pretenders and burn outs

ive come to learn 'foreign' teachers round my way are claiming to be citizens of 'better' countries than they are actually from.
tell tale signs are dodgy accents that the chinese dont notice, and poor spelling.
some 'decent' teachers corrections to a students work, ive just had to correct myself! stuff a 5 year old native might not mistake!

im losing all respect for my peers, get there on the hour, leave on the dot, and blank me just because im british white and the parents prefer me to a black yank. not my fault!

and they never help anyone who isnt paying them.... am i the last gentleman in china?

It's wonderful that you can tell the citizenship of a person from their accent.

Your post was nigh indecipherable. For a Brit, you sure like to take liberties with your punctuation and grammar. You are an English teacher, right? 

I would argue that one should not be so eager to cast aspersions upon the grammar of other teachers when same person is, consistently, incapable of using capitals for the first person singular pronoun and seems oblivious to the usage of apostrophes when using contractions. Furthermore, what was the point of this post? Perhaps one should refrain from using phrases like "black yank". I, too, am bowled over by your ability to detect the nationality of other educators by their accent. How very Henry Higgins-like of you. 

oh, sorry for a few things i didnt make clear...
this is a forum, where informal speech and grammar rules apply, we are basically 'talking' so i 'aint bovvered' about writing a masterpiece.
but correcting a students work is important so i thought a little more care should be used there.
im not guessing regarding nationality, 'higher ups' mentioned it.
well, my attempt at a half humourous rant failed magnificently, ill get me coat. (slang round my way, 'me' for 'my' is ok in speech!

An accent can provide a clue, but in today's more mobile world, it's not nearly as strong of evidence as it used to be.  Even so, I do have a sneaking suspicion that a certain very muscular former governor of California just might have been born outside the confines of the USA.

Grammar rules do tend to vary a bit between World Standard English^{TM, PatPend} and the lesser forms of English spoken in the UK it its other former colonies. This can lead to 2 people vehemently disagreeing on a grammar point, while each is perfectly correct by the grammar rules of the originating country.

ive come to learn 'foreign' teachers round my way are claiming to be citizens of 'better' countries than they are actually from.
tell tale signs are dodgy accents that the chinese dont notice, and poor spelling.
some 'decent' teachers corrections to a students work, ive just had to correct myself! stuff a 5 year old native might not mistake!

im losing all respect for my peers, get there on the hour, leave on the dot, and blank me just because im british white and the parents prefer me to a black yank. not my fault!

and they never help anyone who isnt paying them.... am i the last gentleman in china?

Good for them! America is a country of immigrants anyway. What's in a name?

In either case, there are some folks who give a damn. Let's use the bad examples as a warning to keep rein on ourselves.

Sorry English Gent I am from the UK,my accent seems to have changed as my husband can't understand it so I adjusted it a bit for him and I have been away for 30 years.I couldn't make head nor tail of your original posting and,even though not using capitilization etc is okay on a forum I really think ill for I'll is a bit much!

i understood OP'ses firstest post on the first read through. must be sumpthin wrong with me.
 

And a forum full of English teachers are perfectly aware of the usage of "me" for "my", I learned that amongst other things as a post-graduate English student in Manchester.

ive come to learn 'foreign' teachers round my way are claiming to be citizens of 'better' countries than they are actually from.
tell tale signs are dodgy accents that the chinese dont notice, and poor spelling.
some 'decent' teachers corrections to a students work, ive just had to correct myself! stuff a 5 year old native might not mistake!

im losing all respect for my peers, get there on the hour, leave on the dot, and blank me just because im british white and the parents prefer me to a black yank. not my fault!

and they never help anyone who isnt paying them.... am i the last gentleman in china?

I used to do voice overs for children's books. There was usually two of us, the other had to be female. The guy running it had trouble finding a good English speaking girl to suplement the duo. My friend who did this was almost native speaker level. One time he said he found a girl who said she was from the states. He asked me if I could tell or not. After she said hello I had trouble to determine whether she was from Russia or the Ukraine as her accent was so heavy. I'd bet the farm she had never set foot in America even once.

I asked her where was she from in the USA, first she said America  

Then which provence. She said the province of Minnesota  

Which city? She said Minneapolis. So I asked her if she had ever been to the Twin Cities - she said never  

Last question, I like to fish, so I asked her if Minnesota has any lakes. She said she didn't know as she stayed in the city (Minnesota is the land of 10,000 Lakes)  

I assured my friend that this girl is not American.

That is NOT the only time I had spoken to someone about this sort of thing





 

I had this exact same experience about 4 years ago. I AM from Minnesota, and was introduced to a new part-time foreign teacher staff member at the time. "Oh she's from MN too." The Chinese staff informed me. Obviously not. It didn't take long for her to admit that she was from the EU, I forget where now - perhaps Netherlands. She told me she picked "Minnesota" as her claimed region, because she (rightly) figured no one had ever heard of it or would challenge her on it. I guess a passport was unnecessary to et the PT job. Anyway her English was fair enough and she seemed to do fine with the primary school children.

Hey BrandeX, did you like my test for her?

Yes, I think the questions are simple enough to have been answered by anyone living there for even a short time.

When I'm asked where I come from, like most Americans, I always give my state (Texas), but in China, when I do that I get tis confused look with a follow-up question of "where's that?" "(sigh) America"

I then have to explain that because each state is different, we identify with our home state more than we do with the country of our nationality.