The Great Pretenders

Tigers are the great pretenders

N The Tigers have been lucky by staying healthy. While the Indians have lost their top three hitters to injury for significant periods and the Minnesota Twins have been crippled by injuries, the Tigers have lost only one contributing regular. Victor Martinez missed 11 games with a fractured bone in his thumb. Inge missing two weeks with mononucleosis actually helped the team. After 12 straight losing seasons, the Tigers finally surprised their fans by winning 95 games and reaching the World Series in 2006. But they embarrassed themselves while losing to St. Louis in the Series. Since then, the Tigers have been the biggest tease in baseball. They�re a strange organization that continually trots out nonproductive players based on the size of their contracts while hastily giving up on others (Scott Sizemore). Comments are welcome, but require a Facebook login. Please be considerate of our rules when posting a comment. We do not allow swearing, name calling, slander or advertisements. We operate under a zero tolerance policy; If a rule is broken once, you will no longer be able to leave a comment. To see a complete list of rules that apply to commenting, see our Terms of Service If you see a user breaking the rules, use the "report these comments" link.

The Great Pretenders: China's “Unfire-able” English Teachers ...

“I’m hungover every time,” said Michael Weiler with a grin. Michael is a 20-year-old English teacher in Beijing, and every Saturday at 10 a.m. he tutors a 14-year-old Chinese girl called Daisy. “Sometimes I’ll go straight from partying to teaching, and because I stink I spray on loads of cologne.” Although Michael is from Austria, the school that hires him tells his students that he’s American because they prefer a native speaker. Sometimes he forgets whether he told a student he was from Connecticut, or Chicago. Michael was hired without any previous teaching experience and given no training. Just thrown into a room with students and told, “go teach.”

If you’re in China and the kind of person with foreign friends under 30, chances are you know an English teacher. And chances are, they don’t take the job very seriously. While the rest of the world flails in the wake of recession-related disasters, the world’s second largest economy is only finding itself a larger and larger presence on the international stage. And with this comes the people’s thirst to master the only true international language. Last year China Daily reported that 400 million Chinese people are studying English – one-third of the country’s population. (The majority of these would fall into the school age bracket.) And the value of the English-training market is estimated at 30 billion RMB ($4.5 billion US).

This insatiable demand for English teachers has led to a situation that Samuel Cowell, a 29-year-old (genuine) American teaching English in the south of China, has made teachers like him “unfire-able.” He says, “the school basically just works as a matchmaking service between teacher and student. So if I’m consistently late, or am not a very good teacher, they could fire me, but it just means they miss out on the commission. And there are just so many students here, and such a limited supply of teachers.”

When Carolina Grespi (pictured), a 25-year-old Italian student, came to Beijing to study Chinese, she found herself wanting to stay on after her course finished. For many young foreigners such as herself, lacking the language skills or work experience to join the professional class of expats in China, teaching English is their only answer. And an attractive one at that: work conditions are usually flexible, while the pay, for Chinese standards, can be exceptionally high. For casual teaching in Beijing 120-180 RMB/hour ($18-27 US) is standard. A local tutoring Chinese with similar conditions will be lucky to make 50 RMB/hour ($7 US).

RT @: @ It is important to point out that India's present crop of Gandhi-pretenders have nothing to do with the great Mahatma Gandhi.

Man City will always be the great pretenders. Liverpool Vs United is and always will be the most important rivalry in those parts.

RT @: @ It is important to point out that India's present crop of Gandhi-pretenders have nothing to do with the great Mahatma Gandhi.

RT @: @ It is important to point out that India's present crop of Gandhi-pretenders have nothing to do with the great Mahatma Gandhi.

RT @: @ It is important to point out that India's present crop of Gandhi-pretenders have nothing to do with the great Mahatma Gandhi.

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