15 Days in China before I go home.

At this time of year the EFL/ESL teacher’s thoughts turn to home.  Some of us, particularly those of us that work in universities and colleges are on their last week of teaching.  They have the long two months of summer to look forward to.  Others, like myself, working in High Schools still have a few weeks left. My semester ends officially on the 10^th July. Initially I was told the 6^th July but, as always, things change. You have to be adaptable to live in China.  My plane ticket is actually booked for the 9th; I cleared this with my school admin as the last weeks are usually taken up with exams, marking exams and general shilly shallying about.  Also its important to negotiate a bit of wriggle room when booking your tickets home so you can bag the best prices from the airlines.

So now it’s 15 days before I go home and gaol fever is starting to set in.  I booked my ticket months ago and as I said the dates were negotiated with my school admin.  This is tricky in itself because you will find that even the school admin will not know for definite when the school semester will end. It seems to be a movable feast.  According to my admin it’s the local education department that sets the dates of the semesters and the holidays and nothing is ever set in stone. That’s why you have to be adaptable.

One would think, logically, that as these things happen every year then dates would be fixed, or at least planned for. But no, this is China, every thing is flexible, everything is moveable and subject to change.  It is sometimes infuriatingly frustrating.

Take the beginning of the next academic year.  Most years the new semester starts on September 1^st.  This year however on the 3^rd and 4^th of September there is a special public holiday in China to commemorate the 2WW.  I have heard, from other teachers, that in their schools the start date has been set back to the 7^th. Of course they haven’t heard this officially, they have heard it from their students.

I asked my admin what was happening in my school and she said she would have to ask. Around a week later, when I asked again, I was told that the start of semester was the 1^st September. But I am not holding my breath. It is just as likely that someone somewhere will decide that we start on the 7^th. Or have a day off but then work on the Sunday – that’s how holidays work in China by the way, you have a day off, but then work the Sunday to make it up again.

Nevertheless, before we worry too much about that situation we have the run up to the break to manage and we need to think about what we will be doing during the two months or six weeks we have off.

For myself, the next few weeks will be teaching as usual. But as any teacher knows during the run up to the holidays, the natives get restless.  It’s been a hard year for my seniors.  Remember they are in class from 7am in the morning until 9pm at night.  Plus most of them have spent the last few weeks doing the Cambridge AS and A level exams so they are pretty exhausted.

My senior class - about 15 students  short

Of course they also have the end of term exams to look forward too and many of them are not even in class as they are now swotting for American college/university entry exams or the IELTS/TOEFL language exams.  This is a bit of a nightmare for the conscientious teacher because if you are working to a lesson plan that lasts for a couple of lessons you are constantly being disrupted are the numbers in the class change on a daily basis. So some students are turning up in the middle of a programme of teaching and not knowing what the hell is going on or students are missing from the pairs or groups you set up.

But of course, we teachers are human too, so we are feeling the pull of the holidays. They are just around the corner so plans are being made and rumours of cheap flights abound. Most of us have, as part of our contracts, payments to cover our flights to home and back. For most of us this is not a fortune and in many cases barely covers the cost of the airfare and the incidentals such as train or coach tickets to and from airports.  So finding the best price for the tickets home, or to your final destination is important.

Many of the gap year graduate teachers might not even get home this vacation. The lure of exotic destinations just on our doorstep is too enticing. So trips to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam are popular destinations as are the highlands of Thailand. Why long haul home when you have deserted beaches and cheap beer on offer just a couple of hours away?

Like myself, most of the older teachers that I know, will be going home to visit with families and friends.  But it’s a double-edged sword. For those teachers on the lower incomes, the 6000 – 7000rmb per month teachers, going home for any period of time is expensive.  We might have our airfares paid, but it’s the day-to-day expense of living in the West that becomes the topic of conversation once we are back.

‘Can you believe how much it costs just to…’?

a.     get the bus into town

b.     eat out

c.      buy a pint

d.     stay in a hotel

All things that are reasonably cheap in China and are a shock to the system and the wallet once we get home.  So for some colleagues to head out for countries where the cost of living is cheap and the living is easy makes good financial sense.

Of course some colleagues and friends will be leaving for pastures new come the end of term. Some might not have their contracts renewed, like the guy who can’t be arsed to wear a shirt to class and thinks shorts and flip flops are reasonable attire for a teacher in a High School.  And what the Aussie who was teaching his High School students English four letter words was thinking F*&! knows.  Of course he is no longer required at that school. But within a week or so he has secured a new teaching position, no problem, and teaching kindergarten of all things.  That he has to leave his pregnant Chinese girlfriend, soon to become wife, hundreds of miles away with her family seems to be bye the bye.

Other friends are seeking new working opportunities across the world and its sad to see them go. I feel like I am losing very good friends. Friends with whom I have shared the highs and the lows of living in China and in one case we have both shared actual blood, sweat and tears.  I hope we meet again to share a whisky or two.

Some of the younger teachers, teachers who I might have stereotyped as ‘gap year graduates’ are returning home to continue their academic careers.  Some are entering MA programmes back home to become better teachers, and of course become better qualified in what, at home, will be a very competitive job market.  I think I have written elsewhere that teaching time in China on your CV/Resume doesn’t cut the mustard with most employers in the West so returning home to continue with their education might be the best choice. Of course they could have spent their time in China doing the various courses on offer here such as the CELTA and various MA courses taught in English.

Of course going home also offers us the chance to replenish and purchase those crucial things that we can’t seem to find in China.  I’ve already done some of my shopping on Amazon so things will be waiting for me when I get home. The 600gms plastic bucket of Marmite for instance, shaving oil and other goodies to bring back with me.  I might do some clothes shopping, especially shirts and a few tee shirts because as I have mentioned elsewhere its difficult to get the sizes here in China – a Chinese XL from a couple of shops (Uniqlo and H&M) just about fit me, if I watch my weight - an XL from a standard Chinese men’s shop is about a western M. I have not seen XXXL shirts, apart from some tee shirts.  (I have mentioned that you can get shirts made to measure here – but they are more formal type work shirts I want casual short sleeve shirts.

At the moment my agency, my actual employer has my passport. They have to renew our residency visas with the authorities so we can come back.  This has turned out to be a fraught experience for a colleague as her passport was stolen whilst it was in the charge of the office admin en-route to the police on the Metro.  Obviously this is one of our worst nightmares losing the passport. Thankfully my passport was in a different system and was not lost. But now my colleague, with only about two weeks before flying home, has to go through the rigmarole of filling in forms, travelling to Shanghai to visit the embassy and hoping the passport gets back before she has to fly home. Fingers crossed as the trip to Shanghai, scheduled for today, has already been put off until Friday as the police didn’t complete all the paperwork on time – This is China!

Getting one’s residency visa renewed also means a trip to the local travel medical centre for a medical check up.  This means getting there at around 8am and doing the rounds of the various doctors and tests. Ones blood, eyesight, chest x-ray, ECG, Ultrasound are checked and then various bits are prodded in different rooms until all the boxes have been ticked and signed.  This year I was given my report and it raised a few minor issues that I need to chat with my doctor about in the UK.

Of course one of my major problems is getting someone to look after Snooky whilst I’m gone. Some people ask me if I will take Snooky with me.  But at around £2000 per each leg of the trip that’s a non-starter.  I’ve looked into the local dog stay places but I have not been impressed as the dogs seem to be confined to cages all day and only given two walks a day. Fortunately a Chinese friend of mine has offered to take Snooky again as she looked after the dog whilst I was in the Philippines, Australia and NZ.  So I know Snooky will be looked after. Probably looked after too well as she was a little fat when I got back from my holidays.

So that’s pretty much it, everyone I know is counting down the days to their holidays and in fact some lucky b………s are travelling this week! You know who you are!  We teach for ten months of the year and to be honest for some of us the workload is not particularly onerous and China has lots of public holidays but I guess we are all looking forward to going home. We need to wash China out of our hair for a while, indulge in some of the food we have missed, meet up with family and friends and have some rest and relaxation.

That is not to say that we will wash China out of our hair completely we still come back, year after year – next year will be my forth year – to continue to teach English and be amazed by this crazy and wonderful country and its people.

Learning is not a spectator sport – someone please tell my students

Sometimes one just gets fed up at staring at the uncomprehending faces.  Fed up of waking students up during the class. Fed up of the incomprehensible and mangled attempts at speech. Fed up with the lack of comprehension when I explain to them in words of one syllable that it is unlikely that they will be attending Cambridge or Harvard, well, at least this year anyway.

I work in a top high school, in the foreign language department, in a big city in China.  I have been teaching the senior classes ESL for the past two years. All of these seniors have the expectation that they will be attending a good, if not superior, foreign university next year.  Let me put it a bit more succinctly, these seniors’ parents have the expectation that their child, their only child, will be attending a top ten foreign university next year.  Most of these children of rich parents do not really seem to know or understand why they are sitting in my ESL class. They seem to think that what they really should be doing is cramming for the IELTS or TOEFL exams they probably have in the next few weeks or months. What they shouldn’t be doing is wasting time with me, a native English speaker, who has actually spent 20 years teaching in a top ten university in the UK.

This is highlighted by the fact that after at least a semester of me prepping my class with IELTS and TOEFL related study, although not in my remit.  Plus giving them all the insights from a book I have been writing with a Chinese colleague about the IELTS speaking test, one student, lets call him ‘Land’ because that’s what he calls himself, came to me and asked me for all the questions and answers I had been giving them over the past year. That this was two days before his IELTS test seemed to me a bit short-sighted.

I am an irrelevance to these rich kids.  These rich kids, who, for most of their pampered and spoilt lives, have been given everything they have ever wanted. Who, even at 16 and 17 years of age, are still fawned over by their doting parents – it’s galling that most of them have designer watches and clothes I couldn’t even think of affording. These rich Chinese kids who think daddy will be able to buy them into a university regardless of their ability and their lack of effort in the English classroom.

It really worries me, this lack of engagement with the English language, by these Chinese students.  I actually want these kids to go to university. I want them to succeed. That’s why I’m a teacher.  But in my classes there are students who can barely speak to me, even after two years of English tuition by foreign teachers.  Plus they have had two years of English classes given by the bilingual Chinese teachers and the fact that they are following the CIE iGCSE Science and Math’s subjects - in English.  God knows when they actually started learning English, because I don’t.

The problem, it seems to me, is the focus on the IELTS and TOEFL tests. Chinese students have tried and tested rituals, rotes and tricks for them to achieve the required scores on these tests. This approach really has nothing to do with learning English it’s simply to pass the test with the highest score possible. Indeed I have even colluded myself with Chinese students by publishing a book with a Chinese colleague that provides a method for the student to increase their IELTS score from the ubiquitous five to the much needed six or six point five and higher.

And yet they seem to think if they could just memorize all the words in the vocabulary books then all will be fine. That they attempt to do this during my ESL class whilst I am actually trying to teach them how to use words in the correct order seems cruelly ironic.  Even so, when I close their books for them and ask them to focus on the lessons I am giving them on collocation, or phrasal verbs, or even something simple like listening or writing they can barely finish the tasks that I set them.

In an attempt to shock them out of this torpor I presented them with some research which shows that the IELTS and TOEFL scores do not indicate how successful a student may be in a western university, indeed in many cases the research shows that Chinese students with a ‘respectable’ IELTS score of 6 or higher might still struggle when entering higher education in the West.

Indeed one report out of the US shows that 8000 Chinese students were sent home in 2013/14 from US universities and colleges for cheating and not making the grade. And yet, and yet, when I show my students these statistics there is barely a lifted eyebrow or a murmur of shock. I really think these students do not believe that this would, or could, relate to themselves in any way, shape or form, such is their confidence and their denial that they may not be making the grade.

That my school has a foreign language department where we teach English and yet we do not have any formal English examination on site must bear some of the blame for the situation.  The only English examination these students will take is either the IELTS or the TOEFL tests.  This to me is a ridiculous state of affairs. It means that we have no way of gauging the level of our students English, over and above any tests we the teachers set.  There is no way we can measure our students against any global standard such as the iGCSE.

Consequently the students have no motivation to pay any attention to my ESL classes at all.  They remain focused on the IELTS and TOEFL requirements and what I do in my classroom must seem to them just a minor detail, another forty five minutes where they can zone out and if they think they can get away with it have a snooze – they never get away with it in my class.  If I have to be 6000 miles away from my 16-year-old daughter in the UK then they had better, by golly, pay attention in my classroom.

I really do want my students to get to university. Last weekend in the high school right next to mine the Gau Kao university entrance examinations took place.  I really do think some of my students would have been better off to have sat that exam and to enter a Chinese university. But filial duty being what it is in China these kids will have to suffer their fate to the dying end. I do know some of my students really do not want to go abroad but they just cannot let their parents down.  To be brutally honest they will get their wish because their English is just not up to scratch and they make little or no efforts to change that situation in the classroom. So mummy and daddy will be faced with a fait accompli.

Will poor Cherry or Coby be blamed for their failure?  Personally, I think not, I think the odds are more likely to be stacked in favour of the English teachers at the school being the fall guys here and, as is often the case, contracts will not be renewed.  And yet, and yet, I still love working with these testing, exasperating, annoying, trying, at times demanding, maddening, but very often delightful, funny, charming, sweet, naive, innocent kids.

Cherry and Rita - two good students.