The foreign staff has shrunk, with three teachers leaving in the last month or so. The reasons and context will be left undisclosed but let's just say it is a shitty, shitty story. With their departure, the rest of the staff had to take over their classes, which led to a new period on my otherwise free Thursday schedule. I don't complain though as these students are damn fun, one of my best classes by far, and I get some overtime pay ($$$ or should I say 元元元).
The job is still good, the awesome moments still overshadowing the hard/shitty ones. I do my best (and succeed) at focusing on the positive aspects but sometimes it is damn hard to feel like something else than just a "walking advertizing billboard"... Lemme explain.
I am a non-native English speaker, recently graduated with a major that has nothing to do with teaching, with no relevant experience, hired with no real interview to become an English teacher. Doesn’t it seem a little odd to you? Now obviously, although somebody who corresponds to this profile can still be a terrific teacher (and I like to think that you are goddamn right), it still calls for caution. I initially thought that they would supervise and guide the crap out of me, because you know... all the stuff previously mentioned, but no, just "here are your students, your books, now teach!". I don't complain AT ALL, as I like the total freedom of action and I like to think that I get around pretty well, but sometimes it leads me scratching my head wondering about how much of a shit the school actually gives about my performance.
Once in a while, we get a meeting, announced of course 5 minutes beforehand, thus with 1/3 of the foreign staff present. The other ones are not missing out much though, as nothing very important is said at those meetings. The messages for the foreign teachers are not adressed directly, but given to our gatekeeper, Jackson. Jackson being busy from 6 AM to 11 PM with his numerous chores, the chance of us actually getting the message in time is damn low. Oh, and one day, they gave us important information about the midterm exams by sending a mass text message. In Chinese. I WISH I was making this up.
Mindless bitching about some flaws in the school administration? I'm afraid there's more than that. Keep readin'.
As I said before, 成功学院 (Chenggong College) is a private institution. They don't get money from the government, nor a guaranteed flow of students. Therefore, they have to be in "seduction mode" to attract people. In Mississippi, the gas stations advertize with "We have clean restrooms"... well, in China, advertizing with "We have foreign teachers" is a damn good point to attract people. Get it? Well, it must be, considering the overwhelming amount of effort and money that the Foreign affairs office went through just to bring me and the other laowai teachers in China.
When Mercedes-Benz buys some space on a highway to put a giant billboard, they assume and accept from the beginning that the billboard is just gonna stand there and will never weld any metallic parts together, its sole role being advertizement. This analogy comes to life pretty well in my case, when I try to get some academic support but can’t get any, just as if the school did not actually care about what I do, as long as I “am here”. It is not very flattering.
An example of that would be how the school deals with photocopies; to xerox some material here, you need to get the signatures of three deans, each of them having offices in three different buildings, then get the official stamp of the college on your form, and when it is done, you can send the form (in seven exemplaries) to Beijing so it can be ratified by the Mao Zhe Dong mummy. If you are lucky, in six to eight weeks you get your authorization and can do your damn shit photocopies. Or, you can just do like me: go directly to the photocopy office and use a 1/3 French, 1/3 English and 1/3 Chinese creole to express what you want. It works.
Of course, this is slightly exagerated. It is true however that you need the signature of a few people, the first being the secretary of the Foreign language department. However, due to the fact that she is also a part-time teacher and that she has to spend 240 hours a week attending meetings with the dean, she is NEVER AT HER OFFICE. Bang up job indeed! Another classic case of Chinese misplaced overstaffing.
But as I said before, this lack of supervision actually suits me very well. I like the independence, and it actually solves the problem of the irrelevant and crappy textbooks by allowing me to create lessons from scratch without anybody nosing around and telling me to use the ineffective book. According to what I have observed so far, well, my methods seem to work and I have got some good feedback from my students I care about (ie: not my computer science kids). If we add to that the fact that pretty much every other aspect of the job is more than satisying (the money, the buddies, the cool students, the fact that I am travelling every weekend), I am happy. That whole thing sucks for the students though. By not supporting the teachers, the school is basically not supporting its students. They pay a damn large amount of money to attend this college, and I feel that they could get much more of it. There are also tons of other aspects which, in my humble opinion, could be drastically improved, but I won’t even get started! That’s gonna be for another time…
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