ESL Traveling Teacher

ESL Traveling Teacher

An ESL teacher in Asia, 9 years in China 🇨🇳 and now Cambodia 🇰🇭. What's it really like to teach in Asia?… I will tell you some tricks and tips. With a sprinkle of memories!
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Gary has spent a decade teaching English as a second language, first in China and now running a summer camp in Cambodia with roughly thirteen kids split across two grade levels. Saturday mornings that used to run back-to-back classes sometimes hold just one now, and he takes that as a sign that families are carving out space for something other than study. Teaching in China once allowed room to go off-script; friends still there tell him teachers are handed a textbook and expected to follow it precisely. Cambodia lets him teach Minecraft Education, where he walked a skeptical principal through building a hospital, planting a rooftop garden, and hiring workers to harvest crops for the patients. The principal came around. Gary asked his students to log one week honestly: homework time on one side, screen time on the other. One boy logged twenty minutes of homework against three hours thirty of YouTube. A fair number of kids say they want to be influencers, and Gary's response is a genuine question rather than…

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Teaching English in the Age of AI Doubt

Gary has spent a decade teaching English as a second language, first in China and now running a summer camp in Cambodia with roughly thirteen kids split across two grade levels. Saturday mornings that used to run back-to-back classes sometimes hold just one now, and he takes that as a sign that families are carving out space for something other than study. Teaching in China once allowed room to go off-script; friends still there tell him teachers are handed a textbook and expected to follow it precisely. Cambodia lets him teach Minecraft Education, where he walked a skeptical principal through building a hospital, planting a rooftop garden, and hiring workers to harvest crops for the patients. The principal came around. Gary asked his students to log one week honestly: homework time on one side, screen time on the other. One boy logged twenty minutes of homework against three hours thirty of YouTube. A fair number of kids say they want to be influencers, and Gary's response is a genuine question rather than…

23 Aug 2026
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One Suitcase to China on £1,495

In 2016, I was unloading containers of chilli powder on a forklift in Felixstowe, six in the morning to six at night, living in a caravan, when one of my boxing students messaged from Asia: "I got you a job in China." I left with one suitcase, a backpack, an iPad, a phone, a passport, and £1,495 after paying for the flight. Getting there was its own ordeal. A 12-hour layover in Mumbai where I couldn't leave the terminal, a lost suitcase that contained my only clean boxer shorts, and a work visa process that involved handing my passport to a man with glasses and a brown bag at the top of an escalator in a Hong Kong underground station. I had a one-way ticket and no backup plan, so I handed it over. Two days later I had my passport back, a visa stamped inside it, and a WeChat message with a train booking number. My bags arrived at 2 p.m. and I needed to be at the border crossing by 3. Standing there, about to step into mainland China for the first time, I had no idea what the next ten years were going to look…

10 Jul 2026