So, a few weeks ago, School #1 tried to mess with my life once again. My recruiter emailed me to say that my position had AGAIN been given away somehow. She said the school wanted to offer me a different position at a sister school in a neighboring city with a nearly identical contract. Knowing all I know now, I know I can probably make more money elsewhere and not get dicked around nearly as much.
I'm also finding that I really like much of the flexibility of a private school (School #1 is a public school, so I lose 90% of that) and also the way my teaching is going right now, both the students I teach and the structure of my schedule.
I was initially looking at public schools in Korea when I first decided to teach abroad. There, hogwans (aka private schools) are more of a crapshoot as far as shadiness goes, and public school jobs tend to be much cushier. I assumed that logic applied to public and private schools in China as well, but talking to other foreign teachers here, the general consensus is that private are better.
My contract with my private school has a set salary for up to 88 teaching hours per month. Anything beyond that, I get paid overtime for and it's completely at my discretion whether I get near that or not. Office hours (for lesson planning and such) don't count towards teaching hours, but since my return to Songyuan I have stopped lesson planning, I no longer need to. This setup is pretty standard.
My contract also says I get one day off per week, public holidays off, and an allotment of personal paid vacation days. Since arriving, I've worked a zillion days in a row, including holidays, and banked all my days off to take long holidays. It's working out to a vacation a month, and every other month is a loooong vacation. I actually really love this because it gives me a lot more freedom to go do things I want, when I want. It's a give and take.
My classes in Songyuan are shaping up to be mostly tutoring hours. I tutor a high school boy that will go abroad to finish high school and then attend university in Canada; he will leave in about a month and has absolutely no interest in focusing, studying or putting any effort into learning English. My only job with him is to get him talking for two hours a day. I have an amazing amount of conversations about high school girls every week, lol. He's going to take me boxing on Saturday though, so there's definitely some perks to teaching him.
I am also tutoring a high school girl that is planning to attend college in the UK. First she must attend a language school there for a year to help catch her up. She is quite the opposite of the boy, she is very focused and tries really hard. Vocabulary is her biggest challenge. I use a book for the basic structure of our daily lessons and then tie in whatever practical life things come up.
Both of them spend almost all day every at our school studying and do not attend their Chinese high schools at all, ever. They actually took a field trip back to their high school yesterday and were somehow allowed to just join their former classmates in what they call PE, but seems to be the equivalent of recess. Somehow I'm thinking security and school shootings are not an issue here...
In addition to them, I tutor a man that is the administrative assistant of a president in one of the oil companies here, an oil company translator that has worked primarily with written language and then teach my old favorite class, Oil Adults 2. I'm pretty happy with everyone I teach.
I've just been looking at a map of China, figuring out where I want to be and then trying to find jobs there. I will probably take a holiday in May to visit a few cities I am interested in and just drop in on schools there and see how it goes. People tend to not plan so far in advance in China, and espeically since I am already here, it will be fine.
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