Fuddland

Another short-term job I took on was at an IELTS summer school. For those that don’t know, IELTS is a internationally-recognised standard English level certification that many institutes require as part of their entry criteria. The exams focus on one-on-one interviews with native English-speaking examiners, testing vocabulary, grammar, and the ability to express one’s opinions. Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Chinese students take these exams every year with dreams of studying abroad.

Through a fellow teacher, I was put in touch with the local office of a company by the name of Běijīng IELTS, run by a nice enough chap calling himself Adam. After meeting with him for less than ten minutes we had agreed on me teaching four two-and-a-half-hour classes at a higher-than-average hourly rate, without him once asking me if I knew anything about the IELTS programme requirements. It was enough that I am a native English speaker. He lent me a textbook on which to base my lessons, but couldn’t tell me anything about what the students had covered to date. This was the first indication [of many] that the “school” is little more than a money-making scheme that provides little benefit to the earnest students looking for an intensive few weeks of English skill-honing.

Classes of more than twenty students were packed into the twelve or so classrooms on the fifth and sixth floors of the building — a building which housed two other English training centres, directly across the road from where I had been working full-time for the last year and a half. The textbook I was given to use proclaimed to be an official IELTS publication, but flipping through the pages revealed it to be a knock-off copy — as in: someone had taken the original and typed it all out again, except his/her typing skills left a lot to be desired, with plenty of typos to confuse the students.

On two occasions the students hadn’t even brought their copies of these copies. When I located Adam or one of the numerous administration staff members, they told me that “the last teacher didn’t use the textbook.” Well tough, my lesson plan hinges on having these mistake-ridden textbooks to hand. I laughed in Adam’s face when he suggested I come up with a new plan after the class had already started. [I’ve had this experience before, when “managers” seem to be under the impression that teachers can pull two-hour lesson plans out of their bottoms at the drop of a hat.] Faced with this refusal to change my plan, he magically found spare copies of the textbook for each and every student.

After these mishaps were ironed out, the classes themselves generally went quite well, but the sheer number of students coupled with the lack of organisation meant that the school could never tell me if the class I was having was one I had taught before or not. It wasn’t clear if students were consistently kept in the same groups all the time, or moved from class to class depending on their own schedules. This made it frustratingly impossible to build on previous lessons, so each class had to be a self-contained session.

I organised a lot of role-play speaking activities, making sure each and every student was given the opportunity [read: forced] to come up to the front of the class and give a short talk or simulate a section of the IELTS exam, but hardly anyone seemed to be taking notes of my suggestions for what the correct way to say things is, or what sounds better, so I don’t know how much they actually went away with after the classes.

The only bad class I had was one with a group of younger [mid-teen] students who were clearly at the rebelling-against-all-this-studying period of life. [This was, to be honest, something of a relief to see, after teaching so many studying machines who never seemed to tire of hitting the books, but it didn’t make my job any easier.] I did manage to get some of them interested in the activities, and those that wanted to mess around I guilted into shutting up by asking who was paying for these classes, them or their parents. At one point one of them thought he was being very surrepticious when taking a photo of me on his mobile, so I just strolled up to him and took my own picture.

Adam asked me to teach more classes during August, but I had had enough of the distinct feeling that this centre was interested in nothing more than making a swift yuan off the back of parents desperate to give their children a chance to study abroad, and told him I was too busy. Not that it’ll make any difference, I’m sure there were plenty of other foreign teachers on his virtual Rolodex, and the money will keep rolling in. I have since gone back and forth in my mind as to whether this was the best course of action — the other path being to keep teaching there for the rest of the summer and do my best to help the students with passing these exams — but in the end, given that there was no way for me to build on previous work we’d done, I couldn’t see the students missing out on very much.

#1

Thane | 2008 / 08 / 22 – 11:48

Surely this is not the first time teaching in China has made this impression on you?

#2

David | 2008 / 08 / 23 – 10:32

Re #1: No, I suppose it’s not the first time, but I think the sheer volume of students I saw milling around and almost spilling out of the classrooms really brought the issues to the forefront of my mind.

#3

Thane | 2008 / 08 / 24 – 22:51

I know what you mean - I have a friend in Benxi, a Chinese university professor who teaches Chinese literature to high school students in her spare time. I went to watch her class one day - there must have been about 70-80 students in the class and for an hour and a half, this woman lectured them without a break, all the while transcribing what she was saying on the board: speak, write and wipe the board; speak, write and wipe the board; non-stop for 90 minutes. God only knows whether the poor buggers learnt anything.

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