I am a part-time teacher at a private junior and senior high school, and I am currently working on Trinity DipTESOL. I want to move on to an online MA in TESOL after that since many UK universities count the DELTA and DipTESOL as a certain amount of credits towards the master’s degree. My colleague disagrees with having a master’s degree while working for a junior and senior high school. He says I would be overqualified.
What do you think? I don’t intend to work at the tertiary level in Japan. I am studying voluntarily and love improving myself since my undergraduate degree was in an unrelated field.
8 comments
If you don’t mind spending the money, do it. I taught at a high school in which several teachers had doctorates.
Your colleague is free to disagree, you do what you like.
> My colleague disagrees with having a master’s degree while working for a junior and senior high school. He says I would be overqualified.
My thinking (as somebody who’s got one)…
– People always act as if having a masters is a big thing. I have three masters degrees all up and I’m not ‘over-qualified’ for anything. Rather, I wanted to learn about shit so I did them. None have directly led to me getting more money/respect/jobs but they’re obviously part of my story (in which my CV emphasises my experience, not my quals).
– IMO a misconception is that you do a TESOL so that you can teach in universities. They’re called a ‘masters’ degree but they’re basically a crash course in ESL/EFL that will qualify you to get jobs in tech colleges and similar when you’re in the west. One barrier to ‘going home’ is that ALTs aren’t qualified to teach ESL back at home (though their only job experience is in EFL), so they feel they can’t leave. Getting a TESOL gives you options when you decide to go home. As an example I designed/delivered a migrant English program for job seekers, a basic literacy/numeracy program for prisons (goood hourly rate) and various vocational English courses for tech colleges (and similar). I TESOL doesn’t make you an academic!!!!! It’s a basic coursework masters that takes 6-12 months full-time, is pretty easy and will make you a qualified ESL teacher.
– On the basis of the above I don’t think anybody with a TESOL is over-qualified for anything really. ALT work is what I call a ‘gap year’. If (like many) you’re from ‘Murrica, have a liberal arts degree from a small uni and are in Japan teaching English while you try to sort things out in life then they’re a pathway into becoming an ESL teacher when you return. Nothing more, nothing less.
– Final note… I wouldn’t put too much time/money into a TESOL. I was arguing with a guy on here a while back who said it took 4 years to get his and that my uni must be shit compared to his because his was SUPER hard, made hom VERY well qualified and blaaah blah blah… he’s now amazing because of it. Reality is that I’ve since done a law degree (in less than 4 years, including my professional certification). As respectfully as possible, IMO spending 4 years and a stack of money on a TESOL is a waste of time/money (and IMO the said person musta been a little bit challenged to have taken so long). If you’re wanting to spend time and money on a degree then IMO a professional degree (e.g. accounting, law, med, engineering…etc) is far more valuable than a TESOL.
>He says I would be overqualified.
That’s not for him to decide.
If you want to stay in secondary, why not try for moreland/a US license? It wasn’t 100% transferrable to a Jp context but I enjoyed it and felt like I gained quite a bit.
You seem to just like learning which I get because I am the same – if there’s a particular thing that draws you to a TESOL though I say go for it. I have heard that Japanese teachers will sometimes look down on MA holders for some reason (?) but you can always just omit it from your resume if that is an actual issue, especially if you were working concurrently…
I have an MA TESOL. It does not make you overqualified for junior and senior high school but that doesn’t make it the right choice automatically. It all comes down to *why* you want your MA.
I got my MA because I wanted to be able to look at my teaching practice and have a reason for what I was doing beyond “it feels right!” or “well that’s how my boss told me to do it!” or “I learned Japanese this way so obviously it’s best for everyone!” I also wanted to be able to critically evaluate new materials as they come up without being swayed by empty marketing hype. I wanted to be able to build my own classes and not be chained to a textbook. My MA TESOL helped tremendously with all of that.
But it’s far from perfect. While it helped me get my foot in the door when competing for an interview for a teaching job, it didn’t actually help me find any jobs. It didn’t help me get a promotion. It didn’t help me get listened to when I disagreed with how my department conducts teaching. It didn’t help me get respect from Japanese teachers. There are teachers in my school who see my foreign face and hear my less-than-perfect Japanese and just assume that the next young natural blond who walks in the door will automatically be an English speaker and therefore will teach just as well as I do. Foreigners are interchangeable.
It can be really frustrating to have people assume I am good at my job not because I studied my ass off in grad school, but because I’m a foreigner and therefore English just comes naturally to me. It can be really frustrating to have a flat career trajectory while many of my Japanese colleagues are getting mentored for leadership positions. It can be really frustrating to watch colleagues with less education make a dog’s breakfast of English department initiatives, and when you try to help, they smile politely, then utterly ignore you. It can be really frustrating to know from recent linguistics research that your students could be learning faster, with less frustration, while having more fun, only for someone older in the department with less expertise to go, “but this is Japan…” and force you to conform with some approach from the 1950s. And of course, it also has to be said that it can be frustrating to know there some methods of teaching are absolutely more efficient than others, and have a native English-speaker colleague trash-talk EFL research just because they haven’t done it.
On balance I’m happier with my MA than without, but someone early on told me not to count on it getting me a better job. After graduating I did get a job that was better on paper, so I assumed that meant they were wrong. Now several years later, I feel more ambivalent. If you care about doing your job well, it is worth it. But post-MA I’ve had to work with far too many people without it who somehow got into equivalent positions teaching in private schools to think it actually means anything when it comes to advancing your career in Japanese EFL.
It’s probably cheaper and less work in the long run to just go drinking with your principal.
if you are working as a direct hire teacher, most schools offer a different per hour wage for those with MA qualifications. check with your school 👍
Just do it anyway, it’s not like you have to tell anyone.