change of plans

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.

Thinking about these things and then what School #1 was offering me, I told them I was no longer interested in either contract, and I parted ways with my recruiter as well. As much as it makes me a little nervous not having a job or apartment lined up for September, I know this is definitely the better way to go.

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.

the hows

All you absolutely need to teach English in a foreign country is a Bachelor's Degree of some sort and to not be a serial killer. Beyond that, qualifications vary from school to school, but they won't really involve anything more than being a native Canadian or American needing some teaching experience and needing a TEFL certificate (which I got online in a week).

China was actually my backup country, I wanted to go to South Korea initially. I'd heard great things about the country and the schools and there are a lot of jobs with very high pay available there. Unfortunately, they're really strict about who can come work in their country, so with a DUI showing up on my FBI background check (I'd say "Thank you Sheriff Joe" but who am I kidding, that was totally my fault.) I couldn't get in. That brought me to China, which was fine with me; how different could they be? It's not as though I did any research about where I was going, outside of what the weather was like. I'm more of a jump in, deal and don't look back kind of girl.

I made the decision to do this in April of 2011. I interviewed and got set up with the recruiter a friend from college used and started the job search. I already had a trip to Oktoberfest in Munich planned for September/October, so I wasn't be able to come until around November. The Chinese school year starts in August, which meant it was more difficult to find the right opportunity starting after that, and it required more waiting, but that was fine.

Mid November I was offered a great position at a public school, it was exactly what I wanted. I had the friend whose recruiter I used take a peek at my contract and she said it looked pretty standard, so I was good to go. The position was due to start in early February, so I planned to quit my job in time to finish out my two weeks just before Christmas and then take the month of January off.

When I had less than a week left at my job, my recruiter emailed me to say that the school was concerned about getting my visa in time and they went with a local candidate instead. I was completely baffled as to how this could have happened after I signed a 15 page contract over a month before. But this is China. And I (stupidly) did not get my countersigned copy. Not that it would have mattered.

The school still wanted me in August for the following year, but I declined. I was dead set on leaving sooner than that, and after they backed out of my contract I was officially unemployed, and about to be in a weird situation with housing as well, seeing as how my lease at my apartment was up at the end of February.

I knew I was going to be fine money wise, I did liquor promotions which generated enough income to pay rent and live, but talk about drifting before I quit my job... working a few hours a week only on nights and weekends for six months could drive a person like me crazy. Not to mention the fact that I think I might have died from parental judgement if that's all I was doing for months on end at the age of 27 (see below). I had too much pride to go back to my job, and having known I was leaving since April, I was so over it I could barely function by the time I left anyway. And I had no vacation time left so I would have had to miss holidays with my family; it wasn't an option.

I decided not to rely so heavily on my recruiter, and started finding teaching jobs and applying myself. Within a week of School #1's news, I'd interviewed with and been offered positions at three other schools. I suck at interviews in the States, but foreign interviews I dominate, if I do say so myself. Also, as I subtly alluded to earlier, it really isn't that hard to get a job like this. None of those three schools was what I was looking for either though, so I declined all three offers and enjoyed my holiday season in peace.

After the holidays and my first week of unemployment (which was absolutely wonderful by the way, I hiked every day, read, visited friends on the beach in California, etc.) I started thinking about School #1 again. The offer was still good, still what I wanted, it just wasn't on my timeline. But did I really want to rush things and accept an offer I was less happy with just because it got me out of the States sooner? I went back and accepted the offer for August.

Which still left me with the questions of what to do until then job wise, so as not to go crazy, and what to do about my living situation. I couldn't get a real "career" type job because I was leaving in 6 months and I didn't want a retail or serving job because I just didn't think I could bring myself to do it. In the midst of my freaking out about that, a very wise friend (thank you again sir) asked me why I didn't just get with a temp agency. I could go to an office every day, put on my professional face and play at actually doing something I would classify as work until I left, sounded great. Meanwhile I was getting a TON of pressure from the family about what I was doing for work.

My mom is the consummate worrier and workaholic. Her life is not complete if she is not worrying about something, whether it merits the heart attack risk or not. She worked like crazy when I was a kid, I'm talking 80 hour weeks at one job, and still made dinner every night, took my brother and I to sports and music lessons, co-led my Girl Scout troupe, was on the PTA, etc. She was Wonder Woman. So to her, me doing any kind of bs job for six months was completely unfathomable.

And then there was the where to live when my lease came up conundrum. I had a friend that said I could move in with her and her husband rent free and just save money, but they were fighting a lot then, there was only one bathroom and it just wasn't a situation I wanted to be in. I had the guy I had just started dating a month prior, who was moving really fast, asking me to move in with him. And then there was the logical choice, my parents. I could always move in with them. But at my age, and having not lived there for more than a summer since sophomore year in college (actually less than a summer, I always seemed to have boyfriends I stayed with instead), it felt like failure. Even if it was only an interim between big life steps. And there was also the worry and pressure issue.

I love my parents to death. If I could only talk to three people on this planet for the rest of my life, I would choose my parents and my brother. But being there, and feeling that every day, I don't think I could take it. My parents don't understand this at all, so it was very hard to be supportive at first. Now that I'm underway and they can see that I'm still alive (I'll come back to this later...), I think they feel better. Plus my parents live in Wisconsin, very far from the Phoenix desert I know and love, and winter and I are not friends. 

Eventually I had it all figured out, I was going to get a temp job and move in with the boyfriend in Phoenix (yes, he got very serious very fast, but that ended up just being how we worked).

Until that just wasn't the plan.

I can't remember what exactly it was that my mom said to me, but something made me start looking for really short term contracts in China starting in February. In the same fashion as December, I had four interviews and four offers in one week. I was less picky with those than with School #1 because I was essentially looking for a time killer, it was one of those or a temp job. So I picked the best one and suddenly I was leaving for China in a few weeks! I negotiated a few points, signed my contract and waited to hear the exact date they wanted me here... and waited... and waited. It was Chinese New Year, this biggest holiday of the year, and no one works. It was a week after I signed my contract before I heard back about when they wanted me. When I finally did, I had less than a week's notice to get rid of everything that I owned and get over here. Sure, I left a few loose ends, but I feel like I handled most of the important stuff, and I'm glad I ended up where I did.