Having only worked for one University in China, I cannot
speak for each school, but from what I have experienced here, it is a vastly
different system from schools in America.
And some of the initial (and sometimes continuing frustration) that I
have felt concerning teaching here comes from the differences in how the
University is organized, compared to schools back home.
I have already mentioned the lack of curriculum. I have since learned that they do, in fact,
have curriculum, but they are all written in Chinese, and so what this usually
means for the Foreign teacher, is that you are given a copy of the text book
and updated by a member of the department who everyone agrees has the best
English skills on an “as-we-remember” basis. For instance, last year, I would
have this one woman (she was really, very helpful) rush into my classroom
periodically during a break; tell me that something (midterm grades, oral
speaking final exam assignments, etc) was due—usually tomorrow or something
ridiculous—and then dash out again. She
once popped in and asked if I had given my students the topics for the Oral
Speaking part of the final. My response
was: “what topics and what oral speaking final?” She then told me that all the
students took the exam next week at the same time and that I would be judging another
teachers classroom. My students were expected to memorize information on one of
26 possible topics. And thanks to my
total lack of knowledge about this (I had received no email/phone call), my
students were not prepared. And this I suppose brings me to my first point of
frustration: A lack of information on due dates and expectations.
I cannot count the number of times I would get a call or
email from someone at the school telling me that some vital piece of paperwork
was due, and it was due tomorrow. So
then we would rush to complete this intended assignment, only to discover that:
1. half the Chinese teachers hadn’t finished it either and
it was no big deal or
2. the policy had changed (literally overnight) and they no
longer needed it.
The University calendar was another point of contention
among foreign teachers at this school. I
know that in American Universities, school calendars are set years in
advance. You can go to your alma matter
and look at when the vacations and holidays are going to be for the next 3
years. Well, there are national
holidays, and everyone gets those off, but the school also has the option of
assigning extra days to the official holidays to make a vacation. It’s like getting Wednesday and Friday off
for Thanksgiving, instead of only Thursday.
The government says you need to have Thursday off, but the school says
you can have Wed. and Fri. too. However,
in this school, you have to make up the holidays that are not actual national
holidays. So, we would not need to make
up those classes missed on Thursday, but we would have to make up classes
missed on Wednesday or Friday. And the
school schedules those makeup days…usually on Saturday and Sunday. Sometimes it is the weekend before the
holiday, and sometimes it is the weekend of the holiday. So instead of having a nice, uninterrupted 5
day weekend, your whole schedule is thrown to shit and you are working on a
Saturday. And they don’t tell us this
until about the week before. So if you
had any vacation plans, screw it, they just got ruined. We got smarter about this as time progressed
(especially for our 2nd year) and would pester the school to tell us
the vacation days as soon as possible, but it is still unreliable.
Teachers in America, you will know your schedule and what
classes are going to be taught throughout the year at the end of the previous
academic year (or at least over the summer).
Not so for this school. I
received a call 2 days before I was supposed to teach an Introduction to the
Cultures of English Speaking Countries course informing me that not enough
students signed up, and so the class was cancelled, but can I please teach
Critical Thinking and Speaking (not a course I had taught before). When is the
first class? In two days. So I said
goodbye to an entire summers worth of planning for that course and said hello
to frantically throwing together some kind of syllabus for a course that I
would not know even an iota about the curriculum until after the first day of
class.
If this sounds chaotic and frustrating and hectic to you,
well, it is. But don’t fear. Like I said, this is true for my experience
at this particular university. But I
have learned that other schools in China are much better organized. Also, as a
foreign teacher, you are given a little bit of leeway in due dates (and a lot
of leeway in curriculum). Once you
remember that, it does not seem as chaotic.
 |
| Also, schools are huge here. This is located in an whole education district (no fitting in with the city or anything) and there is just a sea of dorms, academic buildings, and administrative buildings (this is the library) that are spread out creating a very large campus. |
No comments:
Post a Comment