Neil Porteous is a teacher who knows how to get things done, and he might be the most dedicated foreign teacher I’ve ever heard of or met in the Middle Kingdom (more on that later). To wit on my first point, as Xinhua reports:

All 45 students in his class in Shimen High School in the city of Foshan, south China’s Guangdong Province, passed with good enough results to access the country’s key universities.

Six of them ranked among the top 100 in the province, where 727,000 students took the exam, also known as gaokao.

That’s a staggering level of success for any teacher, much less for someone teaching to a test infamous around the world for its inanity and focus on rote memorization. College entrance exams anywhere carry an enormous amount of pressure for high school kids, but if you fuck up, say, the SAT in the US, it won’t kill your intended career or negate the years you’ve already spent in education. However, in a country like China, where there are only a handful of top universities and your opportunity to get into those universities is tied to your hukou and gaokao score, pressure to succeed is turned up exponentially. Students in China spend the first eighteen years of their lives being turned into mindless, downtrodden learner automatons. Working in a private language school, I never got to spend a lot of time teaching high schoolers, but the stress of being a Chinese student showed even on the faces of my eleven- and twelve-year-olds.

What’s amazing about Mr. Porteous is that he was able to push his students to succeed by going vigilante, transforming into Batman with a whiteboard and marker and turning Chinese education on its head. According to Porteous’s students, “[He] never [forced] us to do anything, and his student-oriented thinking should be acknowledged.”

“Seeing us buried in schoolwork, he brought us fruit, chicken soup, porridge and Italian food. He even played guitar and sang for us sitting on stairs,” Zheng recalled, adding that such “seemingly rebellious acts” helped ease the pressure that is put on students.

By most standards of the coveted elements of “Western education” that foreign teachers are hired for their supposed ability to provide, Neil Porteous’s methodology is far from unorthodox. Going to school in the US, I had so many teachers with (effective) “outside the box” approaches to education that I have a hard time remembering all of them. There was Mr. Thomas, who kept a dangerous (and borderline illegal) geology lab on my high school’s campus. Instead of writing a paper or concocting a lame experiment for our final project, we spent a full day in the Colorado School of Mines Edgar Experimental Mine, where we spent the day operating heavy machinery, drilling with big fuckoff drills, setting explosives and examining rocks we’d cracked out of the walls of the mine ourselves. At the end of the day, one lucky student got to push a detonator while a pure bass explosion pulled in a lungful of air and shot it back out in a couple of short, terrifyingly awesome seconds. Another teacher, Mr. Hilbert, ran his AP English class with the rigor of a football coach. After all of our class passed the test with high enough marks for college credit, his only lament was that we wouldn’t get a banner raised in the gymnasium for our accomplishment.

To say my favorite teachers weren’t unorthodox is in no way an attempt at a backhanded compliment; I was lucky to have a lot of great teachers who approached learning with a special kind of creativity. What makes Mr. Porteous stand out is that he was able to implement such, well, different teaching methods in a Chinese public high school. Eschewing the traditional dancing monkey or pronunciation guide role that most foreign teachers are expected to fill in Chinese public schools, Porteous took full control of his classroom and refused to compromise with the local education standards (which is absolute shit in most cases). He got himself promoted into an academic advisory role and seems to have spent a lot of time relieving the crippling pressures of taking the gaokao. The fact that a school would cede that much control to a foreign teacher is incredible given the education system in China, and I think makes a great argument for why foreign instruction shouldn’t be segregated from Chinese instruction.

The justification for issuing work permits to foreign teachers is that they fill a role that a local teacher could not, mostly based on their (supposed) native speaking ability. That’s flawed logic, and I think it holds a lot of great teachers back from realizing the full potential in their students. I put a lot of work into making sure my classes were fun, effective and different from how my students were learning during their day jobs, but foreign teachers are never made to feel like anything more than a supplement, something to give students a slight competitive advantage over their peers. I had my students for two hours a week at most, while they spent the rest of their educational life watched over by strict Chinese teachers who’d sooner throw chalk and “kill the chicken” rather than think a millimeter outside the box.

I suspect it’s the same for most foreign teachers outside of über-expensive international schools. In primary and middle schools you get a forty-minute block to teach… something… to a group of forty (or more, god help you) screaming students. High school students are too burned out to really care about their foreign teacher, and my experience with university has mostly been teaching to ten motivated English learners and ninety people either sleeping or scrolling through their iPhones. Mr. Porteous’s success story isn’t necessarily a worldwide educational breakthrough, but I think it provides a blueprint for how hands-on foreign instruction can push students to succeed in ways that China’s current draconian culture of education could never do.

Previously: Teaching Culture with Your Language

|Chinagog Archives|

Another year has come and gone and America continues to noisily barrel on into middle age. The Fourth of July has always been my favorite holiday. It doesn’t come with any of the social burdens and anxieties of Christmas and Thanksgiving. The political implications are pretty minimal as well. While it’s technically a celebration of the US throwing off the shackles of our tea- and gin-soaked oppressors and their shilling-and-pencing sales taxes, it generally lacks the nationalistic bluster and bravado of, say, Chinese National Day. There are no military parades. It doesn’t generally prompt discussion of America’s place in the world, nor how the country will cope with its status as an aging superpower. The freedom that we celebrate isn’t focused on the political but rather the personal: it’s a day leisurely spent drinking beer, throwing steaks, hot dogs and burgers on the grill, and shooting the shit with your friends and preferred family members. When the sun goes down, you head to a park to soak in some fireworks, or you set off the stash of explosives you smuggled across the Wyoming border. A few kids inevitably blow their hands off with M-80s and everyone calls it a day.

And that brings me to this: “American culture” can be a tricky subject to approach as an English teacher in a foreign country. An important part of learning any language is understanding the culture that spawned it, and many schools explicitly integrate Anglophone culture into curriculums. However, problems can arise when teaching about a holiday so overtly celebrating a revolutionary act (albeit one essential to the American experience) in countries where political freedom is much more restricted. China’s an obvious example, but many popular TEFL destinations around the world are lacking in their human rights, including much of Southeast Asia and large swaths of the Middle East.

Student interest in American culture was a mixed bag, and something to be approached with a high amount of caution. I never brought up politics unless my (older) students brought up specific issues, and even then I remained as neutral as I could be. Surprisingly, food, which I’ve found is generally the easiest thing to use to engage strangers in small talk, was a yawn-inducing affair. That’s probably partly owing to the fact that most “Western” restaurants are neither Western nor generally edible. One class in particular was impossible to engage on cross-cultural terms, the one that laughed at me when I accidentally called myself a “silly cunt.” I made up slideshows highlighting the differences between Chinese mountain trips and those in my native Colorado. I tried to build excitement for American holidays, but the only thing even slightly interesting to them was Christmas, which I absolutely abhor. American schools versus Chinese schools? Nope. The only thing that really perked them up was learning that I’d fired my first gun at seven years old, and that my redneck brother in law gave me a .410 shotgun when I turned thirteen.

Integrating national holidays when teaching other languages can be far less politically charged than teaching about the Fourth of July. Bastille Day is a great example. It marked the beginning of a long political reform in the country, and it’s certainly one of the most important events in modern French history. However, French culture had been developing for well over a thousand years prior and it didn’t create any fundamental shift in French identity. July 4, 1776 is arguably not only the birthday of America as a separate political entity, but also of the country’s separate cultural identity. The definition of what exactly it means to be an American has radically shifted over the years, through the abolition of slavery, the (long) struggle to politically enfranchise women and African Americans, to the neverending debate about the place of immigrants in American society, both legal and illegal. Throughout all of this, the Fourth of July has remained a touchstone for the American conceptualization of freedom.

And now that I’ve written my way all the way up onto quite the tall horse, let me backtrack a minute. The ideas that America espouses are all well and good, but the American government is often populated by packs of hypocritical cunts. The current NSA-Snowden circlejerk is an obvious example, but the US has spent most of the last fifty years less promoting democracy and aforementioned American ideals than protecting its economic and diplomatic interests. It’s far from an ideal country, but that’s what makes the Fourth of July so important to us.

Which brings us back to teaching: how do you teach about a holiday entrenched in American cultural identity that also contains elements of politics and nationalism? Maybe you don’t. If students are engaged enough in a language to find out more about the countries where it came from, they’ll probably ask you about it first. I’ve had some wonderful political discussions with adults from all over the world, but only when they expressed initial interest. I’ll occasionally teach about the history of the English language to point out why it’s so grammatically fucked and inconsistent, but only when it comes up during a specific time in a specific lesson. Controversial topics like guns and crime are sure to capture students’ attention, but tend to focus more on the negative aspects of the US. It’s really hard to get over the harped-upon concept of American exceptionalism until you meet wide segments of people who rightfully don’t give a shit about your country.

Today in class I mentioned that today was America’s birthday, handed out pennies as rewards for good participation, and left it at that.

Of course, once I was back in the teacher’s lounge, I made sure to yammer on about freedom and pride of ‘Murica, all while ad-libbing stanzas of “God Bless the U.S.A.”

Previously: Our Columnist Prepares to Move to Vietnam

|Chinagog Archives|

You might remember Greg Donohue, our English teacher columnist. What’s that, you don’t? Here’s your reminder.

Greg Donohue? I thought you’d been fired.

Me too. But then the BJC editors reached out and explained that unpaid columnists couldn’t be fired, especially since I’m not a particularly corrupt official, a pedophile, or a LBH teacher. And how little do they know.

There’s only one editor, but we won’t quibble. We understand you’re planning a move to Vietnam.

I’m either going to be furthering my career in TEFL at a highly respected institution of learning offering multiple avenues for professional development, or I’ve just been elaborately tricked into entering the Southeast Asian sex trade.

Is that why you’ve been absent lately?

Well, yeah. That and the fact that I decided to take a one-month unemployed staycation before moving to the other side of the world again. Lots of camping, weekday drunken bicycle pub crawls and “catching up.”

That doesn’t sound at all like what English teachers do.

Implicit derision is so last year. Are you trying to fire me and repossess my small store of face?

So you were unable to hack it in China, moved to Denver, and now, unable to hack it in the States, are going to ‘Nam.

All joking aside, yes. That is basically correct. I drink to excess. I smoke tobacco from time to time. I’ve downloaded a car. I’ve worked on two continents, and both marked me “return to sender.” Vietnam is quite literally the last place in the world I can legally work, much less teach.

But I want to teach.

How will teaching there be different?

First of all, when I’m obscenely drunk in class, it probably won’t be the result of a baijiu lunch; I have yet to ascertain the characteristics of the local officially-sanctioned moonshine, but it’s apparently different from baijiu. Also, I’m guessing that I won’t be answering questions about how much I like China or if I like Chinese food, or asked to reaffirm that 钓鱼岛是中国的.

Otherwise, I expect I’ll be teaching awesome kids who have no idea why they’re learning English. I see no reason how my boilerplate motivational tools of American pennies, stickers, and dumb, nonsensical jokes will fail to be effective across cultural lines.

TL;DNR.

Too many teachers (actually, all of them, myself included) talk too much in class, and one of my next columns will be about cutting back on your teacher talk time. Anything from minor offenses like echoing to major ethical quandries where you query your students endlessly about your coffeeshop startup. “Okay, so here now is what we’re gonna do…” is on my first sacrificial altar of blacklisted instruction questions.

What else do you plan to write about?

How to stay sane teaching in China while only working 25 hours a week. You should say yes when your boss ropes you into a weeklong school trip to Guoliangcun. Why there’s objectively no shame in teaching kids instead of adults. Innovative ways of assessing student progress.

At the end of the day, are you good a good teacher?

Yes, I’m good. Fuck it: I’m great. My resume is littered with student accomplishments from primary to graduate school. My teaching methodology…

Okay, actually…

…is tight. My students love me, young and old. The young ones…

…we’ve heard this from you before…

…have placed in national competitions, and at the very least developed their neural plasticity. The adults have…

…and…

…matriculated into…

…people…

…American uni…

…think….

…versities, or vastly…

…you’re…

…improved their prospects…

…kind of…

…in the business world. So…

…arrogant.

…I’d say I’m good at my job.

What’s up with the English-teaching complex?

Every English teacher will tell you they’re Christ on a bike in a snowstorm when asked.

Thank you for joining us. We look forward to your column next week.

Greg is an ESL instructor who spent two productive years teaching in China. He currently lives in Colorado.

Previously: My English-Teaching Prowess May Have Helped Siwei Defraud Caterpillar

|Chinagog Archives|

Back when I was teaching in China, two of my colleagues and I ran a business English program on behalf of our school at a local factory. The company, Siwei, a mining equipment manufacturer, was apparently in talks with a German company to set up a joint venture, and they wanted to train up the business English of their future managers. The students, most of them recent college graduates, were very enthusiastic learners, and I think they appreciated their company investing in them. Unlike a lot of on-site business English courses, which tend to be a low priority for students who often have much more important things on their plate, the course had great attendance and we made a lot of progress over the course of six months. Also, the training manager, who I named Hank, was a walking stereotype of the shady, adulterous, face-collecting Chinese businessman. He quite excitedly explained his reason for having two phones: “Nokia is for wife, but iPhone is for my girlfriend.” Fucking Hank. After six months, the program ended, we went out for dinner and got wasted at KTV and I never heard from them again.

At least, not until earlier this year, when I happened to be reading some random business news. Apparently the company had (somewhat deceptively) managed to get itself acquired by equipment manufacturing giant Caterpillar, which earlier this year reported an 80% writeoff of bad assets due to Siwei’s creative accounting practices. The two companies have since settled, but the entire incident was more than a little unfortunate.

But what a feather in my teaching cap! My colleagues and I were contracted to improve the business English of Siwei’s staff and their ability communicate with foreign companies. That they ended up using this training to ultimately defraud an American company out of millions of dollars was beside the point*: in a profession where measurable results beyond enrollment and student satisfaction are hard to define, my students used their English to achieve their goals.

Student success stories (even backward ones, as in this example) are what drive me to continue teaching and improving as a teacher. A lot of teaching, especially in TEFL, is an exercise in repetition, at least in a day-to-day context. According to this paper, “Repetition is an important aid to learning and that having to actively recall or ‘retrieve’ a word is a more effective way of learning than simple exposure or just seeing a word over and over.” I’ve seen official estimates that people need to use a new vocabulary word 15 to 20 times before it’s embedded in their memory. Same goes for grammar, especially for older students with fossilized mistakes, which are deeply ingrained in their language use due to their repeated use without proper correction. With some of my lower-level academic students, explaining why “am/is/are” do not act as a helping verb in simple present conjugation is often a painstaking process, often because simple present and present progressive are taught in too close of a proximity.

However, lower-level students have the capacity to make a lot of progress in a short period of time. Once learners achieve basic mastery of a language, they can hit a frustrating wall, and it becomes harder to track even week-by-week progress. Intermediate learners are in a special kind of limbo where they make marked progress in some areas and lag in others, and each student is different. I’ve been there with my Chinese for almost three years now. My listening is great, my speaking is good-okay, and I’m still functionally illiterate. The challenge of teaching intermediate learners is applying triage to fortyeleven different areas of language and maintaining a class focus. Once students get to the advanced stage, it’s on them to address their needs, and the teacher’s focus should be on providing materials and lessons that challenge the students to set their own language goals. For example, I would teach a set vocabulary group about, say, kitchen appliances to a low-level class. For an advanced class, we might read a challenging text, I’d pre-teach a few important words, challenge them with comprehension questions and clarify any vocabulary they found interesting or got stuck on.

On top of this, student turnover is a weekly occurrence in many TEFL situations, especially in private schools where rolling enrollment is the norm. Student retention is a week-by-week struggle for a lot of private schools. Some classes will retain a core group of students, but students come and go quickly in even the most stable of classes. It’s sometimes hard to tell what works and what doesn’t in such a chaotic teaching environment, and even in the most stable of classes, assessment theory in TESOL has only recently passed beyond the alchemy stage.

With all this in mind, I make sure to write myself a note whenever I hear about a student making a significant achievement in his or her language progress. It can be anything from excelling in an English competition to getting accepted into a Master’s program to being able to translate for other students and hold lively conversations in the language after coming into my class as a low Level 1 learner. Part of it strokes my professional ego, sure, and students themselves bear most of the burden in progressing in their language studies. However, keeping an eye out for improvement and achievement (and failure as well, as there is sadly plenty of that) helps motivate me and makes me understand the parts of my pedagogy that work and what needs to be sent to the bin. Sentence diagrams, anyone? I loved them when I was in high school, but they are goddamned useless. Let’s all admire Rolf and his beautiful dictogloss:

* Just to clarify: I didn’t focus on teaching deception or ethically bankrupt business practices; it was a fairly straightforward course based on Pearson’s Market Leader series. If I were that savvy at scamming people I’d open my own foreign trading company or IELTS prep-cram school in China.

Greg is an ESL instructor who spent two productive years teaching in China. He currently lives in Colorado.

Previously: Finding the Right Teaching Environment

|Chinagog Archives|

One of the most common questions I see posted on TEFL forums is whether X school in Z province is a decent place to work. There are ways to ensure that you aren’t walking into an educational Sarlacc pit by emailing current staff and properly vetting your contract. Still, there’s a good chance your first job will be in a shitty private language center — and there’s actually nothing wrong with that. But before we see why, a quick aside.

Private language centers are ubiquitous in Asia, and are a major entry point for new teachers in the industry. Asian parents generally place little value on allowing their kids to have happy, productive, adventure-filled childhoods. Instead they focus on making them as academically competitive as possible. When kids somehow manage to eke out a tiny modicum of free time, parents fill it with classes, including, but not limited to, English, math, music, Chinese/Korean/Japanese, Latin dance, elocution, taekwando, and art.

This can be disheartening for a teacher. You’re actively contributing to your students’ kidnapped childhoods. Parents aren’t necessarily sophisticated consumers, either, and can have strange (or nonexistent) expectations for what constitutes a quality lesson. Unlike the Middle East, where most positions require a Master’s degree and teaching experience, many parents and schools here are just happy to have a white (or native-speaking) person instructing their kids. Schools often provide little direction for new teachers. My Chinese boss told me before my first TEFL class, for which I’d been given no materials or lesson plan, to “provide interesting lesson.” The lesson I’d spent a half an hour writing fell apart after ten minutes and we ended in disaster, and, at the students’ suggestion, we played the game “1 to 99″ for most of the rest of class. I ended up finding a mentor who helped make me the teacher I am today, but starting out as a teacher can feel like being thrown in the pool right after someone chops your arms off.

Induction as a teacher in this kind of environment can be frustrating, but it also comes with a high ceiling for professional development. Larger chains can offer a clear path of career advancement, from senior teacher straight into academic management. These jobs can be stimulating, but they also involve getting back into office politics, which is one of the reasons I left corporate America in the first place.

One of the best things about teaching, especially TEFL abroad, is the high degree of autonomy you’re given. How successful you are in the classroom rests entirely on you. You do research, seek out help from more experienced teachers and managers, experiment with new teaching techniques. You certainly don’t have to do it alone, but there’s no one standing in the way of your success. The floor is low as well, and there are plenty of examples of teachers delivering the same boring lessons day-in and day-out. They never improve, and they never get fired, because at the end of the day it’s easier for the school to keep them on for years at a time than finding an unreliable replacement abroad. These teachers are often pretty miserable. Putting in a modicum of effort into learning how to teach when you start is a surefire way to avoid becoming “that guy.”

Getting into the management route means working much more closely and relying on the managerial acumen of the owners and local managers of the school, which can quickly turn into a disorganized nightmare. Several factors can affect this. For one, the TEFL industry in China is a relatively new business. The market for classes varies across cities and incomes, and a lot of school managers tend to come from a public school background. They’re oftentimes unfamiliar with managing a business and can be stubbornly ignorant of what makes an effective TEFL teacher. White skin and youth are prized, even though teaching experience, training in methodology and time spent learning a second language (like English) have a much greater effect on making a good teacher. There’s often a distinct push and pull between effective directors of studies and local management, even when they share the goal of running a successful school, with “You don’t understand Chinese culture” often ending a disagreement.

Some people can thrive in that environment, and, actually, advancing in the TEFL industry (like most workplaces around the world) requires dealing with incompetent coworkers and managers, no matter the locale. I’ve heard stories about, and worked at, schools with management problems around the world, including Korea and Japan (similar problems with China), the Middle East, Europe and even the United States.

I still personally prefer private language education, as public language education is still woefully behind current teaching theory. Still, there are decent enough jobs to be had in China outside of private language mills. I’ve known a lot of people who quite enjoy life working at a university. The pay is often at the bottom of the TEFL scale, “professors” work ten to fifteen hours a week and receive generous blocs of time off. You get to work with half-adults, and there are quite a few Chinese college students who are searching for a non-academic way to use English. Their English teachers is a great utility for that.

At the same time, there’s a good chance you’ll be “teaching” in a lecture hall filled with 90 kids sleeping or dicking around on their cell phones and a group of 10 English nerds sitting up front and hanging on your every word. The university teachers I’ve talked to emphasized the latter as their reason for teaching excellent lessons every day, but I know I’d be discouraged by the low percentage of people I was actually educating. The small class sizes you can teach in a private language school (for both kids and adults) create peer pressure that encourages apathetic students to maintain a minimum level of participation. There’s also little room for advancement. While private language schools often offer little teacher support, universities offer even less, and there’s little feedback from administrators, positive or negative. I enjoy the day-to-day satisfaction of teaching, but it’s when students start showing chartable progress over a longer period of time that I know I’m doing my job right. You don’t really get that at a university. And while it can be quite chuffing to put “professor” on your business card, teaching at a Chinese university lends little industry credibility, especially compared to similar positions in Korea and Japan where professors need to have the resume of, well, a professor to get hired.

The public-school teaching I did in Chinese primary schools was equally frustrating. The “small classes” had a minimum of forty kids, and I’ve taught classes with more than eighty students, none of them for longer than forty minutes at a time. Lots of low-end flashcard games and yelling “cat” and “dog” back and forth. The pay can be decent depending on the school, but the Chinese education system is not at the moment set up to allow an English teacher in a primary school to achieve much beyond passing a poorly written, standardized Chinglish test.

Finding the right environment to teach in is an exercise in patience, and there’s nothing wrong if you don’t love your first job. I had a fear of teaching kids before I moved to China and was hoping to spend most of my time with adults, but after years of experience teaching both I’ve found that I click better with kids. I would’ve never known that before jumping in. TEFL offers a surprisingly wide variety of environments for teaching English, including young learners, business English, general English for adults, academic English, test preparation… the list goes on for a while. The only way you can figure out what’s right for you is to just jump in and teach, even if it is at a language mill run by idiots.

Greg is an ESL instructor who spent two productive years teaching in China. He currently lives in Colorado.

Previously: A Passionate Defense of Henan, My Adopted Chinese Home

|Chinagog Archives|

Anytime anything bad, weird or completely fucked up happens in China, I hold my breath for the inevitable mention of Zhengzhou, Sanmenxia, Zhumadian or any of the horror-story prone towns and cities around Henan. Historically, the province has known many sorrows, including around a billion earthquakes and Yellow River floods. In more recent history, it was completely flooded by Chiang Kai-Shek to stop the Japanese, subjected to crippling famine and food shortages during the Great Leap Forward, witness to the greatest dam disaster in human history, and, more recently, exposed for its corrupt blood drive creating villages with staggering AIDS infection rates. Henanese are labeled by foreigners and Chinese alike as dirty, filthy thieves, and any weird news story usually has the prescient follow-up, “Why am I not surprised this happened in Henan?” as the first comment.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s what I actually came here to say: Henan is an amazing place filled with awesome people and jam-packed with cool (and sometimes perfectly weird) shit to do and see. It’s far from perfect, but it doesn’t deserve the horrific reputation it’s earned, and I think it’s essential for telling the story of China, past and present. Three or four of the (disputed) ancient capitals of China were located there, and if you like history, there’s thousands of years of it on display in the province. It’s also the most populated province in China, and strikes the most perfect balance between cosmopolitan, developing China and the rural lifestyle that has held for umpteen centuries.

Henan makes a lot of bad first impressions. A lot of travelers use Zhengzhou — my adopted Chinese city — as a base of operations, as, since it’s a major rail hub, taking a train there makes a lot of sense. The train station is an armpit. It’s dirty, crowded, and populated with beggars, taxi touts and blatant counterfeit peddlers. When my parents visited me there, we were strafed by two of the resident taxi queue beggars. As a group of four white people, we were apparently easy targets, and I did my best to politely keep the interlopers at bay. One man was handless and would pop over the barrier with a bag hanging from his stumps, exhorting in (my imagined) lawyerese, “Ladies and gentlemen of the taxi stand: as you can see, I have no hands. Please deposit currency in this bag.” Another old lady shuffled around the line trying to annoy those of us waiting for a cab for money. I gave her a few yuan and told her to please leave my parents alone. She took my grimy bills and ignored my request; the others in the queue politely asked aunty to leave my parents alone. Anytime I went to the train station I was stressed out and watching my bags, and going there with my parents was an exercise in overprotective bum-deflection.

But once you move away from the congestion of downtown Zhengzhou and Erqi Square (the supposed center of the city), things start to get better. The choking pollution dissipates a little. Most of the city is criss-crossed by nice, tree-lined streets. Walking through the neighborhoods can be a lot of fun, and, especially after the start of spring, there are spontaneous street food places everywhere you look. I know that’s pretty typical of China, but Chinese street food is one of the things I severely miss, and I never had a complaint about Henan’s.

Henan cuisine isn’t super-famous (or particularly amazing, but return-to-here-noodles are an amazing comfort food), but there’s a great deal of culinary selection from the rest of China. It actually – gasp – resembles most nicer third-tier cities around the country! The place for 羊肉串, 炒面 and street oysters is the smoky alley next the McDonald’s at 黄河路经七路. I had an amazing (amazing!) Indian restaurant there, but apparently they’re out of business. My favorite 油泼面 restaurant ever has apparently sold out, but the city is still apparently a great street food destination. And outside of Zhengzhou, my trip to Xinyang was the best culinary/tea trip I’ve ever taken.

A quick note on Henan being the stereotypical scam center of the Middle Kingdom: In two years there I was the target of a poorly executed scam exactly twice. Once was when a taxi driver loosened his cage thingy and tried to get me and my friends to pay for it when it fell down (a well-executed 妈了个逼 to the face from a fluent friend shut him up in a hurry). Another taxi driver forgot to shut off the meter and claimed that my Chinese was hard to understand, which might have been the case. Net loss: six dollars.

Otherwise the people were amazing. My boss only tried to skim a bit off my salary only once, and we were thick as thieves after we fist-bumped and she understood that I was a man with conviction. Every time I walked in to get my salary, I told her how much she owed me and she thew her hands up in adorable exasperation. “Oh well, Greg, I guess I have to pay you that much.” Then we’d both smile and laugh and I’d work on getting her to finance another staff KTV night. I still have a lot of friends there, and I will definitely be visiting Henan in the near future to tie up some loose travel ends.

If you’ve made it this far and I’ve even mildly changed your mind about the Middle Plains, let me make a few recommendations for things to do (and see) around Zhengzhou.

Erqi Square 二七塔 Actually, as mentioned above, you can skip this place. It’s just a bunch of shitty malls, choked traffic and a smog-stained throwback memorial pagoda.

North Tea Market 北茶城 This place is amazing. Out of the way and nearly hidden next to a flower market, the North Tea Market is home to hundreds of tea, tea-making and tea furniture stores. There’s a lot of different kinds of tea sold here, but most of the stores focus on Pu’er or (my personally most-abused substance) Xinyang Maojian (信阳毛尖). Every store will pour you unlimited samples of their wares (it’s polite to buy a token bag before leaving, but they will not give you a hard sell), and speaking with the clerks is a great way to practice Chinese. They spend their whole day making and drinking tea; sunnier dispositions I’ve never encountered before.

Henan Provincial Museum 河南博物院 Henan is the cradle of Chinese civilization, and this museum does an amazing job of documenting that history. Chock full of cool old shit if that’s your thing.

Shang Dynasty Walls Basically 4,000-year-old piles of dirt, which I suspect have undergone recent dirt renovations. Still, oddly cool history.

Zhengdong CBD 郑东区 A skyscraper farm just to the east of the city, the CBD was a lot of interesting when it was basically a ghost town consisting of hundred of tall buildings and a half-finished hotel. Less interesting now that it’s receiving more use for its intended purpose. There’s a nice lake there, too.

Food
Most of my favorite restaurants have closed, moved or changed their menu significantly in the last couple of years, so I don’t have any specific travel guide recommendations to make. Ask around and try the Huimian (回面). Haidilao’s as good here as in Beijing. There’s also a nice little street food alley behind the McDonald’s at Huanghelu and Wenhualu, but make sure to bring an iron stomach.

Drink
Target Bar 目标吧 经六路金水路
A gathering place for laowais. Owned and operated by the legendary Lao Wang (The Most Interesting Man in China), Target’s a fine place to get pissed for an evening. The mood gets sour when foreigners turn it into a bitter barn, but it’s one of the more consistent places

Bird Bar 鸟吧 经七路纬一路
This was my spot. It’s owned and operated by Snake, who has the craziest full-sleeve tattoo of any Chinese person I’ve ever met. The Long Island Iced Teas are some of the most potent I’ve ever tasted, and have almost resulted in me losing friends a couple of times. There’s a drink named after his girlfriend, Bottle Opener. It’s a foreign-feeling bar without any of the foreigners. Just for good measure, they stuck a picture of a pot leaf on the front door.

Anyone who has shit to say about Henan or Zhengzhou can come at me, bro, and I’ll give you a list of a dozen reasons why you are WRONG on the INTERNET.

Greg is an ESL instructor who spent two productive years teaching in China. He currently lives in Colorado.

Previously: What’s The Value Of Native-Speaking TEFL Educators?

|Chinagog Archives|

Most of my students are studying at an English training school with the intention of enrolling in a Master’s program, or at least attaining a Bachelor’s degree from an American university. During my time here I’ve had a soul-enriching load of students accomplish just that, as they’ve gotten their IELTS scores (a British-Australian test to measure English language proficiency in both general and academic English) and entered various BA, BS, MA and MS programs across the country.

But while some of their success can be attributed to my instruction, most of my best students came in (and exited) my class with amazing study skills and positive attitudes toward learning. (There are many more who possessed none of these attributes and promptly failed, but let’s not talk about them yet.) A lot of students are whipped by bureaucracy or a sense of obligation to overachieve. For example, the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission (many of my students are Saudi) gives them eighteen months, regardless of their prior language education, to get their English up to university-grade level. Those who buck up tend to make it.

Yet there are those who have an innate difficulty learning foreign languages. I try to motivate students who get frustrated with the grind and struggle with English by using my personal experience as an example. I came to China able to say “你好” and “咖啡.” I am what Scott Thornbury described as a Bad Language Learner. I was also quite intimidated by the effortless abilities of many of my fellow foreign coworkers, especially since the only fluent thing I could do for months was order a beer and “yangruhschwar.” To this day I can’t say 服务员 with enough of a coherent growl to get any service. At the suggestion of a friend, I started making shorter-term language goals. Having short conversations with Chinese people without giving up and resorting to friends to act as translators. Having a conversation in Chinese on the phone. Ordering Sprite at McDonalds. And while I don’t speak academic Chinese by any means (I’m functionally illiterate), I can confidently say that I speak Chinese. My stories have connected with a few students, and I’ve helped them develop unorthodox strategies for practicing at home. Spending half an hour a day conversing only in English with their spouses. Taking the same small bite out of their day to write up flashcards, and then categorizing them. Walking into a BMW dealership and seeing how long of a conversation you can have with a sales associate before they realize you have no interest (or means) for buying one.

The frustrating thing about all of this as a teacher is that I have to do a lot of mental gymnastics justifying my existence as a teacher even when my students have immediate, apparent, life-affecting language needs. Getting into an American university will improve their life, sure, but many students are sold academic English courses when they don’t possess either the language ability or study skills necessary to take full (or any) advantage of the services they’re buying. I wouldn’t call it a scam, but like a lot of higher and private education in America, a lot of classes are sold with more of an eye toward enrollment.

All of this renders the value of native-speaker TEFL education in foreign countries dubious. It might lead, say, a Chinese parent to ask: If the accredited academic English program I’m sending my kid to in the United States might not be providing me any value, what does that say about the private language school he goes to every week here in his hometown, or the foreign teacher his primary/middle/high school teacher employs?

I’ve seen numerous online comments denouncing TEFL education in China as an outright scam. They’re right in many cases. Both public and private schools in China are stocked with teachers who are checked out, drunk, unmotivated, ineffective, boring, borderline-illiterate or any other educator-insulting adjective you can think of (reply with more in the comments, I guess). A sad majority of schools are interested mostly in boosting short-term enrollment and throwing as many students at newly minted white teachers as they can handle. Foreign “professors” in Chinese universities “teach” 200-person classes. On top of all this is the fact that the ultimate goal, the gaokao, is focused mostly on non-verbal English skills, while a lot of TEFL theory focuses on improving speaking and listening skills, as we use them to communicate.

Now that my cynicism has backed me onto a hypothetical ledge questioning not only my value as a teacher, but the value of my profession as a whole, I have to offer a rebuttal. While the quality of education can vary across subjects, countries and schools, I find it hard to judge any kind of education as inherently worthless or “scammy.” Looking back on my time in grade school, middle school and high school, I have a hard time identifying any single piece of knowledge that helped shape me into who I am today. I can’t remember a damn thing I specifically learned in Mrs. Burroughs’ eighth grade English class, but some part of it drove me to study English in college, and eventually pursue a career in education. I didn’t fall in love with literature by accident; I was guided into it by some excellent teachers. I’ve only used my high school French during a couple of short trips to France, but over the years it’s helped me dive back into French cinema and don a comically amusing French accent on command.

I’m sure I didn’t reach all of my students in China on a fundamental level, but I know that a lot of them left my class not only as better English users, but also possessed a greater appreciation for the language. I hopefully helped them improve their critical thinking skills and broadened their cultural understanding. If some of them choose to major in English down the road, I wish them a strong wind at their backs upon that rocky path. While STEM teaching gets a lot of (deserved) credit as a measurement for academic development, the humanities serve as a necessary means to creating an enlightened, intelligent and awakened society. I’m not changing the world as a TEFL teacher, but I feel that I’m serving a small, necessary part.

Greg is an ESL instructor who spent two productive years teaching in China. He currently lives in Colorado.

Previously: What “Chinese With Mike” Does Wrong, And What It Does Right

|Chinagog Archives|

So I just stumbled across Chinese with Mike. I can’t decide if this gentleman is the worst Chinese teacher since my boss forced my coworkers and I to learn “Tianmimi,” or the best Chinese teacher ever, like a mullet-enhanced Dashan. He certainly holds my interest as a Chinese language learner, and that’s half the battle. I mean, this man is constantly rocking a Hawaiian shirt and questionable haircut, and his classroom is plastered with pictures of him, yet I’ve still managed to waste countless precious hours this week I should be spending on prep time (harf harf) learning Chinese with the motherfucker.

My Chinese ability is, uh, interesting. It was pieced together (in the most literal sense of the word) in lovely Henan province, where all the men growl like farmers and the women do, too. I adore the place, but it was fucking hard to use the Standard Pirate Mandarin I was picking up through Pimsleur, only to get in response a stream of unintelligible, second-tone exclamations peppered with a healthy dose of 中中中中中s. I (mostly) picked it up eventually, but I was never really able to find a competent Chinese teacher who could formally direct my learning.

My aforementioned boss was a veteran of the Chinese public school system, so her lesson plan usually included a bunch of random, unrelated vocabulary words, followed by a Confucius Say. I can say the hell out of 三人行必有我师, but it’s never been used for anything other than making new Chinese friends smile. After about a year in China, I hired a private Chinese tutor to come to my house and kick my 普通话 into overdrive. Her first lesson, which was supposed to be an hour, consisted entirely of “你好” “你好吗” and “我很好.” Once we established after five minutes that I knew how to say all that perfectly well, I asked her what was next. She said, “Nothing,” before awkwardly packing up her things and leaving. I called her a couple of times to see if we could arrange another class, but never heard back.

After that, the Zhengzhou North Tea Market was my primary source for conversation practice, and while my listening improved, my pronunciation and knowledge of grammar stagnated. It was frustrating, because all I wanted was someone who taught Chinese like I teach English. Competent language instruction is pretty easy if you focus on a few points. Emphasize the communicative importance of language. Logically group vocabulary and grammar. Include activities that are fluency-focused (minimal teacher correction) and accuracy-focused (teacher correction of target vocabulary, grammar). Make the class interesting.

Chinese with Mike does a lot of things that offend a lot of my formally-trained teaching sensibilities. For one, his lessons are a good 70 to 80 percent English, which is excessive even for an early beginner class. He also doesn’t give any wait time for his viewers to reflect on or repeat the language. When presenting a language point (such as his “There is/there are” lesson), he constantly re-translates the grammar back into English, which is quite confusing. Mike, you only need to explain once that “there is/there are” switch into “[noun] have/ [noun] has” in Chinese. And you have the grammar topic written in English at the top of the whiteboard!

Any TEFL course not purchased for $60 on Groupon will hammer home the importance of student-centered lessons. Good TEFL teachers work on reducing the ratio of TTT (teacher talk time) to STT (student talk time) in their classes as much as possible. Student-to-student interaction is gold, and should be the ultimate goal of any TEFL class. If you can get a pair of 10-year-old Chinese students to have an authentic conversation in English, you are doing your job exactly as Jesus intended.

Now that I’ve got that party-line stuff out of the way: Mike does a lot of stuff quite well. First of all, he looks like NFL sackmaster Jared Allen, and now that Allen doesn’t play for the Kansas City Chiefs I am totally in favor of that guy. (Go Broncos.)

Mike’s methodology is solid. It’s obvious that he’s the Dashan of Chicago. He could probably cross-talk my puny Chinese into a gang-controlled sidwalk, but instead he levels his language to ridiculous depths in order to connect with true beginners. His gestures that emphasize tones are great, and he even changes his height and lateral position to hammer home the importance of perfect pronunciation. He includes extremely useful visual examples from time to time, and I’m sure that the “downloads are currently being revised” will return in the near future with a supplemental vengeance.

The best thing about Chinese with Mike is that the guy delivers interesting lessons. He makes dry jokes, throws markers for effect, dresses extra-conspicuously and tries to make his viewers guess how he’s changed his appearance from week to week. Jokes are beginner-level and come out of nowhere.

I host a happy hour event for my school once a month, and it’s hands-down the best part of my job. I get paid to drink, pass out free beer to students and facilitate discussion for a few hours*. Sometimes I drink a bit too much and start speaking Chinese — none of the people studying or working at my school can speak Chinese — but it’s all in good fun; I have a uniquely Irish ability to speak coherently, not piss anyone off and arrive home safely, so I never get in too much trouble.

The best part is when students start loosening up. Japanese learners, even those at an advanced level, are almost uniformly quiet and reserved in a group class setting, but after a couple of beers they’re (magically) some of the friendliest people in the bar. Those unique “what is this like in your culture?” questions, which as a teacher can be a linguistic exercise in teeth pulling during group class, shoot around the bar like shotgun pellets. Friendships are forged, cultural boundaries are bridged and everyone (besides me, depending on how much merriment I made) walks away speaking English a little better than when they walked in.

Moderate to severe drinking is one of my favorite tips for those trying to acquire a second language.

The classroom is, of course, a great place to start the process of learning. Teachers facilitate this with guided, well-structured lesson plans. We promote a balance of fluency and accuracy, group vocabulary and grammar points, correct important errors and use a variety of activities to allow students to use the new language. Most language teachers employ speech graded to the level of their learner to enhance communication. It’s not baby English, but it sure isn’t authentic, and that’s where classroom learning can often fall short: learners may be inhibited by their own shyness, overactive classmates, cultural taboos against speaking in class, bad teaching and a whole cast of other negative factors.

This is where alcohol comes into play. Drunk people the world over just like talking to each other. The atmosphere is laid back. I usually initiate conversations, but after a beer or two the students take over and I try to sit back and listen. The students all know each other pretty well through their class time together (doubly so if any of them are smokers), but once the restrictions of the classroom are removed they open up a lot more about their jobs, personal lives, goals, dreams and ambitions. Even students who don’t drink seem to have a lot of fun; there’s a core group of six to ten students from the Middle East who seem to come to every damn event.

School happy hour is one strategy to drunkenly stumble your way towards fluency, but I’ve used many others in my own language learning. The link between language acquisition and alcohol is pretty well documented, so I want to focus more on my own personal experiences of boozing and shmoozing. A lot of my ability to speak and understand Chinese came from my inebriated social experiences. My Chinese is far from perfect, but I think it’s pretty good for two short years there. I never partook in a formal class in Henan, but I owe a lot of my ability to my adventures drinking and 汉语ing.

Strategy the first: whenever you travel, take the slow train and bring a bottle of 60% Erguotou with you. My typical MO would be to establish my tiny bed of residence, drink a third of the bottle, then camp out in the smoking section of the car and make conversation with the people crammed in there. Not the healthiest way to practice a language, but I’d always emerge hungover yet linguistically leveled up. People on bullet trains tend to keep to themselves and avoid geeking out over random foreigners; slow train people generally don’t speak English, but always want to talk to the laowai who speaks Chinese. Also, they enjoy baijiu.

Strategy the second: when deciding on your bar of choice, avoid the one populated by a large contingency of bitter expats, drinking away their sorrows and bemoaning everything about China. I used to hang out at Bird Bar in Zhengzhou. Proprietor: Snake. Bartender: Brian (alias: Briancells). English spoken: minimal. Aside from myself and my friends, the clientele was mostly all Chinese and quite amenable to conversing with sauced foreigners, so long as you didn’t insist that Japan is a great country and that Japanese people are heaven-sent. Goddammit, friend who I totally swear wasn’t me.

Of course, if you get violent or abusive when you drink, using alcohol to improve your language skills can end up badly. It also has its limitations: drunk people, even native speakers, make a lot of mistakes. While this isn’t so bad from a fluency perspective, it can fossilize common mistakes. Also, as alcohol adversely affects short-term memory, there’s the danger that you turn into a raging alcoholic with a tendency to forget everything you learned the night before. Exercise caution and stay thirsty, my friends.

* And yes, my current students are all adults. I did have a friend in China who ended up drinking baijiu with some students (not provided by him) on a field trip to the countryside. The “responsible adults” thought it was adorable.

Greg is an ESL instructor who spent two productive years teaching in China. He currently lives in Colorado.

Previously: The Importance Of Graded Speech 

|Chinagog Archives|

It’s been a stressful day for you, the stared-at, harried, overworked (up to 30 hours this week, for chrissake!), hungover foreigner. Your Chinese is just good enough for you to order an 二号套餐 at McDonald’s, but the girl at the counter just stares at you blankly when you order 谁比. You repeat: 雪笔. 水碧. Nothing but a blank stare. Screw everything, you say, then point at the fucking Sprite and tell her “那个!” You’ve taken to walking everywhere backwards in a vain effort to avoid the e-bike ninjas sneaking up on you and ringing their satanic bellhorns for the grave, bourgeois offense of being a pedestrian on a fucking sidewalk. A sidewalk. You lose half your voice spewing invective in English at the asshole in a Santana who nearly de-limbs you after running a red light…

A day like this can only end well if you’re plastered in a bar. You text your friend. Bird Bar. Good people. Your friend appears concerned when he arrives because your face is the color of a maraschino cherry crossbred with a ghost pepper. Flickers of rage are in your pupils. “Let me tell you about this fucking day in this fucking country,” you start, and what follows is an unrepeatable string of profanity, unbridled anger, bile and utter hatred. A crowd starts to gather, rubbernecking with no discretion. None of them have a clue what you’re saying. You might as well be this guy, just with more frowny-face and frustration with… well, nobody knows because you’re speaking so fast and none of them have gotten out of the first round of swear word bracketology.

(As an aside, the first piece of advice I give to people moving to or visiting China is thus: never use the words “fuck” and “China” in the same sentence, no matter the context. They’re the only two words that everybody knows and they can elicit quite a strong reaction. A friend was jumped by five dudes after exclaiming, “I fucking love China!” in a bar during the Beijing Olympics. He went to the hospital and had a fun three-day stint in jail. The more you know!)

Native speakers are naturally wired to understand and express English in an abstract, idiomatic, and compressed way. We speak fast, pepper our speech with cultural references and clever bon mots, and expend as little effort as possible. The reason that the schwa /Ə/ is the most common phonetic sound in English (and the sound we make in interjections like “uh” and “um”) is because it requires the least amount of mouth and tongue positioning to pronounce. Over-pro-noun-cing your words might slightly enhance communication, but let’s be honest: it kind of makes you sound like an asshole.

If you don’t grade speech, you’ll be like that McDonald’s cashier who can’t tell “Sprite” from “snow pen” and “water jade.” Some people cock their heads to the side, raise their voice and talk.like.pa.tron.i.zing.ro.bots. Others will grade their grammar and remove any fluff that has the possibility of confusing their students. “You. Page two. Do now.” I have a few alternative techniques that have been quite helpful.

The first thing you should do as a TEFL teacher is check your ego at the door. The class is not about you. As much pressure as there is on teachers to be engaging, a lot of ESL teaching, for both kids and adults, is finding ways to make English interesting and relatable to your students’ interests, which oftentimes are very different from your own. After your first class, the “shiny foreign person” veneer will fade and you will just be their teacher.

I’ve known a lot of bad teachers in my day (at one point I was one myself). They spend entire classes telling their kids about the kinds of coffee they like, or why their hometown in Bumfuck, Texas is such a nice place. They talk about what it’s like being a foreigner in China and why their lives are so interesting. The problem is that for most of the class, the teacher is doing the talking, while the students are staring at the wall because they have no fucking clue what this person is going on about, and they count the seconds until they can leave.

I’ve also seen a lot of teachers — even good teachers with lots of experience — get angry when they have to work with unmotivated students without realizing that’s why they get paid the big bucks. Motivating students is half your job as an educator, and I’d estimate that it’s a challenge in 80% of TEFL classrooms around the world. And while it’s impossible to get every student on board in every class, figuring out what baggage students bring to the classroom — for example, being a ten-year-old spending her entire weekend in training centers — and how to work around that baggage is an essential skill. Not every class is going to be like Stand and Deliver, but you should try to understand your students so you can engage them.

Inspiring, though as role model may create unreasonable expectations.

I struggled a lot with this when I first started. I taught a summer program filled with low-level middle school students who were present two and a half hours a day, four days a week. Naturally, this being China, there was no curriculum and only half the students bothered to buy the coursebook. The students were completely unmotivated to learn English (except Larry; Larry was great, and yes, I did give him that name), and I was raw enough as a teacher — I’d only been doing it for a month — that I had no idea how to connect with them.

For a while, class was mostly just me talking about stuff I did and seeing if it clicked. That backfired one horrific day in July. I told them I ate Japanese food the day before. I asked them if they liked Japanese food (“Yeah, it’s okay”) and asked them if they liked sushi (after a few seconds, consensus emerged that I was talking about “shousi,” and they all said they did). Then I asked them if they liked the spicy, green dressing called “wasabi.” All of a sudden ten heads shot to attention.

“Say that again, teacher.”

“Wasabi.”

Giggles. “Slower.”

“Wa. Sa. Bi.”

They erupt in laughter. “Again, teacher.”

“Waaooh. Saaaaa. Biiiii. Wasabi.”

With my class on the verge of dying from laughter, I realized what I’d been saying. Woshabi. 我傻屄: “I’m a stupid cunt.” Over and over and over again in Chinese, I was saying “I’m a stupid cunt.” I lost all face that day.

While the class did improve as the summer wound down, my biggest takeaway was that what I did on a day-to-day basis wasn’t going to cut it to stimulate class discussion. I needed to find ways to relate to my students’ interests, because as much as it felt like people were interested in me based on how often I got laowai’d walking down the street, for my students I was just another bleepin’ teacher in another bleepin’ class their parents made them go to that prevented them from having a childhood.

Hoping to never repeat that experience again, I looked through the training materials at my school and found what might be the most useful (if infuriating, at the time) piece of teaching advice I’ve ever received.

“Parent/student complaint: the teacher is not interesting. Solution: be more interesting.”

I use it to motivate me every day I teach and for every lesson I plan. I’m constantly asking myself how I can relate the material to the students. Strategies can vary. Chinese kids tend to enjoy basketball, sleeping and playing computer games, all of which are boring. I banned discussion of these topics and we came up with alternative identities for the students. Some flew in the trash can in their free time. Others enjoyed jumping out the window. The only English that Travis really knew was “killing Japanese,” so we went with that. And if you asked any of my students what Greg’s favorite activity was, the answer would have been “eating students.” It was a start.

Now, this isn’t to say that you should never tell personal stories or talk about yourself in class. I use personal stories to set a context for the target language of the day; it’s an important part of “scaffolding” language to enhance your lessons. But just telling stories — with ungraded speech, and/or lacking in language goals — is a surefire way to lose a class. It’s so obviously low-effort that it’ll inspire your students to give back exactly what you put in — which is not much.

You can also integrate stories into your pedagogy in other ways. Using a dictogloss is one of my favorite things to do. Basically, tell your students a story several times, then have them work in groups to rewrite the story as accurately as possible. It’s a great way to integrate speaking, listening and writing, and results in a lot of good student-to-student interaction (which should be your endgame as a TEFL instrutor).

If all else fails, just bring a bunch of stickers and American pennies and pass them out for good behavior. Your kids will go nuts.

Greg is an ESL instructor who spent two productive years teaching in China. He currently lives in Colorado.

Previously: Why You Need A Break From Teaching To Fall In Love With It

|Chinagog Archives|

This isn’t going to be one of those “Why I left China after two long years and everyone is going to miss me” pieces. I left China for a bunch of personal reasons not related to China, decisions that I later (somewhat) ended up regretting. But let’s not get into all that. Laowai leave or stay for a whole host of reasons, and since China inflates all our egos, we tend to think our departure theatens the foundational future of the country.

What this column is about is perspective, and specifically how living the expat life can cloud how you approach your future, in China or otherwise.

I think that teaching in China is one of the best jobs you can have. The pay is decent (especially as you gain experience), the job can be a lot of fun (if you put some time and effort into it) and the hours are minimal. As an introvert, the classroom affords me a social environment where I can put myself out there while simultaneously be in total control. It’s a deep-end-of-the-pool kind of therapy for shyness. My kids were great, and I had a wonderful relationship with my school. On top of that, China might be the most interesting place in the world right now, and it was amazing getting to witness, firsthand, the largest rural-to-urban population transition the world will ever see. As a writer, living in China does most of the work for you.

The problem was that, at the time, I didn’t see education as my career. I moved to China on a whim, while recovering from a horrible knee injury and experiencing an existential crisis. Three years after graduation, my English degree had gotten me as far as mid-level retail management, and, due to the financial collapse, I was looking at having to put in five more years as a copy slave before getting anything resembling a promotion. I also fucking hated the work; the money was decent, I was good at it, but it was slowly consuming my soul on a daily basis. While laid up with a fractured tibial plateau, I was chatting with an acquaintance from an off-topic message board about my vague interest in teaching in Japan. He told me I had a job at the school he ran in China if I wanted it. Five months (and a fuckload of paperwork) later, I was in Zhengzhou and it was the best decision I’ve ever made.

Teaching didn’t come easily to me at first; it took a while to master the social dynamic aspect of classroom management, but I wasn’t too worried. Teaching abroad was, at first, just a means to an expat end. I always envisioned myself as a novelist-poet who would be constantly waylaid by a “real job” until my dream of being published came true. After finishing my China adventure, I figured I’d get a technical-sounding Master’s degree (city management held a lot of appeal at the time) that would land me a solid-paying, if boring, job that could support a normal family life back home. Along the way, I developed into a pretty damn good teacher, but I assumed I’d be leaving Teacher Greg behind once my little jaunt was over. I put zero thought or effort into shiny certifications or training courses I could put on my resume, one of my biggest China regrets.

As soon as I arrived back in America, I set to work researching my next steps, in the meantime taking a career one-eighty and stacking wood in a lumber yard.

Oddly enough, the first thing I missed about China wasn’t the food, the people, the pollution or the cost of living: it was my classroom and students. I realized that all I wanted to do for a career was educate people. I spent a lot of time researching and getting myself qualified to teach high school English, but after eight grueling months I realized that the tepid job market and ever-powerful bureaucracy would be too exhausting to overcome. The whole time, I had my eye on returning to China, but this time with specific career goals instead of “get paid to travel” and “teach gud Englitch.”

One thing I definitely wanted, according to the old Confucian saying, is to train people how to teach. To start on that path, I got a good TEFL certification and found my current job, which has taken my teaching to the next level. The certification provided an imprimatur for my (mostly self-taught) pedagogy, while the latter has given me the chance to engage a diverse group of students with completely different needs than Chinese primary and middle schoolers. I have a fifteen-year plan for my education career, and every day I teach is another step down that path.

The crux of this story: none of this would’ve happened if I’d stayed in China. I might’ve been working at a different school in a different city, and probably making more than I was initially. I wouldn’t have seen the need to spend money on certification, and I doubt anything would’ve shocked me into investing much time or money into professional development. Old habits would probably not have died, and I doubt I’d have any idea where I’d be in a year or two, much less fifteen; I could see my future self starting to feel unfulfilled and quite pessimistic about working in education. Teaching can be a grind some days, and it’s really hard to track student progress across a couple of weeks (or months, even). It’s sometimes even more difficult to step back and look at the big picture of your career in TEFL when you’re entrenched in a fairly comfortable, if boring, career abroad.

To teachers reading this: I’m not advocating taking as drastic of an action as quitting China and going directly into manual labor, and I don’t want to detract from the experience of anyone who fits China into their long-term plans. My experience has just led me to believe that you need to pull back and assess your short-and long-term goals, then see how teaching and China can fit into them. China is not necessarily the best place to do that.

You could do something as easy as saving up some dough, then spending a couple of months mid-contract taking an intensive TEFL course and traveling around. You might even get your employer to pay for it; if they do, they’re probably a place you might want to consider for long-term career options, as it shows they’re as invested in your professional development as you are. You could try teaching in a different country for a year and see how it compares to China. I work with people who’ve taught all over the world, and China’s still on my shortlist of places I’d like to continue working. Or if you’re iffy on continuing in education, get a different job and see how it compares.

Closing your eyes and jumping in the deep end, into new experiences, shouldn’t be too difficult. After all, isn’t that what led a lot of us to China in the first place?

Greg is an ESL instructor who spent two productive years teaching in China. He currently lives in Colorado.

Previously: Introducing: A Weekly Column About Teaching In China 

|Chinagog Archives|

Before we get started, let me say this:

If you’re one of those who reflexively shits on anyone and everyone in the education industry in China, let’s just get the hate all out of the way. Yes, there are those who deserve the world’s flung feces because they are your stereotypical loser-back-home/asshole-backpacker laowai who drinks to excess (often in class, because “it’s China”), whore around like end-times are come and space-cadet their way through lessons. There are those who show up in China without a degree or any ounce of marketable skills and sob to the heavens when the only place they can find work is a kindergarten in the middle of Henan farm country. And I know people who have arrived in class covered in vomit, spent a year having conversations with the classroom wall and been mostly unable to communicate in the language they teach.

But I am not one of those people. I hate those assholes.

I’m a proud member of the education industry. I love my job and I’m a damn good teacher. I approach my class every day with the explicit goals of teaching useful material and having fun while doing it. I’ve taught English to people from all over the world, ages six to seventy. My students have placed nationally in English competitions and matriculated into American universities. I’ve tutored executives in major corporations. Edutainment is my middle name.

If you’re still up there (metaphorically, natch) with your pants down, squatting and ready to release a shitstorm upon me and my ilk, I cordially invite you to get stuffed in a car fire or go suck on a vinegar-filled egg.

I’m not actually this hostile in life, real or digital. I’m just aggressive at defending the reputations of my hard-working, kickass comrades in classrooms — and if you can’t tell, we tend to bond over the mild disdain and outright hostility thrown at us almost every day, both on the Internet and in real life. This column will partly address those issues, and hopefully allow fellow teachers to commune with one another in this virtual space.

You should know upfront that I no longer live in China, but plan to come back. These columns will not be my horrified reactions to everyday China things like babies shitting in the street, the endemic smell of garbage during the summer, the lack of cold water in restaurants, the inability to queue (I played defensive line in high school, so it’s an excuse for me to dust off my once-formidable club and swim skills), spitting, smoking, or any of the mild annoyances that drive so many of our more sensitive foreign brethren to unnecessary insanity on a daily basis. China wouldn’t be China without its (her?) sizable rougher edges, and the weirdness stokes my sense of perverse amusement. And after living in Henan for two years it’s really hard to faze me.

“But Greg,” you’re undoubtedly mumbling to yourself at the moment, “you haven’t actually told us what you’ll write.”

Well, Releaser of Horses, here’s what I have so far: alcohol and language acquisition; classroom atmosphere; professional development; a love letter to erguotou; proper drunken adventures; Xinyang; using multimedia in the classroom (instead of just hitting play); setting (and accomplishing) language goals. If you want more details, you’ll have to come back around later. I’ll be here in the coming weeks, months, years, and possibly eons (science willing).

Greg is an ESL instructor who spent two productive years teaching in China. He currently lives in Colorado. His columns will run on Fridays.

(Image by Katie) |Chinagog Archives|