I’ve given some thought to doing an MA in TESOL. After all, I taught it in China, liked it, so why not earn 5,000 RMB a month instead of a mere 4800? All I need is a golden ticket. Luckily, I found one, via a Google ad on a message board. Upon seeing the heading, [...]
teaching Posts
I’ll just add that to my resume, then…
I’ve taught English to two-year-olds in split bottom pants. The trick there is not letting them sit on your lap for storytime. I’ve taught English to bartenders and asked them to repeat after me. Bud…Wise…Er… I’ve taught businessmen and doctors, flight attendants and fry cooks. I’ve taught Little Emperors in large classes, I’ve taught university [...]
The Outdoors Poetry Exercise
Keith, already suspicious of John, is doubly suspicious now that John missed their dinner appointment. On a rainy Friday, he wonders about John’s motives for being in China, as he implements a fresh idea into the classroom: a poetry exercise, where the students go outside, and use English to write a poem about what they see.
Keith started class. He did Tongue Twisters. He had arranged them in such a manner that they grew harder the further they went down the list, until the last student had the hardest.
“Theolphius Thistle,” Keith corrected. “Like THis. TH. Got it?”
The boy was shaking. He tried again. He got closer on the ‘th’ sound. Closer. But not correct. Keith kissed the air, drawing some ahhs from the front row, and said, “TH. Like this. Got it?”
They repeated until the bell, and the boy, now trembling, quietly slipped out of class. He never came back.
The 7 Year Laowai: Part 8 – The Graveyard of all Ambition
… He died an old man in a cold Chinese hospital an entire hemisphere removed from everyone and everything he had ever known. Surrounded by strangers, he couldn’t even have read his own obituary.
The 7 Year Laowai: Part 6 – Concentration Camp
“How can someone who exists on the fringes of a society understand that society?” Jack said. “You’re a laowai, a wai guo ren, an outsider. You can’t understand pigs without shoveling pig shit, you shouldn’t even fucking eat bacon. How can you be an expert on death without taking the occasional life?”
The 7-Year Laowai: Part 5 – Lego Blocks
…that look came upon his face. It stuck there as he went over and bashed the usurper right in the eye with a Lego block.
A black look grotesque enough on a five year old’s face, when seen on the face of a sixty-four year old man…I think Matt noticed too. Or maybe he was just hitting his stride. He took Xia Yu’s hands and started dancing with her.
He was fired a month later.
The 7-Year Laowai: Part 4 – Contract Renewal
“Freshman?” Jack said. “The first I taught freshman English, all the girls came up to me after class and asked if they could come home and fuck me.”
…and we never had another group dinner.
It’s a sickness
As an English teacher at a 6,000-strong middle school in the northwest of Hunan province, I come into contact with several hundred students a day. My course load puts me in front of roughly 850 students a week. In a school as cramped as mine, the students and staff are constantly breathing each other’s germs. As such, when I started to get a deep-lung cough and run a mild fever, I should have known it was only a matter of time before the surgical-mask brigade descended on our school.
Tuesday, October 26th, after about a week of classrooms full of hacking, coughing, sniffling teenagers, I walked into my first period to find 40% of my class wearing surgical masks. The next day, the school closed down for a week due to the diagnosis of swine flu in several students and one teacher. That’s right: we got the piggy.
H1N1 has become a pandemic, so much so that it’s now considered to be “the dominant flu strain in the world today,” according to an article at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The article gives a good overview of the implications and complications of swine flu and the panic surrounding it. The US government’s website about the flu provides statistical evidence that backs up the RFE/RL article. The World Health Organization has an FAQ about the pandemic.
University ESL Teaching: What you should be asking about!
Teaching ESL at a university in China is a good gig: low hours, long holidays, weekends and more than enough money to survive on. If you’ve chosen this route you’ll find that most universities (and agents on their behalf) are very happy to offer basic terms, conditions and vague information to hurry you through signing [...]
Crossing The Line
Recall the old expression: teachers are to act in loco parentis. This means, if my high school Latin still serves me, that during school hours the teachers are responsible for assuming the role of parents in the lives of their students. Yet as anyone knows, this doesn’t really work. As teenagers, the last things we [...]
