What I Do
I haven’t spoken much about my job here. I have another site for that; if you want to subject yourself to much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth you can go there for the finer details. On a much broader level, I thought I’d introduce you to what I do.
There is a widely held mythology out there (especially on EFL forums) that says 1. all teaching jobs in China are easy peasy oral English positions that don’t require much more than Caucasian features, an intact cerebral cortex, and an ability to speak English to a convincing degree, and that 2. teaching salaries are crap in China.
Not true. If my job consisted solely of no-brainer oral English classes I wouldn’t have to spend this weekend doing professional development for marking writing exams. If salaries are truly crap here, I would never have been able to afford that 50rmb passion fruit margarita afterwards at Cantina Agave on Changle Lu.
I work for an Australian university that has joint-venture degree programs in Shanghai. There are many, many similar programs in universities all over China, requiring varying degrees of experience and qualifications. You teach academic skills (like essay writing or presentation skills) to Chinese students who want to study abroad (or whose parents tell them they want to study abroad). The hours are sane (no evenings or weekends and for me, only 4 days a week) and the holidays are long (I work about 8 months of the year). The workload is often heavy though, and I usually have piles of papers stacking up that need marking. I definitely earn my salary.
For those of you out there (and there are many) who disparage EFL as a cowboy backpacker field full of maladjusted losers who can’t get a job/date/life back home and who really ought to just go back to their home countries and settle down and get a real job, I’d like to put forward an idea:
What we have going on here is pretty damn real. We may not be in Cleveland or Vancouver or wherever home is, and we may not be working in a cubicle or making car payments or defining ourselves or our goals by conventional social markers, but we are definitely living our lives in a real and serious way (well, actually, no, not really- see my fake essay marking criteria above). The longer I live away from home, the more possibilities I see for other ways of living your life. There really are no rules. It’s very liberating when you finally realize that. We feel quite settled here, in a really unsettled, nomadic kind of way.
“If salaries are truly crap here, I would never have been able to afford that 50rmb passion fruit margarita afterwards at Cantina Agave on Changle Lu.”
Too damn right! I taught (also a career teacher, hello there!)in a fancy-pants university in Japan while my much more clever friend taught in China. She owns a house here in NZ now, I have no money at all. What did I learn? Well, I had a awesome professional experience, but managed to save no money and so, should have gone to China. I’m still considering it for the future.
RE: your marking criteria- I love it! Do you also know about “stairwell marking”? Stand at the top and fling the essays. The ones that land at the top of the stairs get the top marks and so on down to the bottom. Don’t tell anyone I told you. I’m still maintaining that I am a “professional”. P.S. Sorry I’ve written so much!
A friend of mine I used to work with in a university in Istanbul once insisted he used phrenology as a basis for his portfolio marks- apparently reading the bumps on students’ heads is just as accurate as stairwell marking!
(Could you actually read my marking criteria, aside from the, er, big LSD, OMFG bits? I worked hard on that one- got it down even to half points! Even more accurate than the IELTS…)