If you take it "as I said before," it's fine with me because I say this again and again on this thread. There are more important factors to make one a good teacher other than knowledge or skills. If the teacher has a passion to learn English he/she can make up for the lack of his/her knowledge or skills in the langauge.
>>954 Way to go buddy. Again, hint hint, it's just the context was like >>953, so if you are feeling like that then that's pretty much in accord with what I meant.
When people here find out that I'm a teacher, they start shouting at me and say, "Be ashamed of yourself." OK, I may not be a great teacher but not bad either and most of my co-working teachers are just good. I just don't understand why people make it such a big deal out of something like TOEIC, TOEFL, EIKEN.
>>956 I don't care for certifications much ether and I think most of the teachers must be good, but you've gotta see the title of this silly trolling thread, and looking at how that "wall" guy acted, I have to say there really are bad ones as well.
I'm pretty much sure I've talked with someone like the "wall" guy before. They somehow hate (or despise) Japanese English teachers probably from their own limited experience in their school days. One of them was a son of a high school English teacher. The guy really looked down on his own poor Dad, who is now retired but he didn't study English at all when he was a teacher. The son, on the other hand, was quite into learning English and excellent at it. The son assumed all the teachers were like his old father. It's sad that he cannot respect his own father.
Now I've found I was called a liar. Probably I should be offended for being called a liar. I'm a teacher and I got 627 in TOEFL(PBT) several years ago. Does it sound unlikely? Whether you like it or not, it is true and I'm not lying. It might sound contradictory if I say teachers need not be too much concerned about their scores in TOEFL(TOEIC) because I've already got quite a good score...but I mean it. We'll keep improving as long as we have a passion to learn. In doing so, we can show our students how we try to improve ourselves. We are all non-native speakers and almost none of us was brought up in any English speaking countries or have ever lived in any other countries besides Japan. However, we can probably be a good model for our students. Look at us. We studied and study and are still studying English here in Japan. Although our English is far from perfect, wecan communicate well using English. Isn’t it something?
I'm not surprised you are one of them. Well, what is your opinion about the topic of this thread, then? Are you a teacher yourself, too? Are you a student, whose teacher is hopeless? Or are you a parent of a kid whose teacher can't use any English?