Retention- by Ruby

I remember we talked a lot about retention. We raised a lot of ways to keep our students back to our classrooms. Recently, I got some deep feeling about that.
I remember in Feb., we got more than 22 students in the class. However, after two new teachers (without ESL teaching experiences)took turns to teach the whole class, this month, we only got 12 students left. At first, I thought they would come back next time. However, several weeks passing by, we still got only 11 to 12 students left. I suddenly realized that even students with very limited English proficiency can tell who has teaching experiences and who has not. Although no one was born to be an ESL/EFL teacher and everybody deserves his/her first chance of teaching, the reality is very cruel: once students begin to doubt your expertise, it will be very very hard to get them back to your classroom.
I always thought native speakers of English got the privilege when it comes to teaching ESL. However, recently I found that many Americans cannot explain the basic grammar issues correctly no matter it is phonetics, phonology or syntax. I have never thought that it is the academic studies in Linguistics and TESOL that make the non-native speakers (like me) much more professional than those who speak English for their whole life if they are not TESOL or linguistics majored.
When they were teaching English vowels, even I could not understand what they were talking about. They even asked the students to read aloud the rules of pronunciation with them, hoping that the low intermediate level students can get the epiphany of how to pronounce English vowels automatically. On the very next week, ten students were gone and I guess they will never come back.

Life is cruel. Reality is cruel. TESOL is cruel.