The shanzhai WSI that I worked at was terrible – the sales staff were so terrified of saying no to the customers/students that they put them in whatever class they wanted to join. If students were told to repeat a class because their English wasn’t up to scratch, they just coasted through the entire programme to the point that the Advanced classes were filled with students who could barely string a sentence together.

The university that I work at now is slightly better, although there’s no real management of student expectations, and they still expect that I’m able to chat away with them even though the level ranges from pre-intermediate to upper intermediate in a class of ~35 students. We were promised/threatened with teacher observations, but in the three years I’ve been here, someone from the govt’s “education” department has observed one of my classes once and never gave me feedback.