外教: A Day in the Life

[Note: This blog post was originally written at the end of November 2025, but was not published until June 2026. Text in brackets was added in June 2026.]

When I learn about people whose lifestyle is greatly different from my own, my most prominent question is typically what their daily lives are like. I expect that most of my readers have never taught overseas or lived in China, so to give you greater insight to my experience, I’d like to share with you a day in my life.

I work from 8:30 to 5:30 Monday to Friday. Each day I have between three and five classes which each last forty minutes. The rest of my time is dedicated to “office hours,” which means I have to be present in the office, but I’m free to do whatever I like. Theoretically this time should go to lesson planning, grading, and meeting students — in fact, I’m not allowed to give grades, students rarely meet with me, and my lesson planning doesn’t take nearly long enough to fill all of that time. It falls to me, then, to find ways to occupy myself. Let’s take a look at a typical Thursday for me.

I wake up at 7:30. I spend about half an hour grooming and getting dressed before I call a Didi, which is the Chinese equivalent to Uber. In the US, if I took an Uber to and from work every day, I would quickly go bankrupt. In China, though, Didi is exceptionally cheap. To go from my apartment to work costs me 15 yuan, or just over two bucks. I think of it like bus fare. When I get to work, I open an app that checks my location before letting me clock in. If I clock in before 8:30 all is well, but if I clock in late I get a penalty, and after five penalties the school starts to dock my pay. This is a generous cushion, but it’s not unwarranted, as my reliance on a third party to drive me to work every day can render my commute pretty inconsistent. Unfortunately, there isn’t really any other option — walking is too slow and the bus is even slower than that. Suffice to say that I’m glad for the leniency though I hardly ever need it.

I head straight to the office, set up my stuff, and wait. My first class isn’t for another two hours. The only reason I made it to school this early was to clock in and secure my pay for the day, but I don’t have any responsibilities except to be here. It’s up to me to find something to do. Fortunately, I’ve gotten pretty good at this. I start every day by reading the news, which takes a while because I have to check a lot of sources: I follow the New York Times, the South China Morning Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Kansas City Star, the Park Record (for Park City, Utah) and the Royal Gazette (for Bermuda). Typically I read the NYT’s morning newsletter and skim the other papers for any stories that might be interesting. I’ll also complete a very short Chinese lesson on Duolingo. I understand that Duolingo has a poor reputation, but it’s the only language learning software I found that doesn’t require me to speak out loud, which you can understand would be difficult in an office setting. [Many of the behaviors I present here as habitual I actually abandoned shortly after writing this. I think at the time I wanted to present myself as intellectual, but I think it actually just makes me come off as an unfocused ditherer.]

I often wonder what my coworkers think of me while I’m doing this. Before I came to China, my employers warned me that native Chinese teachers often resent foreign teachers, because we don’t have to do as much work as they do. If any of my coworkers feel this way, I haven’t noticed. They talk a lot with each other but rarely talk to me, either because they assume I don’t speak Chinese or because they know I do speak Chinese but not very well. Sometimes other teachers will bring in snacks and they’ll make a point of offering some to me. Realistically, I understand that they’re probably so absorbed in their own responsibilities that they don’t pay me any mind at all, but a part of me fears they think I’m lazy because I spend so little time doing real work. [Although I still have this fear, it seems as though I benefit from low expectations. Previous foreign teachers apparently gave poor lessons and neglected work responsibilities, often going absent for long periods of time.]

At 10:30 my first class starts. Nobody ever checks what my lessons are and I’m allowed to teach whatever I want, but I typically stick to a vocabulary list I got at the start of the year. This week the eighth graders are on unit 5, which has a lot of words pertaining to foreign exchange students, so that’s the theme of today’s lesson. Most of my classes follow the same cadence: I’ll start by asking them review questions from last week’s class, then I ask them a discussion question to introduce the day’s topic. I ask these questions to the whole class at once and let any student respond. In general, the students’ level of English proficiency is far below what it needs to be for them to understand the lessons in their own textbooks. If I call on a particular student, he probably won’t be able to understand or answer my question. All that does is embarrass him without advancing anyone’s understanding. It probably says something about the state of Chinese education that the standards for students are high enough to impede their learning, but I’m an outsider here, so I just accept it and adapt my teaching to fit that.

Unfortunately, my students have learned they’re not required to participate in my class, which means a lot of them see it as free time. Teaching in China really shattered my image of the industrious, well-mannered Asian student. Some of them chat the entire time, no matter how much I tell them to be quiet in both English and Chinese. I don’t really punish them for this. My students’ school day typically runs from 7:30 to 10:00. I don’t have it in my heart to chew out my kids for taking advantage of one of the few brief periods of levity in their day — I just wish they could do so without disrupting the students who really follow my lesson. [If you’ve read my previous blog post on education in China, you’re aware that I’ve developed a more critical attitude since writing this. By the end of the first semester, my classes were complete pandaemonium. When the second semester started, I adopted a new policy of refusing to permit any noise while I teach. Although this means I have to stop every few seconds to scold students (who can’t seem to go a few seconds without interrupting me), my classes have been much less chaotic since then.]

One of the ways I like to add more fun to my class is by sharing a video in each lesson. This week, it’s a trailer for a TV show about a foreign exchange student, which I play for them before asking them to explain to me what happened in English. After this, we learn seven or eight words from unit 5’s vocabulary list that I consider especially important, and I will typically use them as jumping off points to explain something in English in great detail. After this, I review the words we learned with the class. Some of my better behaved classes will have a little time after this, which I usually fill by playing an English language song related to the week’s theme. I’m not afraid to deviate from this formula, but most of my lessons follow the review - discussion question - video - vocabulary - review mold.

[A representative slide from my most recent lesson. This word was in the eighth graders' unit on "Helping Animals."

I’ll do this same thing in my next class, where the seventh graders are learning about science. I take the opportunity to teach them about some famous western scientists. My job title is technically 外教waijiao — foreign teacher — so I consider cultural education equally important to English education. I also show them an excerpt from Bill Nye the Science Guy, because really, anything I can do to make their school experience less miserable is a victory for me.

When this class ends, it’s time for lunch, so I head down to the staff canteen. I pay a fee of five yuan — less than a dollar — to access the buffet, which will usually have about ten dishes of stir-fried meats and vegetables as well as a couple soups and sometimes a dessert. It’s quite an elaborate spread and really quite good, although I admit I got tired of Chinese food much faster than I expected. It’s actually the food that I miss most about home.

Because they work such long hours, Chinese people usually take a nap after lunch. The school is eerily quiet from 1:00 to 2:00. I take this opportunity to catch up on my reading and walk a few laps around the track. Because I no longer walk to and from work, my lifestyle is even more sedentary than it was before, so I try to carve out at least a little time to walk each day. [I’ve since gotten a gym membership and started using the school’s pool after hours.] I come back to a message that my next class has been cancelled because another teacher wants to use that time. My class isn’t really essential, so other teachers will often request to use my class time for their own lessons. Communication in China is often abrupt like this; cancellations, tests, and events disrupt my schedule constantly, and I rarely know until it’s already happening. This doesn’t bother me, of course. It gives me more time to work on other stuff. Sometimes it’s writing blog posts or working on creative projects, but because it’s a Thursday, I need to start making powerpoints for my lessons next week. I look up the vocabulary for unit 6 and start putting it together.

My last class of the day is at 4:30, and it’s my only class all week that isn’t an English lesson. On Thursday afternoons, students take 二课 erke, or second class, which is basically a club. I run an international chess club. Most of my students know how to play xiangqi, which is a Chinese variant of chess, but hardly any of them knew how to play international chess before I taught them. Running this class is pretty easy, as the kids just play chess on their own and all I have to do is supervise. There is a particular student who asks to play me each week, and I always agree because otherwise I’d be bored out of my skull. Although I enjoy playing him, he always gets oddly upset when he loses, and I have to gently remind him in Chinese that it’s just a game and I have much more experience than he does.

I clock out shortly after second class ends. I could eat dinner in the staff canteen, but today I want to get something other than Chinese food, so I go home and order delivery off Meituan, the Chinese equivalent of Doordash. Just like Uber, I would never use Doordash so flippantly in the US, but here in China it is extremely cheap. [I should probably clarify here that my apartment has no cooking appliances. I eat out for every meal because there’s no other alternative.] Tonight I’m ordering from the shockingly good Italian chain Saizeriya. [I was desperate for good food when I wrote this. Saizeriya is repulsive.] A bowl of pasta and a 6” pizza together cost about ten to fifteen dollars, although I have to be careful to avoid some of the more unusual pizza toppings, which can include things like durian and fruit cocktail.

I typically get home at 6:00 and go to bed at midnight. I often spend this time watching youtube or reading. I admit that I sometimes feel I’m wasting my grand adventure in Asia. I spend my days going to work and then coming home, and I still haven’t seen a lot of what Guangzhou has to offer, let alone China in general. As much as I’d like this to be a prolonged vacation, I am here to work, and that means most of my time will go to my job. That, as well as many challenges in the logistics of navigating China, precludes me from traveling as much as I would like. [I met my girlfriend a few days after writing this, and she showed me all of the interesting places to go in Guangzhou. I’ve definitely been more active since meeting her. We’ve also taken some trips together - we’ve been to Shenzhen and Kunming, and over winter break my father and I went to Macau, Chengdu, Xi’an, and Shanghai.] Still, it’s hard to complain. My job is easy and my pay is good, and I enjoy a higher quality of life than most people my age. Each night I’m satisfied to go to sleep and do it all again tomorrow.