Life at School

Working in a private English language school in China is quite different than working for a regular school in Canada.The idea of what teachers and students are is also different than what is expected in Western societies.

A teacher is anyone who teaches:

I have been here for a bit more than a month and I have yet to meet a single teacher - in the Western sense of the word. Most of my colleagues are either undergraduates/graduates in areas that are not connected to education or don't hold any type of TEFL certificate. Some English teachers in China don't have a high school diploma. The reason for this is that English teachers here are not expected to be what we expect teachers to be in Canada.

English teaching has virtually been entirely de-professionalized. As such, English teachers are not regarded as real teachers/professionals. I once had a parent who speaks English come to me and ask me why I had no job back home. He thought I came here because I could not find a basic job in Canada. His attitude changed entirely when I explained to him that I had my English teaching degree but decided to learn about teaching practices in other countries, even if it meant less money in my pockets. Many Chinese hold the view that people working as English teachers in China have somehow failed professionally back home and that their only way out of being entirely destitute is to work in China for little pay. Unfortunately, some past and present foreign teachers have influenced this perception negatively. Could you blame a society that sees most English teachers don't have any kind of certification, are passing through and are often overtly rude and demanding for not having a positive perception of foreign teachers? On the other hand, foreigners are being hired by Chinese school owners who know full well that their employees have little to absolutely no qualification to teach English so they should also be held responsible for this situation.

Edutainment:

It would be more appropriate to see English teachers as edutainers. Teachers are basically hired for the following reasons:

- Being a novelty for young learners.
- Being a "perfect" input for American/British English.
- Being entertaining.
- Being able to go through the material (if it exists).

It makes perfect sense for your employer to want you to work with these parameters in mind. A private English language school must be able to make ends meet and as a foreigner you are a major attraction. Parents expect their child to learn things perfectly and because you are seen as a "perfect" source of English, it becomes a requirement for school owners to hire foreigners.It is not rare for me to have people just stop on the street to try and talk to me in English to practice. As a school owner, it would be logical for me to hire foreigners and tell parents that their child will be able to experience Western culture with a foreigner.

The Chinese also put a HUGE emphasis on perfection and making no mistakes, at least aesthetically . This translates into an environment where students will not participate much in fear of being judged by others. For them, it is better to pretend to know the answer and say nothing than to risk being wrong and lose face. As foreigners, our job is to put our students at ease, make sure they have fun, but also paradoxically we are hired because we are a source of "perfect" English and we should correct everything "wrong". Most people expect us not only to correct grammatical mistakes, but also pronunciation, which is unrealistic/tricky/impossible with students aged 3-6.

Sometimes, we have parents coming with their child hours in advance to "wait in the lobby". What this translates into is children that come into the teachers' office to practice English. This is the same thing that happens when you walk into the street and strangers start talking to you. Some students enjoy it, others have to do it because their parents make them. Here are two of my students:





Rote learning is boring fun! :

Being that students are expected to achieve perfection, the logical consequence of this goal is that they will have to learn English through rote learning (practice makes perfect line of thinking). As an edutainer, my job here is to find activities that will increase student participation and reduce student misbehavior. Here is a list of do's and don'ts you need to keep in mind if you entertain the thought of teaching English in China in a private school:

- Rote learning is regarded as the main and most valid way of learning, if not the only one.

- If you are provided with material such as books and props: You will use them. You are expected to provide/create/pay for any material you may want to use that is not provided by the school and have it authorized by a higher-ranking teacher/supervisor.

- On material: If it is provided it is EXTREMELY unlikely that you will be allowed to bring it home.

- You will use a reward/punishment system to manage discipline. Your Chinese co-teachers are expected to help you with discipline : sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

- Activities will have to be kept short and fast. In order to reduce impatience, we have to teach fast and change our activities frequently. This means that you may only have 2 words to teach for a 20 minutes period but will do 5 or more different activities during that period of time.

- Songs: If provided by your school, it will likely be tailored for your specific "unit", meaning that the tune and lyrics will be new to you. Nevertheless - even though you can't bring anything home to study - you will be expected to know these songs before classes, even if you are given your teaching plan some hours before teaching.

Self-introduction,a story and a game:

A friend teaching a group of very young learners. I would like to thank him for allowing me to put this up as I am sure it will be both entertaining and educational for members of my family, my friends and also other teachers who want to learn about the reality of teaching in China.

Students have to practice together their self-introduction (then perform alone in front of class - not shown here):



Same friend telling a story and making sure students memorized the words correctly:



Students during the final activity:



What to look forward to:

If you are, like myself, a teacher that prefers a "progressive" approach to teaching and learning, you may think that such an environment would be bad for you as a professional teacher (if you have a degree or higher). Still, I want to give you the following reasons why it is a good idea for you to come here and teach:

- The students: The vast majority of your students are very polite and curious. They want to learn more about you and your culture and will want to please you any way they can (by being good, by playing with you during breaks, by giving you some of their food/candies and so on).

- Your employer: While this will vary, you may be lucky and have an employer like mine. He is a nice man and will help you any way he can. He shows his appreciation for your efforts and your work in ways that are superior to what I experienced back home on average.

- Your school: If you work for a school like mine, you will be provided with both material and techniques. While this may reduce the scope of what you usually do in your classes back home, you won't have to worry as much about producing new content all the time. You can thus spend more of your free time doing what you like.

- Teaching schedule: Working for a private school means that you will mostly teach on evenings on weekdays (2 hours) and up to 8 hours per day on weekends. Sometimes you will also teach some hours during the day at public schools but you will receive a financial compensation for doing so. The average teaching schedule is about 15-20 hours per week, plus about 10 hours of preparation. I like this , but it is up to you to see if this sort of arrangement is good for you.

- Wage and apartment: My employer provides me with an apartment (free of charge) with free water/electricity/heating/high speed internet. It is actually nicer and bigger than what I ever had back home. It also is fully furnished and I had to provide little to nothing in terms of furniture. As for wage, expect to get between $800-900 USD per month, regardless of your working hours (as long as you teach every classes you are expected to teach in your schedule). While this is not much money in our Western countries, it is plenty here. Because I have free housing, I can manage to send about $600 back home to pay my loans every month!

- Food: Food is plentiful and inexpensive. You can have a meal for as low as $1-2 or even cook yourself and make it up to 5 times cheaper!

- Learn Chinese: By being here you can learn Chinese and visit China. This employment provides you, in practice, with the equivalent of a subsidized Chinese learning program and an unlimited "vacation" in China. Of course you have a lot of work to do, but if you enjoy teaching for its own sake, then you are likely to love being here!

- Issues: As a professional teacher, you may experience many caveats (some of which I talked about above). Nevertheless, if you are flexible and can learn to work with them in mind, you will see that your experience as a worker will be more than satisfactory. As a professional, you should think about the possibilities: You can experience a different teaching approach and this contrast to your usual way of teaching will probably help you grow as a teacher as long as you get into the mindset that you can analyse this situation and learn from it.



More to come (soon?) .

-Yan

Big Update

It has been a long time since I had some free time for myself. Now I can write about what happened to me so far in China.


Getting to Daqing:

To get to Daqing, I had to fly to Beijing from Montreal, connecting in Toronto, then I had to grab another plane from Beijing to Daqing. The flight from Montreal to Toronto took about an hour, from there to Beijing it took another 13 hours, then from Beijing to Daqing I had to fly for another hour. This means that coming here takes 15 hours by plane if you don't take into account delays and all the time it takes to check-in.

Unfortunately, my flight from Beijing had been cancelled due to a snowstorm in Daqing. I was left in an airport where almost no one speaks English well enough to inform me about my flight and what to do next. I could not find a public phone even though they had pre-paid phone cards selling machines everywhere. I managed to get into a net café at the airport to contact my employer by email and he had Chinese Southern Airlines give me a free room at an hotel. From that point I had to follow people I could not understand to some place in a city I know nothing about.

When I arrived at the hotel, I informed the clerk (who spoke English) that I was sent from the airport by CSA and that my room was paid for by them. She told me no she did not know what I was talking about. It took her 10 minutes to figure out that the reservation had been made under the name of the manager on duty at the airport and she gave me my card key to my room. I had to give my passport to the receptionist in order for them to give me my room. This also happened at the net café. I got free meals, got my passport back at 3PM and was given a free ride back to the airport at 4PM the following day.

Getting to the plane was fairly easy and I had no problem at all. I left Daqing's airport at around 7:30PM. My employer's assistant brought me to my apartment. It is big and it is furnished. The following day I was brought to the main office to sign my contract and I was given some help and shown where to shop.


Training:

The next day I started my training. The teaching philosophy of this school gives training a very specific direction. I won't go into the details of training, but it was mainly:

-An elimination process (for Chinese candidates - They only keep the best);
-Learning patterns and activities to use for specific content types;
-Learning efficient ways to do rote-learning and drilling;
-A chance for them to see if we feel at ease in front of a class.

Training was mainly easy although I had some trouble with anything that required quick memorization. I have a good head, but memorization is not my cup of tea. At the end of my training I was given my teaching schedule for the following week.


Snow:

In Canada, when it snows we use heavy machinery and salt to clear roads. In China, they don't use any salt at all: They break everything by hand using shoves and pick everything up using said shovels. They clear all the roads this way, including highways. They do have some machines that will go on the biggest arteries to brush the streets and remove leftovers or some others that will break the ice, but the picking up and clearing phase is entirely done by hand.




Harbin:

On Monday (our day off), I went to Harbin with another foreigner and our boss' assistant. We went by train. The ride was nice and smooth and I took many pictures. Harbin is a big city close to Russia. It even was occupied by Russian forced in the past.We visited underground stores and I bought a shirt.


Work:

The training I went through made teaching here seem much more complicated than it really is. Although the average schedule is light (I have an average of 14 hours/week to teach and some have about 20), the way it is scheduled is what makes it aggravating for some.

I work at a private English school. We teach English as a foreign language only. From Tuesday to Friday, students come to our classes for two hours after their regular school day. This means we will teach only up to 8 hours from Tuesday to Friday inclusively. This means that if you have a 20 hours schedule, you will teaching 12 hours during the weekend. Unfortunately, your schedule is also not planned by taking into account that splitting your hours evenly on weekends would be a good idea. This means you could end up teaching 2 hours on Saturday and 10 on Sunday.

Teaching only 2 hours in the evening sounds very good, and it really is not bad at all. It certainly beats work schedules I had before. The only caveat is that we have to prepare our classes at school because we are not allowed to bring the material or any textbook back home. English schools are everywhere in China right now and very little schools actually provide material, textbooks or any training. By not allowing teachers to bring the material with them, they make sure they can keep their advantage over their competitors. Given the situation here, I can't really blame them for this. Also, because you only have your "plans" from your Chinese co-teachers pretty late most of the time, you can't just sit down one day and plan the entire week in advance and be done with it. We also have "office hours". It basically is 4 hours we have to be at our assigned school to work on our plans for the weekend classes.

In the following updates I will go deeper on the teaching philosophy here and how I see it as a professional ESL teacher.


Food:

Food in China is all over the place. It is very inexpensive to eat here and you can find almost anything you want if you don't mind paying a little bit more. Of course, Western food such as hamburgers, pizza and hot-dogs are very difficult to find here but mostly doable in a big city.

You can have prepared noodles with meatballs for about 6 yuans (a bit less than a dollar right now) or have a meal at KFC for about 30-40 yuans.

When you eat something that does not have noodles in it , it means you are probably eating chicken. KFC and imitators are everywhere. Even McDonald (a lot less popular here than back home) has half of its menu made up of chicken burgers.

Most of the food you will find here is spicy. If you do happen to find Western brands here, it will most certainly not taste the same, and probably not to the best. For example, McDonald tastes the same except the cheese tastes more like Kraft cheese and the taste of ketchup is stronger. I buy skittles here. They are the same except they are harder to chew and they taste a bit different.


Getting around:

Bus: Bus rides are very cheap. It costs 2 yuans for a ride (about 30 cents) and they have a very good coverage here. Finding the right bus is difficult though because they don't have a bus routes map anywhere.

Taxi: Taking a taxi is also not expensive (unless, like me, you have to take one or a bus everyday in which case you're better off taking a bus and to save money on the long run). Getting into the taxi costs 5 yuans (about 70 cents) and you get 4 kilometers for that. Then they charge from 1.2 to 1.6 yuans per kilometer. They don't charge for time so you can stay in a cab during a traffic jam and not worry about the price going up.


This is all for now.

Take care.

-Yan

*I'll add pictures to this post as soon as I can.