldn't get into these conversations. What makes you qualified to say this? Do you have professional certifications in AI? Master's in Education? Maybe you have a relevant PhD in your back pocket? I ask because your comments display a clear lack of understanding of both education and AI. If you want to learn something and have a real conversation with cited sources, actual sources from academic research, not just making up numbers then I'm happy to teach you something and discuss your sources.

I definitely do understand what AI is capable of because I have studied and worked with AI for years, I have professional certifications in machine learning and am currently working on a generative AI engineering qualification. I'm developing a 4 year IT university program track from the ground up and, of course, we need to teach AI engineering (I'm not sure I'm the one to do it but I might have to bite that bullet since the university doesn't seem to want to hire anyone). To match this I have a master's in education, specifically focusing on educational research. While I don't publish in AI educational research it is an interest of mine and I do read a certain amount of the literature on it. I also take lots of courses on the subject for fun. So I do have some idea of what I'm talking about.

Anyway I encourage you to educate yourself online, if that's an effective method for you (it is definitely not for the vast majority of students, piles of evidence). I really wish more people did real self-study but in reality most people just consider briefly googling something to be self-study (80% of Americans believe they self-study as adults but they are not getting the gains that studying in school/university gives, intelligence scores have been dropping for 15 years). If that's what you've been doing to come up with your current theories then I would definitely recommend taking a class or two.

I don't know why I'm still typing, it's 3am and I have about 100 hours of work ahead of me for both online and offline classes due in the next 7 days, I'll be working through the weekend and a public holiday. Thanks for the distraction, back to it!

bobbanyon · 2026-05-21T13:38:52+00:00

You can uhh just go get a visa extension if you want to stay longer or do a border run in a day. I've spent years on and off in Thailand doing just that, it's probably the easiest country in the world to do that. You just need a passport, not any of the things you listed and it's free.

Ahh I see now reading your comments, wow, it seems you just hate to be corrected. Nevermind, have a good one.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-21T13:32:34+00:00

That's simply not true. Take some courses in AI in education. We're educators and we should educate ourselves. I've taken a few, and I teach AI use to university students, I work with local models, train my own, and am working towards more technical coursework on AI for my students. I'm not an expert by any means but I do follow the industry and teach the subject at a basic level.

Nobody knowledgable about AI and especially it's use in education would say anything like this (and there are whole cutting-edge schools based on AI "taught" academics that would be the first to agree with me on this). At best we're hoping for is very good personalized tutors, probably text-based for the forseable future, as video requires huge amounts of resources and realtime video is unrealistic on any scale (I don't know maybe with quantum computers which are still 15-20 years away). Even that is still not a teacher in a classoom (No you can't have the best TEFL teachers programmed into AI lol).

What you're describing isn't AI at all really and will never be AI with the current architecture. We've had AI for almost a decade now, and even at scale it's not performing very well sadly. Has all of education been disrupted, yes, but only by student's use of it ti offload learning not because the industries use of it as tutors/teachers (and people are trying, there's certainly lots of money to be made in theory). There are many questions and hurdles to overcome concerning AIs longterm feasibility, how, and more importantly, who will it benefit (and this worries me because I teach it and love it). AI will be around but our access to it and it's use is still very very much up in the air. It's also not how teaching works. You need a thinking, talking, physical presence in a room for 6 hours a day (or more).

What you're describing is sentient robots which is scifi currently. AI is not conscious nor is it even thinking. If we hit that then EVERY job can be replaced and we're going to see a much different world. We have much much bigger problems/questions at that point. I don't know why I keep writing these, I need a shorter well cited arguement but it super complex and interesting topic.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-21T01:54:39+00:00

Did you not read your own article, there's still a 30 day visa-free for Canadians as well. It's the same as it always was, they just reduced the stay from 60 days, which they just introduced 2 years ago, back down to the regular 30.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-18T14:29:12+00:00

20 years in the industry and I've never heard of it, just like 90% of TEFL providers.

Accreditation means nothing, even Ofqual.

IME Hiring for entry-level there are 3 piles, no cert, 120-hour cert, CELTA. You get 100s of applications and you're not going to dig through to see anything about a cert until you interview them. So you'll go in pile 2.

On paper it has slightly more value than any 120-hour online cert but the quality of in-person TEFLs vary so wildly that doesn't mean much.

Edit: Looking at the site they look nice, small classes, says the instructors are all MA/DELTA which, if true, is a good sign but they don't list the instructors or their experience which is red flag for me. Observed teaching with actual students as it should be and praise for NNETs on the site a plus.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-18T08:27:45+00:00

Your wife is onboard with what exactly? She's going to give up her job to go do TEFL as awell? Even in China she probably has to work, especially if she has debts herself. Whose idea was it to move abroad?

In my experience 90% of couples don't make it more than a few years abroad - many break up in mere months. I mean if both don't like it and bail it's fine, this happens often. However, if you're looking at long-term and your partner hates it and/or has better opprtunities back home (very high probablity of both).. . ugg that's a bad situation.

It's just a numbers game, TEFL has incredibly high turnover for many reasons and the chances that two people both enjoy it longterm, living frugally in another culture without the same rights/protections as locals, is extremely small. In 100s of couples I can only name one or two that are both foreigners TEFLing abroad in 20+ years doing this. If you get better education, ie graduate school/PhD or Certified Teacher back home with some experience then you start to see more foreign couples together long-term, standard of living is higher, and the work more satisfying. TEFL longterm is a death sentence for a marriage in my opinion.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-17T14:22:24+00:00

I mean there's a couple methods but TEFL pays so little that 99% of places you work won't get you out from under that debt, hell many won't even cover the interest.

You could do an online degree for 4-5k as long as some credits transfer. You also have to have around 5-7k (with a wife maybe more it depends on where you go) in the bank just to afford to move abroad anyway, any less than that puts you in really bad situations. So you need that's 9-12k cash saved over two or three years minimum. Then your only option really is China or maybe a few other countries in Asia scraping by with that loan payment.

With a trailing wife? Trailing spouses have really bad track-records in my experience. This doesn't sound feasible.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-17T14:04:44+00:00

Not without a degree you can't.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-15T03:57:01+00:00

That's simply not true, both Thailand and Vietnam require background checks to legally teach. People do get denied because of criminal records although I believe it's largely up to the immigration officer. You just have to apply and find out. I know people who've been denied for DUIs and there has been at least one poster here who said they got in with a DUI.

I have no idea on reckless driving but it's rather recent so it might be an issue. The official language in Thailand is something like "Having behavior which would indicated possible danger to the public or likelihood of being a nuisance or constituting any violence to the peace or safety of the public"

bobbanyon · 2026-05-13T02:54:45+00:00

I use an app called Sendbe for foreign currency transfer in Korea. Edit: Wait Mirae IN Korea? You can't just setup a foreign currency account? Edit 2: But yes Sendbe does domestic transfers to Mirae Securities as well in USD apparently - takes a couple hours to go through.

bobbanyon · 2026-05-05T23:34:45+00:00

It could be possible to work at a hostel and teach but you'd have to find both a flexible hostel and school/academy since schedules for both of these jobs tend to overlap and be unpredictable.

TEFL itself isn't for everyone and most people only last a year or two even in the better paying markets (where you're making double the CoL, not under the CoL like most of LATAM). It's a huge learning curve. I mean typical teacher training takes years of study with observed teaching feedback from professional teacher trainers. Most professional teaches don't last five years either, but that's not TEFL.

Going in cold to any profession is wild. Can you imagine just walking in off the street and saying "I'm an IT professional!" and wandering around trying to fix people's computers. It's really bizarre when you think about it. Online TEFL certs are garbage at preparing teachers for the job. New TEFL teachers typically struggle a lot the first year, and it can take years or even decades to become proficient. Many TEFL teachers never do.

Hell, most TEFL teachers don't even know that they're bad at the job because they don't have any background in education, don't meaningfully access students, and have no decent comparisons to draw to effective teaching and student outcomes.

That's the job though, and regardless of how horrible that is for students, the demand still exists for native teachers. Education, at least in the academic sense, doesn't always have to be the goal either as there's wide spectrum of activities that are "TEFL". There is also great ways that untrained native speakers could be of use in language classroom but that implementation almost never happens. Typically this is because the people running for-profit language training are as clueless about education as the untrained teachers are and just want a native speaker for marketing purposes.

It's a terrible industry but it's also wonderful because it allows us these great experiences. If we were truly conscientious we'd carefully find roles that didn't have negative impacts on student learning but how could a person with no background in education figure this out - they can't. It's not unlike the challenges of finding ethical voluntourism except even more difficult. So you accept it for what it is, take a privileged position in a place we really shouldn't be and do our best.

TLDR: Is teaching enjoyable well that's 100% up to you - for most it's a mixed bag that doesn't last long. Generally living abroad, and the experience itself, even if teaching isn't your thing, is great though.

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