new school

My current school is the polar opposite of my old school in Songyuan. They recognize that Chinese students are really good at memorizing, and that memorization is the backbone of most English education here, not actual learning and comprehension, so they take a different approach.

In Songyuan, I was making up almost all of my own course material and curriculum. Here, for 90% of the classes, the curriculum and even the lesson plans, minute by minute, are already set up based on their philosophy.

Chinese teaching partners gather all the materials and make sure everything is ready for classes, so really, all foreign teachers need to do is show up to teach what they're told most of the time. There are no textbooks. Most classes (outside of feature art, drama or test focused classes) are based around a story. Each class has songs, games, activities and arts and crafts using language from the story, so students have a better chance at actual comprehension. It's also a lot more fun for kids than staring at a textbook for an hour. In most classes, you basically never do the same activity for more than say eight minutes.

It does have a tendency to make you feel a bit like a dancing bear (sing this song, play that game, teach this nursery rhyme, read that story, sing this other song, etc. with none of it being your idea), but you can make little tweaks to the lesson plans to make them your own, which makes you feel a little less bear like.

The school focuses on kids two to 12, but most of my students are between four and six. The max class size is eight, so you get a lot of time to focus on each kid. Naturally, this is a huge change from teaching mostly adults in large classes or teenagers one on one. It takes a lot more energy, but a lot less of the not-so-fun office hours for lesson planning and the like. Wracking you brain for things that are going to keep both you and the students interested and also teach something got kind of difficult at times.

Naturally, it has its problems though.

All the stories that classes are based around are unique, created just for the school, but many aren't really stories, in that they don't have a beginning/middle/end, or a point at all. I think that's offset for the kids though by the fact that they ARE in a non-native language. Many of them have some repetition throughout that the students like to chime in with (if they haven't already memorized the story to tell it word for word with you).

A lot of the English songs or nursery rhymes are a little off somehow, in words, melody, something. Part of this comes from the fact that Chinese people are finding and executing the materials and part of it comes from the fact that the bulk of the lesson plans and associated materials were created by an older man that grew up in the States but lived in the UK for most of his adult years, so he's got American and British ideas mixed into one idea.

Regardless, I think they have a good strategy. My SO disagrees and is of the textbook/study/grammar/sentence structure school, but to each their own.

All the foreign teachers' contracts are structured a little differently; they like to try to make use of everyone's talents. My SO has created the curriculum for a theater class where the kids create the costumes and set as well as put on the final performance. The guy that wrote the lesson plans does a lot of video editing (you might not think a school requires a lot of video editing, but apparently this one does?). Another guy I met up in Songyuan handles a lot of admin stuff.

As for me, I'm contracted for up to 30 hours a week: up to 15 teaching hours and up to 15 office hours, which have including, marketing, event planning, social media management, graphic design and interior design. More on my non-teaching stuff later. For most of us, the rate for our teaching overtime and whatever various other overtime is different, but better than Songyuan and we get paid for office hours.

It might not sound like foreign teachers require office hours, considering the lessons plans are mostly set and the Chinese teachers gather the materials, but feature courses, or those outside of the core program, fall outside of those plans, and also they're big on parent communication. If anything major happens in class, good or bad, I touch base with parents afterwards, but we are also required to fill out monthly progress reports on all students. It can be extremely time consuming, some kids are so middle of the road, nothing great, nothing awful, nothing ever changing that I have to reference all my past reports to make sure I'm not just repeating myself.

All in all though, it's not a bad gig and is MILES better than SAGE Foreign Studies Academy.