Hi pinayinchina-

I've read several of your posts here and you seem to be taking the nationalistic pride/hurt feelings track too far. Filipino posters here in this forum in the past have also taken offense by what is written, but honestly I see little that can be seen as attacks on your country or race. Sometimes these threads are interpreted as anti-Filipino rants by the Filipinos themselves.

Teachers don't necessarily resent your presence as a teacher because of your place of birth or heritage, but because of the level of your English. You mentioned in your post that quality of writing in a forum doesn't matter, and imply we not teaching here. I believe that is where you are wrong. Maybe you are not teaching English to students, but you are teaching other teachers about Filipinos. What is the impression you are giving? If you leave an impression with others that your langauge abilities are good sometimes and at other times you don't care, what might that mean?

Just reading through your posts, and posts by other Filipinos and non-native English speakers, can be difficult and confusing. You frequently mix tenses and make tense mistakes in your posts, so often as a matter of fact, that I can only guess these mistakes are frequent even in your classroom. One of the biggest difficulties that plague Chinese students is with tense problems. If you are not using tenses correctly in your speech with your students, not only are you not correcting their errors or giving a good example, but are in fact are exacerbating and enabling the problem.

Maybe you would like to do a little experiment? Go back and read your posts, and those of other Filipinos, with a critical eye. How often are there tense problems? How often do you mix up him/her and he/she in your speech? Then ask yourself how difficult it would be for a language learner to learn from a teacher that continues to make the same mistakes that the learners make.

Once you identify yourself as a teacher, you will be judged by the quality of your expertise as a teacher. The first impression that others will have of you as an English teacher is your use of the language.

Maybe some of your pride can shift from heritage to profession. Generally, the rest of us don't care where you come from; we just care that you can do well in the classroom as a teacher. This is our profession also and we like to see high standards in all of our colleagues.