A little, well, a lot, about my contract and some problems with this job

Before I get to the main subject of this post, a couple things to write about.

If you're interested, the BBC and WBUR, independently, seem to be
doing a lot of stories on China lately. Right now I'm listening to a
BBC story about Wal-Mart in China. It's interesting. The Connection,
on WBUR, has also had a series of shows about various aspects of
China.

In other news, I tried an interesting concoction for breakfast. I
don't really keep too much prepared food around, because I'll eat it,
but I've found that having some cooked rice available is nice in the
morning, can make an acceptable rice porridge by mixing it with with
some hot, freshly mixed, soy milk. Unfortunately, while it's not
terrible, it's kind of bland, and I haven't yet engaged the services
of a student to help me track down spices. But I did get a couple
packets of various spice mixes from the guy at the market. There's
(now there's a story on Shanghai) one I have that's for a cooking
style from Western China/Central Asia. It's got some coriander, I
think, a flavor which goes well with the pudding, and something that's
called Sichuan peppercorn, which doesn't have all that strong flavor,
except it makes your tongue get tingly and go a little numb. I also
put in a little sugar and some bee pollen, which Paul (another
student) got at Taihu Lake in Suzhou and left behind. It was
surprisingly good, interesting, not gross. I will say that the
porridge works better when the rice is freshly cooked, it absorbs more
water. More work to do to make some really good recipes though.

Now the main part of the post. I've been doing some talking over
e-mail with various people about issues that have come up with getting
the ISLE assistant position and various things about the way the
school works, which I'll try to compile together because I think y'all
might be interested.

Unfortunately I won't be able to complete my contract because it's a
six-month contract, ending July 17th, and there will be orientation
and some pre-program work to do in the US starting in June. When I
decided to take the job here I knew that conflict would be a
possibility, so I worked a penalty-free two-month notice clause into
my contract, which, besides being useful in this case, is advisable in
a Chinese teaching contract, so the teacher has a way out if the
situation is really bad, which does happen.

It's also worth noting that while I will, insofar as reasonable, treat
the contract as a legally binding document, it is not. I don't know
all the details of Chinese contract law, but if it's going to be a
legal document there needs to be a Chinese translation for the
bureaucracy (and then you've got to make sure that there is a clause
saying that the English translation is equally valid), and probably a
bunch of other stuff. And generally, if it's a real contract it's
worthwhile to get yourself a bilingual lawyer. So this isn't that,
it's a four-page Word document in more or less passable English (I
understand what is meant even if it isn't written quite correctly)
which begins by stating that it is a friendly agreement between the
two parties, nothing about being legally binding.

Also, in the next week three teachers are leaving, one taught his last
day on Friday and two others will be leaving next Friday. It's
unusual for so many people to leave so close together, but staff
turnover seems to be part of the way a business like this runs,
perhaps especially for Omeida. Most places will set a minimum time of
6 months, or one semester, some of the more stable or well-paying
places will ask for 8 months or a year, others in more remote places
will ask for 4 months. So even if everyone who taught here agreed to
work for 6 months, which is the minimum for the bonus, and work were
spread out evenly, no couples teaching together or anything like that,
with nine teachers there'd still be someone leaving about every 6
weeks.

But Omeida is fairly rare in that it is located in a place that is
very attractive to native English speakers, which makes recruitment
much easier but retention more difficult, as a fair number of teachers
become such not because it is part of their plan, but instead because
it makes it easier and cheaper to spend time here. As a result, some
people are only willing to work for a month or two. Then there's the
occasional teacher who will not put in any effort or fall asleep while
smoking in bed and accidentally start a fire or sleep with (a)
student(s) or otherwise cause problems and eventually quit or get
fired. This doesn't seem common, but happens. On top of this,
because of the ease of finding native English speakers, the salary is
pretty low, so there's less incentive for people who aren't happy to
stick with it. It all adds up to a pretty high rate of turnover,
usually around 3 per month. It's just having all three leave at once
that's rare.

Let's see, just before I got here, or I guess it was during my first
week, one guy quit just before he got fired (he was the one who set
his bed on fire, and whose room I moved into). He was replaced almost
immediately by an Australian woman. A couple weeks later, just before
the break, two people, a couple, finished up their time here, and were
replaced by a retired Scottish geography teacher and a retired Dutch
doctor, who was volunteering for a month and was recently replaced by
a woman from Canada. And now the changes I mentioned before. The guy
done now is from Australia and will head to Shenzhen with his
girlfriend (Chinese) and be replaced by a bit of a scheduling change
and a Chinese teacher who has been working at another school that is
connected to Omeida. I'm not sure who Ben and Laurie, who are done at
the end of next week, will be replaced by. There was a girl who
graduated from Stanford a couple years ago who had been saving up to
work and travel, but when she actually got to China and realized how
cheaply she could get by, she decided not to bother with working.
There's also an Australian woman who, as far as I know, will be taking
over, but no one's seen her for a while. I don't know.

In any case, this usually doesn't seem to cause too much of a problem.
There's a sort of continual recruitment drive, and the administrative
staff seem accustomed to it. As for the students, I don't think it
hurts too much, for a bad reason. One of the downsides to this school
is that, while the Chinese staff are great and it attracts good
students and mostly good people to teach, it doesn't seem to do too
much to seek out trained or experienced teachers, nor does it provide
much curriculum support. Because of this, I don't think the quality
of teaching drops all that much when new teachers change. There is an
adjustment period, more so for untrained teachers, but it seems that
the most important thing for the students here is the opportunity to
get practice and gain confidence in speaking English. So a fair
amount of teacher turnover might actually be a good thing, give
students more exposure to different accents, different approaches,
etc. And then there is the fact that a lot of the students are only
here for a couple, few weeks. In the short-term confidence, comfort
level, and extension of vocabulary are probably the most important
things, which they will get no matter what, so revolving door for
teachers isn't a huge problem for them.

I think the biggest negative impact is on the students who are here
for a while, a few or several months. For real improvement students
need continual, practical, but structured practice with English
grammar (especially in China, Mandarin is lacking in a lot of things
that seem indispensible to most speakers of Western languages, like
plurals and verb conjugation), which they don't usually get too much
of here. A continuous teacher might provide the stability needed to
do the review necessary, but much more important to this would be a
consistant, well-structured curriculum, clearly explained and overseen
by someone qualified to do so.

The lack of structure, besides not being great for students can be
frustrating and cause problems for teachers as well. Basically, you
get assigned to a couple of classes that you pretty much stick with
for your whole time here, unless you request a change, and you're told
what book to work from, and what chapters were taught last. It's not
too bad, but there are a few things worth elaborating on.

First, I was assigned to teach Business English to the Higher and
Lower Elementary classes, and BE is, um, less than choice. It's
usually boring, I'm not interested in it, most of the students aren't
interested in it, and the ones who are aren't interested in it in its
own right, but because they want to do business in English. However,
I'm sticking with it because a) I don't want to hurt the students by
switching to something else and leaving it to the next new teacher,
who would then
probably do the same thing (it was what was happening when I got here)
and b) I don't know all that much about business, which means,
perversely, that I don't feel too guilty for not straying all that far
from the book, putting in as much effort as I
would feel a need to when teaching something else.

Second, the way students are placed is based on the curriculum in the
New Interchange series of books (a pretty good way to go), but I've
got to teach a book from a different series that's specialized for BE.
This book is a problem for several reasons, the simplest of which is
that it's above the level of the New Interchange book they're using
concurrently and by which they're tested. Furthermore, this book is
focused on specialized vocabulary, phrases, and grammar that might be
common in business situations, but isn't always all that useful for
everyday life. Also because of the BE focus, there aren't all that
many different or interesting ways in which to practice the grammar,
which is basically the way I was taught to teach, don't teach grammar
per se any more than necessary, but structure your lessons to practice
certain grammar points that are appropriate. A final minor problem
with the book is that, as it's published by Cambridge, it uses British
English spellings and turns of phrase which can be a pain to explain
or just have to read or listen to. Besides which, outside Hong Kong
and the occasional student who will go to England or Australia for
study, American English is generally much more important to Chinese
business people than British.

Third is the occasional problem with level testing. It's done not by
the native English-speaking teaching staff, but by the Chinese
principal, whose English is okay, but by no means fantastic. This
results in some student misplacement, which can be bad for their
self-esteem if they're placed too high and maybe even have to be
bumped down or make them bored or frustrated and be bad for the rest
of the class if they're placed too low. Worst though (and what has
happened in my Higher Elementary class) is when some students who are
here for the long term (2 months or more) are away on leave and some
new students, often short-term (usually 2 weeks-1month), who are at a
noticeably lower level are introduced. So now I've got a class where
half the people catch on pretty quickly and half don't have a clue.
And it's not like the old students are ready to move up a level, it's
just that the new students don't know as much and have no way to catch
up. I'm not sure what to do about that, other than just keep going,
balance it as best I can, and wait for the new students to finish
their time here. It does look like we'll move one of the students
down, but, well, we'll see about the others.

Fourth is the problem caused by the highly fluctual student
population. Some students come for several months and stay here the
entire time, some come for several months, but take a few breaks,
especially over the Spring Festival Holiday, and some students come
for a week or two or maybe a month. All of which causes problems
because you want to make sure everyone learns as much as possible. To
do this best you need to continually review old material, which I
could do well if it were a continuous, cumulative course, but when
you're getting new students every week or two with who-knows-what
previous knowledge, especially of BE, it's kind of difficult to
review, I'd have to reteach the whole lesson basically. But I can't
stick with a two or three week rotation of useful vocab and grammar
either, picking and choosing from the book, because that wouldn't give
the long-term students much room for growth. As it is, I've chosen
about ten chapters (every fifth chapter is a review chapter) for each
level to work through and basically do one chapter a week, without
much review at all.

Fifth is the fact that there's not a lot of communication among
teachers here, even those who are teaching the same level (there are
six levels, each of which is taught daily by three different teachers
in three separate class periods). This means that you can
occasionally discover that something you'd planned to do has already
been done recently, or that what you're teaching is something they're
entirely unfamiliar with, or that the words you're eliciting from them
are the same ones they're using in every other class (which isn't a
terrible thing).

Sixth, most minor and last for now, is that, since I'm teaching the
same groups of students every day, I can't really recycle lesson plans
the way I could if I were teaching several classes at the same level
that only met once or twice a week. It's nothing too major or
difficult, but it would be nice if I didn't have to come up with a
brand-new lesson plan every day.

So that's the negative, some of it petty, some of it from justified
frustration. Overall though, I'm having a good time, staying upbeat
and enjoying myself. I like my students and getting to know them, and
I'm learning plenty. But it would be nice if this school would take
the steps to make it really great, it's got so many other things going
for it. Raise the teacher salary so it's more attractive to trained
teachers and put more effort into recruiting them and get a director
of studies, put together a more effective way to teach the students,
maybe reorganize classes so that some are for short-term students,
others are for long-term students. Create a better product.
Location, the social events, the opportunity to meet new people,
foreign and Chinese, are great for students, but the academics could
be better.

Okay, that's it, other things to do today.