Fuddland

The trials, tribulations and triumphs of teaching English in China.

This category is a subcategory of China.

This category also has the following subcategories [number of entries in brackets]:

• Longwin Modern English [2]
• My first Suzhou school [8]
• My second Suzhou school [8]

Last Sunday I had my farewell dinner with some of my colleagues from Longwin. This is what we ate:

Yum! [Except for the chicken feet. I didn’t sanction that order.]

One aspect of the English training centre business out here that I’ve never been entirely comfortable with is what could be described as a form of corporate spying: employees of one training centre pose as potential students at another, to find out about their prices and courses. The turnover of admin and sales staff is high enough to avoid the danger of employees of Training Centre A who visited Training Centre B being recognised when B pays A a visit of their own. To me it seems to be a fairly underhanded way of finding out about local competitors, as well as a pretty lazy method of getting ideas about how to improve one’s own services.

When I occasionally poke one of the managers into defending this tactic, I generally get an answer along the lines of, “Well, everyone else does it.” But when, today, I playfully tsk’d at one of the spies as she headed out of the door on her latest mission, I got a different sort of reply:

What, they don’t do this in your country?

It wasn’t a sarcastic, rhetorical question; nor was it meant to imply that if we don’t do it, we’re clearly doing something wrong—it was asked with a genuine interest. What I found more interesting was my immediate instinct, which was to say, “What?! No, of course not!” But I managed to catch myself and instead gave a stammered, “Um, well, I don’t really know … I hope not.”

But the more I think about it, unless there’s explicitly a law that says it’s illegal to not declare a conflict of interest when enquiring about a company’s services [and it must be a conflict of interest rather than simply posing as a potential customer, because otherwise all those undercover journalist Watchdog-type investigations would be breaking the law on a regular basis], then I don’t actually have any basis to tut-tut this activity other than my own moral standards.

On a related note, a few weeks ago a new student joined a class that I teaching on Sunday mornings. It’s a good group of people from all sorts of different companies that like doing vaguely business-related role-plays, so I welcomed the newcomer, asked her what line of work she was in and was surprised when she replied that she works at the reception desk for a competing English training centre. Thinking that she was either the worst spy in the world, or that her company’s own services must be pretty dire, I asked her why she had joined [and paid for] this group instead of asking her own company if she could sit in on a few lessons a week there. She said that she wanted to improve her English without her employer knowing she was taking extra lessons, at which point I stopped making further enquiries. It’s a source of constant bewilderment to me why people do things that I don’t understand or agree with.

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 Beijing 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.

I’ve just started working at the Longwin Modern English training centre 环亚琅文现代英语培训 in Suzhou, under the management of Michael Hsu.

So far, everything seems okay.

After having a pretty light schedule for the last six months or so, it’s been a fairly busy month or two as I picked up several part-time teaching gigs, mostly at summer schools for kids and teens. With the more strictly-enforced visa restrictions causing problems for a vast swathe of the foreigners who have been, up to now, able to enjoy relative freedom in where they worked, those of us who were lucky enough to have the right kind of visa are much in demand, and it has really been a case of me deciding how busy I wanted to be.

One summer school is just four boys between the ages of 8 and 11, three afternoons a week, which is easy and fun: a bit of reading, a bit of practising-short-talks-to-impress-grandparents, and a good smattering of games.

My approach is to try and make these things as laid-back as possible, to give the kids a chance to enjoy their summer holidays despite being forced to attend classes by their evil parents. My crowning achievement [teaching-wise] is to get them to look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. At the beginning of the course these kids would read aloud until they got to a new word and just stop dead, look up at me and expect me to provide them with the pronunciation and meaning. I was happy to do this for a while, but eventually they needed to realise that Teacher David isn’t always going to be around and it’s useful to be able to check definitions and pronunciations themselves. [Since they learn English as a foreign language at school, they’re all entirely familiar with the phonetic alphabet (unlike me).] It took me three lessons to get them all to remember to bring dictionaries, but now they look words up without prompting. This might not sound like much but it’s a skill that bewilderingly lacks in most students I come across, adults as well as children.

One of their favourite games is one in which I write new words up on the board, and call out the definitions of them. The students line up two at a time at the other end of the classroom and have to race to the board and be the first to touch the word that matches the definition. Being boys, they tear down the room at worrying rates, each trying to trip or otherwise impede the other before crashing into the wall, often randomly hitting the board until they land on the right word. It’s hugely entertaining for me as well as them. I think I might try it with an adult class next time things are getting a bit boring.

Every week I get treated to the wonder that is my kindergarten kids doing their morning dancercises. The music ranges from Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star to a children’s version of We Will Rock You [“You’ve got mud on your face, big disgrace…”]. And the dancing … oh the dancing. Cutest thing I’ve ever seen. Keep your eye on the boy in the second row closest to camera.

One of my summer school students shows off his chimpanzee-in-a-car drawing for the camera.

One of my colleagues cheered me up no end today—not that I was particularly grumpy, aside from the usual headache the kids at the summer school give me, but he gave me an extra boost in his attempt to make a phone call.

He sat down at his desk, picked up the phone and dialled a number. Just as he finished dialling, one of the other phones in the office started to ring. We were the only two in there, and since I’m not paid to answer the phones [and, moreover, my Chinese isn’t really up to dealing with course enquiries], he put down his phone, dashed over to the other one and answered it. But he was too late: the person had hung up.

So back he went and resumed his call. Except the same thing happened: just as he finished dialling, the other phone rang. So, as before, he stopped what he was doing and went to answer the incoming call.

I’m sure you’ve all guessed what was going on, but apparently he hadn’t, so as he scooted on over to the other phone again I felt I had to ask him, nice and innocently if, by any chance, it was he who was calling that other phone. I wish I’d let him do it a few more times without saying anything, just to see how many it took for him to cotton on.

One of my more enjoyable teaching duties is the weekly “English Corner”: a two-hour session open to the public, in which anyone wishing to practise speaking English can come along and talk with other like-minded people and three or four native English speakers. It’s my duty to select the general topic of conversation each week, which we are supposed to discuss in small groups whilst supping tea, but in practice the topic gets forgotten about in the first few minutes and most of the evening’s conversations begin with, “So, in your country…?” I like chatting with the regulars, finding out as much about Chinese life as they do about my culture.

The people who come along are all very nice; some are a little too keen to talk and don’t give others a chance to speak, and some just want to listen until they feel confident enough to contribute. But recently I’ve been suffering a certain level of chagrin due to having developed a few “fans” amongst the attendees, who go out of their way to sit as close to me as possible and direct all their comments at me, instead of talking with the rest of the group. There are a few women who delight in telling me several times a week what a handsome man I am. [My outward, bashful, modest acceptance of their compliment disguises my internal monologue, which is along the lines of, “Run away! Run away! They want a husband!”] And anytime I say something vaguely intelligent—or whenever I demonstrate that I know a little Mandarin—there’s a general buzz of, “So smart, so smart. Doctor is doctor.” This latter statement is a literal translation of a Chinese saying whose meaning seems to be, “People with PhDs are clever.” Profound.

One chap in particular makes me incredibly self-conscious, not only because he’s verges on the sycophantic with his praises of my intellect, teaching ability and general outlook on life, but also because, whenever we’re speaking, not only does he have a habit of repeating the last few words of my sentences—this is fair enough, helping him improve his English—but he also mimics whatever hand gestures I’m using at the time, gesture-for-gesture. I’ve never been so aware of how often I use my hands when making a point or explaining something, and I’m torn between sitting on my hands, and making outrageously flamboyant gestures just to see if he adopts them.

In general, the teaching materials I’ve been provided with have been of a high standard; easy to teach from and well thought-out, but there’s one exception: I teach the employees of a five-star hotel twice a week, and the main textbook consists of long, very boring articles about various aspects of the hotel business, together with comprehension questions and discussion topics. The whole thing is way, way too advanced for the students, using complex words and phrasings to get across what are usually quite simple ideas.

But the worst thing is, sometimes the English is just plain wrong. It looks like the book was written by a Chinese person [or persons] whose English is obviously of an extremely high standard, but it does occasionally fall foul of the dictionary trap, in which they’ve looked up a Chinese phrase in a dictionary and simply copied the translation—anyone who has used an online translator knows how unreliable this approach is. When the results aren’t simply nonsense, the words are not ones that would generally be chosen by a native speaker. Here are a few examples taken from the chapter I taught last night, on the subject of handling complaints.

If the travel agent contacts his clients with a questionnaire about such evaluation items as “Did you enjoy your holiday? Have you any complaints?”, he will not only get valuable feedback from clients but also create a prosperous corporate image.

A questionnaire about evaluation items? No. And when was the last time you used the word prosperous, apart from when wishing someone a happy New Year?

Complaints may occur in various situations, but many are indispensably connected with the work and attitudes of the employees of the industry.

At a stretch, they might mean invariably, not indispensably. But then there’s the related discussion question, which contains the common Chinese misuse of should, “What should indispensably lead to guests’ complaints?”

Tourists expect a variety of information from travel directions to explaining unfamiliar items on menus, where and what to see and do at destination, as well as knowledge about the history and tradition of the places they are visiting. Tourists tend to regard all these as the source of answers to their questions. Therefore it should be emphasized on training staff on offering information as clearly and as accurately as possible.

Tend to regard all what? Information on what to see and do is the source of answers to their question about what to see and do? You don’t say.

Before you do anything, you need to listen and make sure you understand what is being said. This avoids misunderstanding and show your heartfelt care and willing to help.

I think I’d get a little uncomfortable if hotel staff told me they had heartfelt caring for my complaint.

To agree with the complainer is another good way of calming him down, usually because he expects you may rush to the defense of whoever is in the wrong. Never lose your temper on all occasions. Just have him out of his system might be the only solution.

Okay, what? “Usually because he expects you may…”? “Never … on all occasions.”? “Just have him out of his system…”? It was by this stage in the text I was ready to suggest using the book to make papier mache models of each other for the remainder of the class time.

Worse still, the accompanying audio CD sounds like the articles are being read aloud, word-for-word, by whatever native English speaker happened to be passing at the time. There’s background noise, stumbling over words, and a general lack of clarity from the speaker. And it’s hard to hear someone say something like, “Just have him out of his system might be the only solution”, without wasting the rest of the class explaining exactly what he meant to say. I know the students aren’t going to be fluent by the end of the course, but usually they expect I may teach them heartfeltedly.

The rumours were true! After a last-ditch two-pronged-pincer-movement strike, I finally have my year-long Chinese work visa. The last few days of warfare went like this.

Firstly, I called in reinforcements I had been reluctant to fall back on up to now, in the form of an acquaintance I made last year. He’s an Irishman, the boss of a clothing company based here in Suzhou, with several key strengths:

• He’s a very nice man and offered to help me out when I talked to him ages ago about possible visa problems should I resign from my [now former] employer.

• He knows my ex-manager personally, and is as much a fan of her as I am.

• But he also knows, and is on very good terms with, her brother-in-law—a very handy mediation route here.

• By lovely coincidence, he is also good friends with the Irish owner of my ex-company—in other words, he’s pals with my ex-boss’s boss.

All of which add up to some substantial guanxi, the deadliest weapon in modern China’s business world. So he set about talking to the brother-in-law, to find out of there was some kind of give-and-take that would get me the letter of release I so desperately needed to secure my work visa.

He called back later to see what I thought of a peace offering: in return for a letter of release, I would agree to not harm the reputation of the company by going on the record [that is, contacting newspapers etc.] about their recent treatment of me [and other employees in the past]. I agreed in principle to this idea, and the brother-in-law was given the go-ahead to approach my ex-manager.

The very day I set these events in motion, a new hope appeared on the horizon. My new employer told me—and I was highly dubious given the lack of success of their efforts to date—that all I needed to provide the authorities with was a photocopy of my original letter of release—that is, the one I got when I left Benxi. As highly-organised-person would have it, I did indeed keep a photocopy of that letter before handing it over to the police when I first arrived in Suzhou.

It turned out that the photocopy was enough, and it was this that got me my visa. Which is just as well, as the go-between route went rather quiet at my end after the initial contact was made. I’m not sure what transpired between my ex-manager and the brother-in-law, but what I do know is, soon after she was contacted, my ex-manager arranged to have a meeting with my new manager.

She tried to insist that I also attend this meeting—a request that my new manager refused, much to my relief. At the meeting, she demanded that my new manager fire me. She told him I had a habit of breaking contracts early. Unfortunately for her I’d already been open with my new manager about my reasons for leaving Benxi and her comany, and he sympathised with both situations. It also kind of blunts her point when you know that she asked me, on my last day and in two subsequent email messages, to stay on with her company.

Nevertheless, she clearly didn’t want me working for anyone else, and even went so far as to offer to transfer one of her current teachers to replace me. This says a lot about how much she values the services of her teachers, if she’s willing to send one over to a new employer simply to get back at someone who dared to resign from her company.

But it appears to be all over: I have my visa, and that’s all I really care about. I think a celebratory drink might be in order.

There’s a rumour going round that my visa application has finally gone through, and that my passport now contains a valid working visa for the full year.

I’m going to remain healthily dubious until I’ve seen it with my own eyes, later this afternoon. Fingers crossed…

In an un-deliberate scheme to mar my St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, I was asked to swap my usual Sunday off work for another day and give a short, early morning demo class to twenty primary school students; the first half was to be a general warm-up, the second based on a science textbook. This was all fine with me—I knew I could keep things relatively simple, play a few word games, and it’d be over pretty quickly.

What they failed to tell me—in what is fairly-typical Chinese boss style—was that the demo class wasn’t just for the twenty students. Thus I found myself, not in a classroom, but in the school hall, on stage, microphone in hand, performing The David Show for around a hundred parents and children. The twenty eleven- or twelve-year-olds specially selected to be my demo students were, thankfully, already of a good standard of English, but none had brought along paper or pens, so there was a frantic few minutes while—at my insistence—enough writing tools were located to enable them to do some of the work I’d planned for the “class”.

I decided to pretend the audience wasn’t there at all and treat things as a normal lesson—bar having to run over to each student when they stood up to answer a question so they could speak into the microphone—and it all went very smoothly. I must have done something right because, during the scheduled five-minute break between halves, my boss told me I didn’t need to bother carrying on with the second half. He pointed to the back of the hall and I saw most of the parents were already signing-up their children to be taught by our training centre. So I just sat on the edge of the stage and chatted with whichever little ‘un came up to me [usually at their mother’s urging, although I did teach a few of them last month; these kids were very happy to see me again and I was treated to plenty of hugs and stroking of my hair].

As I left the school I noticed a rather disturbing statue outside the main hall, which seemed to be a depiction of a rare sex education class: “That’s right, these are called ‘breasts’.”

For the first few weeks after I arrived in China, whenever I overheard a couple of elderly gents chatting in Chinese on a park bench, I found myself assuming that they were exchanging pearls of wisdom garnered from their experiences and learned readings of the teachings of Confucius. It wasn’t until I started to get a handle on understanding Mandarin that I realised that, most of the time, they’re talking about food, or the price of food, or how long its been since breakfast time.

On the first day of a new Business English course for an insurance company, held in their office meeting room, I gave them a few minutes of conversation practice based on the dialogues we had just gone through, and as they chatted to each other I wandered over to the display cabinet to look at the various certificates, plaques and trophies it contained. Given the intense growth of China’s economy in recent years, and having met and taught more than a few business professionals out here, I was assuming that they were all very serious “Business of the Year”-type awards. Office employees can work very long and hard hours—eight in the morning until eleven or twelve at night is the norm rather than the exception—so their efforts have to be occasionally rewarded with some sort of recognition, right?

Having learned a few characters of Chinese, I was able to spend a few minutes trying to figure out exactly what each achievement was. The largest trophy—a gold cup with an engraved plaque on its base—caught my eye, and I could immediately recognise the characters for Suzhou and the industrial park area in which many new companies are based, and the date: December 2002.

“Okay,” I thought, “this is going to be something like Best New Start-up or Employer of the Year.” But then I recognised two more characters: 乒 and 乓—pīng and pāng.

Yep: ping pong. It was a table tennis championship trophy. Disappointed, I turned back to the class to check on the progress of the business conversation exercise I had set.

They were all talking about food.

The saga of my visa and my previous company continues. To recap: to secure a full working visa related to my new job, I need a letter from my previous employer stating that I have left the company. That’s all it needs to say: a single line, endorsed by the company stamp [the mark of officialness in China]. After getting nowhere exchanging emails with the manager, [they are now being ignored], I made one last attempt to get her to agree to write the letter for me by going down to the office and meeting with her face to face.

It did not go well.

Read the rest of “Empty threats”…

My first couple of days at my new language school haven’t been too bad: just a couple of hours of preparatory work each day. My first teaching session is tonight, taking over a third of the way through a “Hotel English” course where, yes, we work through a textbook specially written for people who work in the hotel industry wanting to improve their English skills.

Later this week we begin a week-long intensive course for schoolchildren [poor little tykes, they’re only just on holiday leading up to Chinese New Year and their parents enroll them in extra English classes], which sees me teaching not only general English but also science- and geography-based classes. I’m quite looking forward to this as it’ll make a change from the usual, quite bland [in the eyes of both teacher and student] English textbooks to be teaching various real-world factoids [I do love a good factoid].

[Meta-factoid of the day: factoid should really be used to describe a statement that seems plausible and has been repeated and believed so often as to be assumed to be true, rather than my usage here, which was intended to mean a little fact; perhaps factette is a better word for this latter meaning. Although isn’t that a female fact (cf. Smurfette)?]

Anyway. Whilst I’ve found the new employers to be a little more receptive to my input and a lot more easy-going in general, there is a certain trait which appears to be common to all the Chinese language school managers that I’ve dealt with, or heard about: the, “Hey, could you waste your time doing something that’s clearly not necessary?” request, as exemplified by the conversation I had this morning, which went something like this:

Manager

Okay, so, David, can you prepare a syllabus for the whole week with what you are going to teach, so we can photocopy the pages from the textbook to make into a booklet to show to the parents?

David

Well, we don’t know the abilities of any of the students yet, and won’t know what speed we’re going to be able to move at, until the first one or two lessons—and each subject only has between three and eight classes over the seven days anyway—so I think it would be a waste of time, not to mention paper and money, to prepare a whole booklet in advance. How about I make a plan for just the first class of each subject and then each day we will be able to add more material, so by the end they have a booklet of the material we have actually covered?

Manager

Okay. But we should have something to show the parents, so can you prepare the material in advance for the whole week?

David

Er, as I say, there’s really no point in doing that. The syllabus will definitely change as soon as we start teaching. We could show the parents the original textbooks on the first day and explain that we will be choosing material from them based on their child’s needs and abilities as the week progresses.

Manager

Okay. Can you prepare a rough plan of what we will do during the week?

David

Yes I can, but it is likely to be a randomly-chosen subset of the contents page of the book with a disclaimer on it saying that the plan will change according to the students’ abilities.

Manager

Yes, that will be okay, the parents will understand.

David

But won’t they understand if you just show them the textbook and explain how we will choose what pages to do?

Apparently not. This happened so many times at my last job too: the parents/clients always want to see a syllabus, even if it’s hastily typed-up with no real substance to it, and even if they are also told that it will change as soon as the course starts. [No-one ever complained that we weren’t following the syllabus to the letter.] I don’t understand what’s wrong with saying, “Look, we’re going to be using this textbook—see, it has lots of nice pictures and plenty of things to do, and a nice shiny CD to listen to—but we won’t have time for everything so I’m going to choose what pages we’ll do as we go along, depending on what speed we can go at, what your strengths and weaknesses are, and what you find interesting. ‘Kay?”

Sometimes I’m tempted to put in bogus activities simply to see whether anyone reads the syllabuses in any detail:

Lesson One: the art of networking at conferences.
Lesson Two: making telephone calls—taking and leaving messages.
Lesson Three: procuring the expertise of a balloon fetishist.
Lesson Four: how to converse in a lift made of jelly.
Lesson Five: taking part in conference calls.
Lesson Six: dining in Western restaurants.

If you’re currently in China, follow this easy sixteen-step guide to renewing a work visa.

1. Secure a job; this could either be a renewal of your current contract or, as in my case, a new job. This latter situation is the more problematic of the two.

2. Tell your new employer that your visa will expire very, very soon. Ask them to find out what you need to do to—documents to provide, etc.—in order to get it renewed. These will probably be: copies of your passport, current visa, numerous passport-sized photos, and a copy of the rental contract for where you are living.

3. Try to get requested documents, and succeed in all except the rental contract, which for various reasons to do with confidentiality you simply cannot get a copy of, despite the best efforts of your roommate. Explain this fact to your employer, who will tell you that they think they can work round this problem.

4. Develop a nagging doubt that they can work around this problem.

5. Try to go for the medical exam required to work in China, but accidentally eat breakfast because no-one told/reminded you not to do that. Cancel medical.

6. Go on holiday to Chengdu for two weeks. [This step is not generally advised due to squeezing the already-tight time limit, but may be worth it to get away from all annoyances for a short while.]

7. Get back, and find out what your employer suggests you do in order to finish the visa application process. They will tell you to try and get the rental contract.

8. Become extremely exasperated with telling them for the umpteenth time that you simply cannot get a copy.

9. Take the rescheduled medical exam, passing it save for being diagnosed with high blood pressure. Put the diagnosis down to being really rather worried that your visa will expire in a week’s time, and decide to get it checked again when life is stress-free.

10. Get stroppy with your employer for not being able to sort out your visa.

11. Get even stroppier when they ask you if it’s at all possible for you to get a copy of your rental contract.

12. Talk to your lovely friend who lives in the building across from you. Get a copy of your friend’s rental contract. Register yourself as living at this address

13. Jump up and down making “Nnnggurrrhurrr!” noises until someone from your company takes you to the police station to complete the visa application.

14. Wait a few moments for the police to ask for something else you’ve already told your company you can’t get. This will be the letter that confirms you have ceased employment at your previous job. Remind your company that you explained to them several times that your previous manager refused to give you this letter for reasons of the utmost pettiness.

15. Be granted a two-month extension to your visa, causing high blood pressure to drop instantly, birds to start chirping once more and the bright shining sun to appear.

16. Prepare yourself to once again confront your ex-manager and demand the required letter in order to be granted the full year-long visa.

To be continued…

Let me outta here!

Sorry about that, just had to yell to some extent. I’m over it now.

I’d like to go to Chengdu. I’ve heard and read that it’s lovely, and I’ve been planning a two-week holiday there ever since I handed in my notice. On Friday I tried to buy a train ticket for the 37-hour journey, only to be told there was none left. There’s no national holiday until next month and it’s the low season, so I’ve no idea why all the tickets were sold out, but they apparently were. But! I was advised by the ticket agent that I could buy a ticket to Nanjing—only three hours away—and would be able to buy a ticket on to Chengdu from there. It escapes me as to why I will be able to do it this way but not buy one directly, especially as a train from Suzhou to Chengdu actually passes through Nanjing, but I don’t really have a choice, and Nanjing won’t be a terrible place in which to hang out, even for a couple of days if there really are no tickets to Chengdu. I leave at lunchtime today.

The above headache was compounded by trying to sort out contracts and visas with my new employer. I went in last week to sign on the dotted line, only to be told I had to come back again a couple of days later to sign the Chinese-language versions of the contracts—err, why didn’t they just ask me to come in when all the documents were ready to sign at once?

When I went back on Saturday, my new boss sprung on me the news that the medical I have to take as part of the visa application process—don’t panic, this is something everyone has to do, foreign or Chinese—needs to be completed before I go to Chengdu in order to have time to process the paperwork before my current visa expires. Having already bought my train ticket, I asked—nay, demanded—to know why on earth he hadn’t mentioned the urgency of this medical before now. He muttered something about us still being in negotiations until I’d signed the contract, so didn’t think it was necessary, but I still think he might have said something sooner because I’d told him numerous times I was going away around this date, and wasn’t planning on being back until just before my first day of employment.

So in I went, early this morning, to be accompanied to the medical, taking my packed rucksack with me in case it all took longer than expected. When I arrived at the office, I was asked if I’d eaten breakfast, to which my reply was a cheery, “Yes thanks,” because I thought they were just going to offer me some food—but alas, you’re not supposed to eat anything the morning of a medical, a fact no-one had bothered to tell me. So I’ll need to take the medical when I’m back from Chengdu [if I ever get there], and pray there’s still time to organise the visa.

[You may ask—as my new employer did—why I didn’t remember not to eat anything from the medical I had when I first arrived in China. The answer is: because I never had one. As I say, everyone must have a medical when they come and work in China; everyone I’ve met who works out here has had one in the past. So why didn’t I have one? The only explanation is that my first employer, in Benxi, acquired me my visa through connections and back-channels that circumvented this need, for reasons unknown. I have a mild fear that my current visa, upon closer inspection, is going to be deemed invalid. Eek.]

So, basically, I would like to get away from Suzhou for a bit. See you all in a couple of weeks.

Having received my last full-time pay-cheque from my former company, the full cost of leaving their employment early has been revealed: equivalent to two months’ worth of rent, plus a passed-on fee for terminating the contract with the internet service provider. This financial loss, whilst pretty annoying, is still worth it to be free of a manager that has demonstrated that she will use emotional blackmail and twisting of the truth in order to try to squeeze as much out of her employees, not to mention her customers, as she possibly can.

Allow me to document some of the occurrences and my experiences involving my ex-manager during the six months that I worked there, so that anyone thinking of working there who comes across this entry will be aware of what I saw. [Please note the date and time of this entry; there may be new management by the time you are reading this.]

Read the rest of “The price of teaching”…

In class this evening—teaching five Korean teenagers who all appear to be big fans of Premier League football—the topic was “unlucky people”, and I asked the class for examples of people they know of who had been unlucky. This, verbatim, was the only thing they came up with:

Ryan Giggs is unlucky because he’s a good player but he plays for Wales.

I may not know a whole lot about football, but I know what’s funny.

Meanwhile, I’m earning some pocket money by still working at the company I earlier officially stopped working for on December 9th—as I’ve explained, during the notice period we reached a mutual agreement that I would finish off the courses that I’m in the middle of teaching; this suited me fine because it coincides nicely with the end of my Chinese course.

This month I’m also covering for a friend of mine at another school during the evenings, while she’s away for her Christmas holiday, and this led me to discover that a lot of teachers charge a little more per hour than my own dear company pays.

The other day my boss asked me whether I’d be willing to teach a twelve-year-old boy for an hour and a half, five days a week, for two weeks—the poor lad is being packed off to boarding school in the UK and his parents want him to have a crash course in English. I thought about it for a couple of hours—my main concern was leaving myself enough time to actually study the Chinese I’m being taught in class—and, armed with my new-found knowledge about other part-time pay rates, gave my answer: yes, but only if she rounds up the pay to two hours, to cover preparation time and generally make it worth my while. This is against what they usually do, but I figured “don’t ask, don’t get”, and since the course was due to start in two days time, I thought they might be a little desperate. But no, of course they wouldn’t consider changing the pay rate: instead they threatened to assign it to another teacher [for the first week, before he goes on holiday], then pull a second teacher out of thin air to cover the second week.

Go right ahead, I said, as I sauntered away, nonchalantly, John Wayne stylee [not quite as cool as I was aiming for though, since this was all happening over email]. Also, I’m fairly sure I’ve never actually seen a John Wayne film. Did he saunter? And was it nonchalantly?

When I arrived at work later that day to teach a class, she asked me to reconsider—except of course there was no offer to compromise over the requested increased pay rate. So, at her request, I said I’d think about it for another day, fully intending to stick to my guns—but my plan was later scuppered by the news that the parents had decided to take their business elsewhere, for whatever reason. I’m disappointed that I won’t get a little Christmas bonus from some extra work, but at the same time, I’m glad not to be doing any more favours for that particular company.

I’ve been put in touch with a sort-of-recruitment agent to help me find a new teaching position, and after a couple of preliminary discussions it suddenly occurred to me that I should tell her where I’ve been working, so she doesn’t inadvertently land me in it by trying to get me a job with the company I’ve just left. But this is a delicate task, given the importance of personal connections and friendships in this country—there was a chance that the agent and my boss went to school together or something like that—so I approached with caution. Thankfully it turned out that I didn’t need to worry about treading so carefully.

Me

Hello, it’s David. Listen, have you heard of the [name of school will be inserted at a later date]?

A

Yes I have, but they’re on the blacklist, I don’t recommend you work for them.

Me

You’re preaching to the choir, sister.

A

什么？

[Translation: “Huh?”]

The next chapter in the saga of my employment in China. Having handed in my notice, I began trying to plan my next few months, specifically with regard to location, accommodation, vocation and communication.

Communication

Finally getting fed up with not being free to commit myself to a dedicated course of Chinese lessons—due to the possibility that new teaching work could be scheduled at short notice and at any time of the day, morning, afternoon or evening—I decided that once I’d handed in my notice there was less chance of my being assigned new teaching duties, so I signed up for eight weeks’ worth of Chinese classes, three times a week. I’m in the middle of the second week and I’ve already learnt more vocabulary than I’d managed to pick up since arriving in Suzhou, as well as putting to good use the basic stuff I’d been taught in Benxi.

Vocation

After handing in my notice, it became more and more obvious that, in terms of finding a new employee, my timing [last day at current job: December 9] was a little off: school and university semesters will only have a couple of months of their first semester left, then break for Spring Festival/Chinese New Year, so are more likely to be wanting new employees to start at the beginning of March. This was rather too long for me to go without work, so I approached my current boss with the offer to finish up the several courses that I am in the middle of teaching, instead of stopping halfway through and her having to find a suitable replacement. [Recruitment is still a seriously difficult problem for her.]

Of course she didn’t immediately agree to this idea, despite it saving her a lot of bother, and the couple of times I asked her for a decision, she tried to convince me to stay on until my original contract-end date of mid-June, which I flatly refused. Finally, last Saturday we sat down and she agreed to pay me part-time [that is, hourly instead of the full salary] to do a few hours a week for the remaining lessons. This gives me a little extra pocket money to tide me over, as well as plenty of free time to crack on with the Chinese study.

Accommodation

The downside to the aforementioned deal is that I lose the flat that comes with a full-time job, so I’m currently being very nice to a couple of friends in the hope that I can crash at their places whilst I finish up my teaching commitments and Chinese course—everything concludes in the first week or so of January.

Location

So, what then? I’d like to take a few weeks in January and early February to get out of Suzhou and see the rest of the country; now that winter is drawing in and things are a bit drizzly around here, I thought a trip down to the south of China might be in order—although the idea of a snow-covered Great Wall then catching up with some friends who have taken residence in Xi’an [northern China] is also appealing.

Whatever I do, I’d like to return to Suzhou after a few weeks, having found one or two good reasons [mostly one really quite lovely reason] to stick around a while longer. There is the issue of my visa to figure out: it expires mid-February, and depending on who I talk to, it’s either a doddle to extend it or I’m illegal the moment I leave my job and must return to the UK first if I want a new one—I’d like to avoid the latter case if at all possible, as it invalidates my travel insurance policy, which is otherwise good until next August.

It’s still all a bit too up-in-the-air for my liking, but things seem to be iterating towards resolution instead of in a worse direction, so I remain optimistic.

I handed in my notice at work yesterday, which went down like a lead balloon filled with a gas that has the exact opposite properties of helium. [Perhaps it is magnetised and strongly drawn to the Earth’s core? Hmm, can you magnetise a gas? Hello, physicists? Anyone?] The boss reacted in an entirely predictable manner, using her complete lack of management skills to try and guilt me into staying on, instead of, I dunno, mentioning that I’m a good teacher and an asset to the company and other management-speak phrases that anyone desperate to try and hold onto yet another early-departing employee might think to throw out. I gave my main reason for leaving to be feeling that a year is long enough out here and it’s coming up to be the right time to leave [cunningly, ambiguously leaving off the word “China” from the end of that sentence].

Asking her to sign my copy of the resignation letter to acknowledge her receipt of it, and CC-ing said letter to the other full-time teacher were both taken as a sign of distrust—this is partly true of course, but mostly I did it because I knew it would antagonise her. Cruel I know, but there was that aspect of proving I’d informed her of my decision that makes it not entirely vindictive.

The notice period is an unheard-of two months, and I’ve no real idea of how the next sixty days will go—I’m half-expecting my workload to double—but I’m hoping to just keep my head down and do my job until I reach Day Zero. I’ve a feeling that there will be attempts to draw out more detail about my reasons for leaving, but for the sake of an easy life I’ll stick to the official story.

I’ve had a lot of positive feedback regarding my teaching lately; some courses have ended and questionnaires are given out in the last lessons to assess the performance of the teacher and the general service provided by my company. I’ve scored in the very goods and excellents almost across the board. The boss has also mentioned more than once that she’s happy with my work and appreciates the efforts I have made.

So it was something of a surprise that, along with my basic salary this month, I received zero performance-related bonus—it had been my understanding that I would be able to earn up to an extra couple of thousand a month if things were more than satisfactory. So naturally I asked what areas I needed to work on in order to qualify, and was told that it was not my teaching that was the problem, but that I had discussed certain issues with the other staff, word of which had gotten back to the boss somehow [fill in your own paranoid conspiracy theory here].

I’m not going to go into the details of what it was that I had been talking about right now, but it was certainly something that I felt quite strongly about and wanted other people to be clued in to what I had observed, with what I felt was good reason. Now she may have a point—perhaps I shouldn’t really discuss these sensitive matters with anyone, especially when the language barrier means there’s a chance I don’t know the full story, or misunderstood what occurred, and company loyalty is a very highly-regarded quality—but for this to completely cancel out my performance ratings was a bit disappointing. And call me picky, but I think company loyalty only comes when you’re actually proud to work for your company—it’s not simply demanded because you happen to be working for them.

I had to laugh at one of my manager’s closing comments of the discussion, which went—almost verbatim—like this: “I really hate gossip so I don’t think you should talk to any of the local staff anymore, particularly not [staff member] because I heard [very personal information about staff member].” Hmm, the words pot and kettle come to mind.

On Monday morning my roommate and colleague for the last two months hung up his sunhat and headed home to Ireland, after a full year with my current employer and over thirty years of teaching abroad—not just in China,…

Read the rest of “And then [briefly] there was one”…

Almost six months in, the last couple of weeks have been the lowest point of my time out here so far, in terms of homesickness. Whether I became ill because I was feeling down, or I started feeling down [in…

Read the rest of “The six-month dip”…

Another first this week: my first being ill enough to visit a doctor. Actually, I wasn’t that poorly—just a standard case of manflu—but upon turning up to work looking suitably pathetic [headache, body-ache, fatigue, distinct “please cancel my classes” look…

Read the rest of “Chinese medicine”…

One of the benefits of teaching the younger classes is that I can play lame April Fools jokes on them and they actually fall for them. Okay, so I just walked into each of my morning lessons and proceeded to…

Read the rest of “April Foolishness”…

A very surreal teaching experience today: my students were reading aloud from a short play in the set text I have to teach them. The scene was: an English lesson, in which one of the students was Japanese, with phonetically-written…

Read the rest of “Meta-teaching”…

There is one particular student I teach, a young girl by the [chosen, English] name of Mary, whose voice is, for some reason, especially grating. There is something about the pitch, or the volume, or the pace at which she…

Read the rest of “Kids can be cruel [#1]”…