My school and its owner have a bit of a bad reputation in town. All the foreigners know it, and it kind of sucks when a new person starts at my school, because we're torn between scaring them about the contract they've just signed and warning them so they know what to watch out for.
He's pretty much known for asking ridiculous things of foreigners and preying on their guilt and general niceness. There are definitely other Chinese that are way worse to work for; we do get paid, and we get paid usually within two days of whenever we're supposed to (which is the tenth of the following month), so that's good. I've also turned in expense reports without receipts and still gotten paid. What we need to watch out for is keeping track of our teaching hours, our days off, our overtime and things like that.
As I've mentioned, we're all contracted for 88 teaching hours per month, with one day off per week. We do not get paid for office or prep hours. So to calculate your salary, you can look at your teaching hours or your teaching days each month, and it can get confusing because the contracts aren't clear.
Especially with me being in Tianjin for a few months and having different pay rate there, I make sure to calculate exactly what I expect to get paid in a way that makes the most sense for me and then I lay it out in an email to my school's accountant so there are no surprises. My explanations of pay have resulted in me getting paid exactly what I thought I should each month, instead of having it spun in the more negative direction for me.
My explanation for March did result in an hour and a half long meeting with my school's owner and the vice president yesterday though. The owner is Chinese, and is kind of realizing that the contracts are open to interpretation on a couple of different points and wants to make a change.
The more I talk with him, the more I don't know if his reputation for asking ridiculous things is actually intentional and malicious, like he wants to take advantage of us, or if he genuinely doesn't realize he is doing it, or that it is happening, as he likely isn't making all the day to day decisions that affect us.
In the course of that conversation yesterday the possibility of me taking on some of the school vice president's responsibilities while she is on a month and a half long holiday came up. I'm not placing too much stock in this, as the whole graphic design for the school thing has yet to come to fruition, but it's been put out there.
The idea of a promotion of sorts is obviously initially appealing (yay American ambition), until I think about the fact that the VP gets the shit end of the stick a lot (in a "don't kill the messenger" and she is the messenger kind of way), and also I don't plan to stay here, so what do I care about moving up.
Regardless, I told them if they want me to expand my role beyond teaching, they need to lay out exactly what they have in mind and I'll consider it. They also asked how many teaching hours I can handle each week, which is a bit scary considering my schedule this week had like 50 hours.
Back to ridiculous expectations and requests though... this whole Happy Songyuan English Speaking Contest is quite the debacle. The whole contest is VERY time and labor intensive, much more so for the Chinese TAs than for us foreigners, but still. Any judging hours that we have do not count towards our contracted teaching hours for the month, and there is judging literally every day, Monday through Friday. We've even had to contract teachers from other schools and cities to come in and help us.
I asked the VP how we get paid for these judging hours at the onset of the contest and she said they count toward our office hours. I don't think she realized at the time that we don't get paid for those at all. Naturally I went to my school's owner and asked about it. He kind of tried to feign ignorance or dodge the question, but I basically bullied him into answering and telling me (and the two other foreigners I brought in with me for backup/witnesses) that we will be paid half of our hourly teaching over time rate for contest hours. We were satisfied with the fact that we had an answer and we were getting paid, but that rate basically amounts to nothing.
What makes it especially bad is that most of the judging hours require us to get to school crazy early, like five or six am. Luckily for me, I've only been involved in two days of judging.
My school is super unorganized and things happen last minute all the time though. This is partly a function of China in general, but also my school takes it to an extreme. I got a call the other evening confirming my final student for the following day, and reminding me that I was to be a judge at five am the next morning (apparently it was on the schedule and I missed it). I told them no. They NEVER hear no. But there was no way I was starting work at five am, and then with the confirmation of my final student, I was scheduled until eight in the evening. 15 hour days are not what I signed up for here.
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