The job description asked for a native English speaker with a
2.1 in any discipline. The role was to go out to different kindergartens and teach English to young children through fun activities and play, basically inspiring them to take an interest in learning another language. Although promised several days of training before we
started, we were given nothing but a folder full of flashcards and a USB stick
with some children’s songs on it. One thing you learn very quickly is that in
China what is said is not always meant. So the day after we arrived we were
unleashed on an unsuspecting class of infants.
I’m not sure who cried more, me or the kids.
They were unruly, too young to understand that they were supposed to listen and not run out of the room every few minutes. They couldn’t understand a word I said. I had no idea how to structure
an hour long lesson for such small and boisterous children. And the Teaching Assistant seemed
to think that sitting at the back of the room taking selfies and making phone
calls was more important than helping the Foreign Teacher (as they call us) on
her first day. After an hour of watching me valiantly singing/shouting nursery rhymes, wrangling two
year old butts back in chairs, and trying to play games using only English words as directed,
she finally stood up and announced it was time to go outside. However, this did
not mean a break for me as apparently I was supposed to now hold a P.E. lesson. Now for a girl who's exercise regime consists solely of laps from the fridge to the sofa that was intense. It transpired that in this particular school, we weren’t English teachers in
the extra-curricular sense we had been led to believe, but actually jointly in
charge of the same class all day every day. Sometimes even on Saturdays. (Here,
if a school has a long weekend and is closed on a Monday, teachers and pupils alike
must attend the following Saturday in lieu. This is just one example of some of
the rather confusing aspects of Chinese working culture. I’d much rather just
have my two weekends.)
 |
| Wondering if the crazy lady is going to make him sing again. |
That said, after a while, the lessons started to become easier. As
the pupils got to know me and I them, it was easier to figure out how to keep
them interested and make it fun. One hour was still much longer than they could
reasonably pay attention for, only having started school, but once they had
learnt some games and songs and I had got hold of some cartoon clips that they were allowed to watch as a reward if they behaved well, things went a lot smoother. They
still liked to bite each other. Bite me. Kick each other. Randomly stand up and
run from the room (the doors of which were never kept closed because of the
heat). And the TA still felt that her time was better spent filtering pictures
of herself to look like a kitten (you might think I am being harsh, but she
basically used me as an excuse to do very little all day) but in general
it was going really well. They were coming on leaps and bounds with their
English, picking up all kinds of phrases and some were even able to ask me to read stories with them. The books were in Chinese, but they really seemed to like helping me to come up with a story as we went along. Also, getting
paid to receive cuddles from ten ridiculously cute children all day long is a
pretty sweet deal.
 |
| "I made a twinkle twinkle little star." |
The way our job works is that we are hired by
a company who send native English speakers out to various schools to hold
English classes. So we are lucky to have the ability to change schools, discuss
problems with our company etc. and they will negotiate with the kindergartens
on our behalf. Upon communicating with my company I realised that I really
wasn’t in the right working conditions. I am not a qualified teacher and so I
shouldn’t have been left alone so extensively with the class. The TA should
have been there to help discipline and care for them. Children of that age group
were only supposed to have 15-20 minutes of English class at a time, yet some
days I was being asked to do 1.5 hour long lessons at a time. The school was
also ridiculously far away from my accommodation meaning around two hours
commuting each way by bus. And commuting here is hectic. Those pictures you
see of people crammed into buses and metros are very much a reality. With
working hours being 8-5 this meant that I was spending over 12 hours a day
travelling and working. Other people had a 30 minute taxi ride to work in the mornings.
Another weird thing in China is that people in the
workplace are very afraid to offend someone and so will dance around an issue
in the most ridiculous way, never saying what they actually mean. So if you are
not doing exactly what the school wants, they won’t tell you but will leave it
for so long that if and when they do hold a meeting about the issue, it is much more serious
than it ever needed to be. As if you were supposed to read their minds and know instinctivley about a change to the curriculum or schedule. But on the other hand, when you as a worker try to address a
problem head on, very often it will be ignored for a long time. Whether it
be in the hopes you just shut up and learn to live with it or simply down to
bad organisation or whatever, the only thing you can do is be persistent. Our
company asked for meeting after meeting with the school but nothing ever
happened. And so it was time to move on.
It took 3 months but finally I switched. I now teach in another kindergarten 2 days a week and in a training centre
for slightly older kids on Sundays. During the other working days I have been
in a different school every week. I never know where I will be going or what
the schedule is until maybe a day before. Thankfully because I have taught a
few different age ranges by now, putting together suitable lesson plans doesn’t
take too long. I quite enjoy getting to see different areas and how different schools operate. Some are very strict on discipline, some are not at all. Some teachers really want the kids to learn English, others are just happy to hand them over for half an hour and get back to their mobiles. It's taught me to think on my feet and heightened my OCD x1000 but it has revealed a real passion and love for teaching. I have especially loved working with the SEN students, who aren't really catered for very well here.
 |
| My minions. If you look closely you can see the TA on her phone as per. |
In the main kindergarten I have 11 classes each day. It is
tiring, but it’s much closer to the set up I had imagined before coming out
here. I set up my computer in the Dance Hall. Classes of about 25-30 kids are
marched in for a half hour lesson and when I am not teaching I am free to sit
in the reception room and read a book. The training centre was my first
experience of using a textbook to teach, and instructing students who already
had a pretty good grasp of English. Once again, no advice was given as to what
I should be doing, but somehow I managed to figure it out. It’s surprising what
your brain can come up with whilst in a state of mild panic. The classes are very mixed
ability, which means planning lessons is somewhat more difficult. It isn’t a
school where the children are all the same age and of roughly the same ability.
A training class could have 6 year olds mixed with 9 year olds, and the 6 year
old might be of a far higher level. But as the parents are paying for extra
lessons for their children, probably hoping in the future they can go abroad
and study, it is so important that the kids enjoy and benefit from
the lessons. Structuring a class so that a lower level child can grasp what you
are teaching but the more advanced students don’t get bored is a difficult
balance. To this end, I definitely recommend studying for a TEFL qualification.
When we realised no one was going to train us up or explain what was
expected/required we decided to take a 150 hour course, and it provided us
with some really useful tips and ideas.
 |
| Melody giving me a sticker for finally becoming a competent teacher. |
In the new schools the TAs are extremely
helpful which makes a world of difference. They are attentive, help to organise the children and even try to participate themselves in the hope
of improving their own language skills. Although, for a month or so I thought
that one of them really hated me. The expression on her face whilst her class was
in with me was terrifying. Then one day she showed up with a new pair of
glasses and a huge smile. What I thought was a grimace was instead her squinting
really hard to try and see the words
and pictures I was showing the children. Oops.
 |
| Even when they cry, they're still cute. |
I
was surprised to discover that ‘work clothes’ are not really a thing in the
kindergartens. Before we came out we were told it would be seen as too formal
to show up for school in a suit or dress. Most teachers I have seen wear
tracksuits or jeans. Some do wear skirts and so on, but I get the feeling that
a dress code is not really enforced. I have only heard of one school that said
jeans were not allowed, but it sounded like a pretty pretentious place,
probably a new kindergarten where the principle had yet to learn that expensive
outfits are not a good idea for finger painting class. At the start I always
tried to wear nice-ish clothes, this soon slipped, but there is a certain pressure to always look semi-decent because of the sheer amount of photographs taken
of you throughout every working day. At times it can feel more like a PR exercise than a teaching job. Before you’ve even taken your coat off in the
morning you can guarantee someone will ask for a photo. In fact, more often than not the cab driver
on the way there will turn around and take some (without asking). Under the
guise of ‘showing the parents what the kids are doing’, teachers will snap everything
you do, not only in lessons but during break as well, and even ask for selfies
after (and occasionally during) class. There is a great idealisation of Western
culture here, and so a photo with the foreign teacher is definite profile
picture material. We are constantly paraded in front of parents, potential new
students, and any visitor to the school. We must arrive early and stand outside
by the gate like a lemon waving at kids as they enter, most of them still
asleep and in their parents’ arms. People will march into the middle of our
classes, phones aloft and totally disrupt the lesson to get photographs. Randomers passing by the gate will point, and start recording you in the playground. Special events are organised where the foreign teachers are placed front and centre, asked to sing and dance onstage. At
times it can feel like our main purpose is just to take photos and make the
school look good - as though they have a rigidly structured and impressive
English programme rather than a previously camera-shy twenty-something holding up flashcards whilst doing the Hokey Pokey.
 |
| So. Many. Parents. |
One thing that does not change no matter the
school or even the day of the week is the lunch. During my time here I have been exposed to many wonderful and exotic dishes. In school however, every single day since
September the menu has been white rice, a kind of crunchy boiled green veg that
I’m ashamed to say I still don’t know the name of, and some form of meat. The culture
here is very much waste not, want not: which, in its own way, is great. In Western
culture we are spoilt with our chicken breasts, mince, chops and so on. But here,
being served up a lump of skin/fat/bone (and I don’t mean a thigh or a wing, I
mean small bits of concealed bone waiting to stick into your oesophagus) with
barely any visible meat on it day after day is the norm. The kids seem to
just eat forkful after forkful, spitting out the splinters of bone, but this is
an ability I have yet to acquire. Yep, the diet takes some getting used to. Last
week the meat du jour was chicken claws. I mean, how does one even attempt to
eat that?
 |
| Yum. |
The bathrooms are also something of a culture shock. Squat toilets have their benefits. They just take some getting used to. I don’t mind them, the bigger issue for me is that toilet paper doesn’t seem to be widely used in China, so I definitely recommend stocking up on tissues. Indeed, it is more likely you will see a little silver tray with ‘put mobile here’ in the bathrooms than soap/tissue dispensers.
Admittedly, it does occasionally frustrate me that many of the things which TEFL and other resources recommend teachers do are not encouraged here, and the suggestions of what to avoid are almost an expected part of the teaching. For example, I have read several articles which advised against using too many competitive games and getting students used to receiving rewards. In school, many of the teachers want you to have competitions in each lesson. Therefore the children start to care more about who wins than they do about what they are learning. And if every child does not get a sticker or prize whether they participate or not the teacher will bring them up at the end of class to receive one. Generally, if a child is disruptive they are not taken out of class lest the parents be annoyed they do not feature in some of the photographs. Yet all of the other children's learning is being impaired because of one child's behaviour. It doesn't make sense to me, but just as the culture in China is different, so is the working environment, so I just go with it. The important thing is that the kids have fun and take something away from the class.
For all of the adjusting and poor communication, I would say that the job is very rewarding. Especially as I am lucky enough to have some regular schools and can see the progress of the children. It would be nice to have a bit more guidance from the schools as to how to help the kids develop as much as possible. But at the end of the day the exposure they are getting to the
language will hopefully inspire them to want to learn more as they grow older
and consequently have the opportunity to go abroad and experience a different
culture. And seeing their faces light up when they come in for English class,
and hearing them tell their teachers they want to “stay more” gives me hope
that maybe TEFL teachers really do make a difference and aren’t just here for
show.
