About six months ago we made a decision – we were leaving Shenzhen before the end of the year, no excuses. We didn’t know where we were going, we didn’t really know what we would do. I had vague hope that outside of China my M.Ed might mean something. We originally set our sights on Australia for no other reason than it seemed a remarkably pleasant place to live and work. One of the few things we knew was that, for various reasons, the wish not to go home was even stronger than the desire to leave English teaching in Shenzhen. We wanted to leave Shenzhen for one big reason. We felt like we weren’t developing.
Category: Teaching English in China
I remember the day I decided I wanted to stay in China longer than a year. I always suspected I would, for lack of other ideas, but I remember the precise moment. I was on a ferry to Haikou, capital of Hainan Island, as token white guy for my first company on a business trip with one of the wealthiest men of the island. Arden, a coworker, told me our company was trying to partner with international schools in Shanghai. She told me the salary – it was more than I made in America. Suddenly those high-rises around Shenzhen looked approachable. A had a new girlfriend I was crazy about who I’d like to live with in one of those apartments. Travel around Asia, a new camera, more frequent flights back home and a lot of other things seemed easier. So did a lot of things.
I taught for a year in America but left before I was a certified in Florida. I decided, on that boat, to do whatever the hell I could to get certified or otherwise value added. Stay in China, pick a good EFL job, and a pave a road somewhere else. Within a month I had applied to Hong Kong University for their Master of Education program. Almost three years later I’m in those high rises with my wife and we’re both making those salaries, I’ve got the M.Ed, but I’m still an EFL teacher.
That’s where a new chapter in my life begins. I want out. I want out of China, I want out of English teaching, and I’ve set a deadline to be out by the end of this year. We’ll see. It’s harder than it seems. In the meantime I’ll be blogging about it. Why I want it, what the prospects are, what I accomplished in China, what my future is with China, and all the rest.
They’re a bad class. One of the worst. They stare blankly at you while you ask them the most simple questions. “Where’s your hometown?” They’re quietly bad. They suck your will to live as a teacher. They force you to confront and ask, “what the hell am I doing here?” Honestly, I have no idea why I’m asked to teach English to 3D animation majors. Nobody does. It’s on the list so I show up. Sometimes I can bring an infectious enthusiasm, sometimes I go in – like today – with a swollen jaw and three stitches inside my mouth from oral surgery.
You ask another student her name. She does that thing they do. You know, look at her friend and ask for a translation. She tries to look clueless. Helpless. Sometimes I make fun of them and whisper to another student, “pssssst, wo jiao shenme mingzi???? What’s my name???” They laugh and don’t do it again for a few minutes. Then I ask another question. She’ll be the girl giggling incessantly with a 1500 word English vocabulary in a few years when she actually finds herself in the a situation once in her life when she needs to speak English. Ten years of English classes for what, exactly?
I stopped myself though. I do this sometime. I find myself blaming the class. It’s good for a teacher to blame himself when classes go bad. Rethink, reorganize. Try again. A student was struggling to answer the question, “why is your hometown special?” He understood all the parts of the question but couldn’t put an answer together. We waited. Deadlock. A game of chicken – who would give up first? Would I go to the next student or make him answer? I thought on my feet – I do that sometimes – and said, “use your dictionary, I’ll ask you again in two minutes, ok?” “OK.”
It worked. He had an answer. I tried it with a few other students. In a few minutes the whole class was on task and talking .One of my favourite education philosophers, Paulo Freire, once said all teaching problems are ideological problems. Sometimes the best thing a teacher can do is break their own pattern of expectations. From our own perspective it’s sometimes difficult to see how authoritarian we can be sometimes. We’re demanding tricks. Do it here and now without delay. You can accomplish a lot when you turn that off.
We work 8:30 to noon most mornings. Usually I go to my other job from six or seven to nine. There’s a lot of empty time in between. We sleep. A lot. Two to four is not uncommon. You try to get up in between. Your cold. Or just tired. It’s difficult. So you keep sleeping until guilt pries you out of bed. It feels like my life in China overall. A quick break that dragged on hours longer than expected. Only the feeling that I should be doing something else, anything else, is what drags you out.
There’s almost no such thing as a “promotion” in this line of work. Usually we sort our own affairs out after a rough or fun first year. You find the money or the students you’re looking for. I’d always wanted to teach college. So that’s what I do. It’s what I’ve done for two years. At core, it’s almost identical work to what I’ve been doing since I got off the boat here. But I can call myself a college teacher. You should see what I did to call myself a Head Teacher for a year.
It’s the first week of classes. I spend about five minutes introducing myself and another twenty five reviewing what we’ll be doing for the semester. Showing the book I use, my method of teaching, class expectations (a Chinese-English dictionary, notebook, and a pen for every class), and such. I end with this:
“There’s one more thing about this class. If you don’t want to be here, stay home next week. Really. Meishi. It’s no problem. If you don’t want to be here you don’t need to come. Come to a few classes and take the test and you’ll get a C-. Sleep, play computer games, chat online, or come to my class – suibian (it’s up to you). I’d rather have a small class of students who want to be here than a large class who doesn’t.”
It is not impossible to make more than I made as an American high school teacher in China while enjoying the lifestyle that comes from living a developing countries cost of living. It’s the land of $5 massages, $2 meals, and easy-to-find $20/hr part-time work. It usually takes time though. For comparison, Saudi Arabia is usually hailed as having the best salaries for TEFL teachers in the world. An older friend looking to buy a house and retire with his wife in Thailand did the calculations of what it would take to get that house factoring in salary and cost of living expenses. Two years, he said, in Saudi Arabia but just three in China. The bottom line is that you won’t be poor teaching in China, and in fact can have a higher quality of life than teaching in America.
I’ve worked in Mainland China for almost four years now. The first year and a half was as a recruiter for what turned out to be a fairly awful company. I want to share here my experiences working in this field and watching trends since I’ve been here. I really like what EmptyBottle.org did for TEFL in Korea and want to make the same thing for China
Visas are the most common headache for foreign teachers in China. My own wife was “deported” once because of a visa crackdown. Start processing the kind of visa before coming over – it’s much more difficult trying to get things worked out inside of China
Treyopia v3.0 