Notes From the Front of the Class

I thought this sculpture in my school was the founder. Apparently, he is a poet.

I remember when I was in high school, somebody in education told my dad I was a “point kid,” because I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life so I could aim at it like a “point.” At the time, he was right; I knew which college I wanted to attend, and I knew what I wanted to study, and I knew what kind of work I wanted to do afterwards. But at the end of my senior year, I certainly didn’t feel like a point kid. I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and for fear that I could find nothing else, I threw myself at the first opportunity I found: working as a “resident artist” in Title I Schools. At the time, I was so relieved to have a job that I didn’t even care what kind of job it was. I was lucky that my first year was tolerable. My school had many behavioral issues and mediocre academic performance, but that much is typical for any contemporary school in the US, and by many measures that school was a success. Further, I hardly ever had to do anything. Most of the teachers weren’t interested in implementing my skillset in their curriculum, and I spent many days sitting alone in my office, frittering time away on my laptop. I sometimes wondered if the school only hired me to say they had an artist on staff, and not because they actually wanted to utilize me.

The next year was a departure from this. I got placed in a middle school with an exceptionally poor reputation. I taught four out of five periods every day, assisting the health teacher (?) and sometimes introducing arts projects. Students were completely out of control. They ran through every classroom like a hurricane, destroying things, getting into fights, and refusing to learn. The best way to put it was that every moment of every day was a fight. I chose to quit when I learned that a student stabbed a staff member at a school near me, which seemed frighteningly plausible at my own school. Did I mention that I got paid minimum wage? I worked for the next few months as a substitute teacher, where I had similar experiences but at least did not fear for my safety.

Theoretically, education is a collaboration between the teacher and the student, working towards the common goal of the student learning something. In contemporary American education, this is not the case. The rule is conflict, not collaboration. Students do not want to learn and resist any attempt to do so, so the role of the teacher is not to guide them towards a mutually desirable outcome but instead to somehow intimidate them into doing something they don’t want to do. Maybe this is not so unusual, and maybe it’s been that way from time immemorial. What is unusual is the degree of resistance. Students show such extreme behavioral problems that to be a teacher is essentially to get abused by children all day. It’s not just the students, either. Teachers are also expected to work long hours, forced to bring work home because they are too overworked during the school day to prepare lessons, and in many places their labor is enormously out of proportion to their pay. It is not an enviable time to be a teacher in America.

The exterior of just one building in my school. This does not include any of the dorms or classrooms.

This is the situation that I come from. My expectation was that students would behave themselves in Asia. Admittedly, I thought this almost exclusively because of stereotypes, but even if Chinese students don’t actually act like Charlie Chan and the Chan Clan, they certainly can’t be any worse than the inner city students at my school, right? After two weeks of teaching in Guangzhou, I have an answer… tentatively. There are two caveats I must introduce: first, I teach at a private boarding school, which of course maintains a higher standard than a public school would. Second, my experience as a foreigner is undoubtedly different from that of the native teachers at my school, a fact likely exacerbated by my being the only foreign teacher at my school. One particularly cynical expat I met told me that my role is mostly ornamental. The school rents me to be a white American face on their campus, which impresses the parents when they see me. It’s not a very flattering thing to hear, but it’s likely true in part — although that doesn’t preclude me from doing the best job I can anyway.

The working hours represent one of the biggest differences. My school runs from 7:30 - 5:30, which is typical. I don’t have to come in until 8:30 unless I have a class before then, but still, that’s a full hour longer than a 9 to 5, and much later than schools let out in the US. However, although I spend much more time at school, I spend much, much less time teaching. In China, teaching is treated like an office job, and you actually spend most of the time at a desk, lesson planning and completing other administrative work. I personally teach only eighteen 40-minute lessons a week, which amounts to 12 hours of teaching. The rest I can use however I like, and the administrative work doesn’t take nearly long enough to fill the time I have. A lot of the time, my job is just “being at work.” I figured out that my pay is roughly $45 USD per actual working hour. This stretches even further when you consider that the school offers teachers buffet meals for less than a dollar each. To put it into perspective, I only need about half an hour of work to survive for the day. Last year, I didn’t even earn enough to cover rent.

And the food is pretty good, too.

It’s nice to work for a school that sees value in me. September 10th was “Teacher Appreciation Day,” a holiday that I knew about before visiting China but did not expect to happen so early. Why are you appreciating me — I haven’t done anything yet! Still, I liked it nonetheless. The students gave us flowers, tea, and cake. In America, teachers mostly just get yelled at.

You may remember from the post I made ahead of my first day of work that I like to divide my goals into five categories, and that two of these are Career and Finances. A person who works to make money and for no other reason (which, to be clear, is a necessity for a huge portion of people) might not understand why these are separate. I’m fortunate to have a different perspective. Because I will spend so much of my life working, I do not want to hate the time I spend at work. Thus, I set Career goals to work towards securing a job I find fulfilling, which in my case means a job that helps people. Finances are just about maximizing the ratio of money to time spent working. The last couple of paragraphs should demonstrate that this job is a great financial success for me, even before you account for the lower cost of living in China. The Career side is a little more mixed.

Recall that I teach eighteen classes a week. You probably assumed that I teach six classes three times a week each, or something similar. In fact, those eighteen classes are eighteen classes, and I never see any of my 500+ students for more than forty minutes a week. This doesn’t mean they only get forty minutes of English instruction each week — they get English lessons from some of the Chinese teachers. But when the students are with me, they get instruction from a native English speaker. Does that mean the students benefit more from me than they would from another period with their Chinese teachers? Doubtful, but I guess from the school’s point of view, it makes a big enough difference to warrant keeping me around. (As an aside, I also think my class is meant to be an English immersion class, because most of my peers who work for the same program at different schools speak no Chinese and therefore couldn’t do anything but an immersion class — however, many of my students don’t have the English skill for a full immersion class to achieve any success, so I don’t do that.) It’s not clear to me that my classes actually help the students learn, and I really don’t think that’s a matter of incompetence on my part. Forty minutes is not very long, and my students often lack the baseline knowledge to excel in the sort of class that the school wants me to give. I understand. Chinese and English are about as different as two languages can be, and it is difficult for a person who speaks only one to learn the other. Further, Chinese people don’t have the same access to English language media or the English speaking internet as people do elsewhere. In a way, just like English speakers, Chinese speakers suffer from their own success. They can live their entire lives speaking only Chinese because that’s all they ever need to fulfill their wants and needs, and it is extremely difficult to learn a language in a context where you don’t really have to. Unfortunately, regardless of the reasons, I have a lot of students who aren’t prepared for my class. In fact, in spite of everything I said earlier, I find myself wishing I had more time with my students. Right now, I’m just not sure how much they learn.

Still, even if I don’t make as big a difference as I would like, teaching here is at least a more pleasant experience than teaching in America. I was right that the model minority Asian is, in fact, a stereotype, and 13 to 14-year-old Chinese kids misbehave just like every other kid their age. Particularly frustrating to me is that they continue to talk after I tell them to be quiet, and when I do get them to be quiet for a moment, they start talking again the moment I move on to something else (i.e. actual teaching). It could be that they don’t understand, but I’ve explained pretty thoroughly in both English and Chinese, so I think they’re merely pretending not to. Still, I don’t see the same malice in them that I got from students in the US. I rarely feel like a combatant. Students seem intrigued by me, maybe only because I’m foreign, but I hope it at least comes in part from my teaching style, which I imagine is a little more interactive and humorous than most of their other teachers.

Unbelievably, the school has its own koi pond.

Teaching in China affords me a lot of privileges that I didn’t have when I taught in America. Just like in America, though, it’s arguable that my job makes a big difference. Maybe I’m being greedy to even care about that. The work is enjoyable, pays well, and doesn’t bleed me dry. For most people, that would be enough. For me, for right now, it is enough. I’m having a good time. In the future, I’ll care about something deeper than just having a good time. Until then, I’ll keep teaching.

The front of the school has a bas relief of Confucius, history's greatest teacher.