Fancy a bit of frustration? Online teaching for Meten English schools in China..

When I lived in China I worked for a private school called Meten. Originally it was called Metro, a much better name in my view, but other businesses called Metro didn’t like it.  I actually worked for them part time in three cities, and also full time in Suzhou. This particular school has endless meetings, the craziest rules, completely unmovable when it comes to suiting the workers, and even though they have lots and lots of foreign teachers, I don’t think any of the top jobs are filled by foreigners, and they never seem to get the foreign teachers to edit anything, so most of their instructions to us foreign teachers is still in Chinglish. Even in Suzhou when I worked there at a brand new school, lots of the signs and posters etc did not have correct spelling.  We got used to it, but as far as we teachers were concerned it wasn’t very professional.

Peter and Dianna one of the teachers at the Dongguan school. All the walls of the classrooms were floor to ceiling glass.

 

 

They also had a club area with books and a pool table that was very popular with the students.

 

Well, about 5 or 6 months ago they asked me to do some on-line teaching for them. They have an internet platform for doing teaching using Skype. Unfortunately, their instructions were completely contradictory. They had a long list of lesson plans, but the instructions on what to do were so vague I had to keep asking what I was supposed to be doing. The first and worst part was that I had to make up ten PowerPoint lesson plans myself, then have an interview, then have a test lesson, then have a trial run with a real class, all for no pay. I was given a list of topics, student levels and language points, but had to find all the information myself, they needed pictures on every slide, very specific guidelines on how the slides should look, font colour etc, so about a whole day was used up making one lesson plan. I’m not so hot on PowerPoint so it took me a while to work this all out. They sent sample lesson plans out etc, which I used and altered.

 Having got about 4 lesson plans done, I had a bit of a free-for-all with the teacher’s assistant.  They kept changing the rules and I got fed up with it, so pulled out, and said I would not go on their teaching list.  I had spent about 50 hours during one week trying to do what they wanted, and still they were not happy. I’d had enough.

The street frontage of the school.

Metro in Xiamen.



 

When I was teaching at Xiamen they had a fantastic set of punishment rules for us. At first we were flabbergasted, but then just got used to the way they did things and basically ignored them. But there was a whole set of warnings listed, and we could be given a final warning for: being absent from work more than once a month without notice, making a false report about overtime worked, drinking alcohol on the job, fighting or quarreling, insulting colleagues, beguilement (not sure what that was), and working in another school without approval. We could also get a warning if we 'played during work hours'.



 In Suzhou the Meten school was on the third floor of this new mall.

While I was in China last month, they asked me again to do some teaching for them. I thought I’d give it another go. Well, it’s been a bit of a rocky road. The Teachers Assistant, poor girl, was still unhappy with me, and her emails were verging on somewhat rude. She didn’t write in capitals, as in shouting at me, but all her replies to my questions were in bold, and I was told in no uncertain terms that there was nothing special about me and that I should follow her instructions and just get on with it.

Fair enough. There are two girls I deal with at Meten’s Head office, Blair and Nana. (I still have trouble calling this young girl Nana – I’m sure she can’t know that her English name means grandmother). They both sent me updated topic lists to make more lesson plans from. But both topic lists were different. Nana would tell me to use Blair’s list and Blair would tell me to use Nana’s list. Hopeless! In the end they told me to ignore both lists and just do the topics I had originally nominated.



The Suzhou students put on a fashion show.

 The other problem is that they have a website that is new. I am supposed to upload my completed lesson plans to this website, but I keep hitting brick walls with it. They send me instructions that cannot be followed, for example, follow the Topic list on the website, but there is no topic list there. Another teacher I know who also teaches for them says that the new website that I am using, is not actually working yet and that they have had endless technical problems, and that she is using the old website….so I don’t know.

They have also changed the rules on when we would have a class. I quote, and please excuse the Chinglish”

“3. After you finished uploading ppt, you can start to choose your availability for teaching, and submit. After you choose your time , the system will match it automatically.

For example: if there is students book class at 7:00 for the topic “entertainment”, and teacher tick time at 7:00 for teaching ,then it will match.
4.     You can check whether you have students attend class and your students’ information 4 hours before the class starts.
For example: if you choose a time at 7pm, and you can check it after 3pm, when you click “details” ,if it shows nothing, which means no one book your class. If it shows something, which means you gonna teach at 7pm
5.     You need to choose courseware before at least 10 minutes before class. For example, if you have a class at 7pm, you need to click “choose courseware” between 3pm- 6:50pm . Otherwise , you can’t teach.”

So I can book a lesson for 7pm on a Monday night, but I have to check at 3pm on the Monday afternoon to see if any students have booked my class. If not, then I do not have a class, and other teachers tell me the classes get cancelled on a regular basis. But I won’t know that until four hours before hand. Haha, forward planning is not high on their list of priorities.

So whether I actually get to do any teaching or not is still to be seen. I can’t upload my lessons to their website, so maybe not.

The  entrance to Meten school in Suzhou.

On the positive side, these were nice schools to work in. The Chinese teachers and assistants were lovely, they had great natures usually and very helpful. The schools were clean and bright, only small, and the students were mostly adults, with enough money to pay the high tuition fees, and were very motivated. We made some great friends with some of these students and thoroughly enjoyed the teaching side of it in the classrooms.

A class in progress.

I will just finish with a couple of little funny things we had to get used to.

Peter and I worked for Meten in the city of Dongguan, not far from Hong Kong. The rule was, if you wanted to do photocopying you had to put the exact number of sheets of paper in the machine. So if I wanted to make four copies of something, I had to put in four sheets of paper from the cupboard. Normally you would put in a ream of paper and just work your way through it, but no, someone might come along and use too much paper so we were only allowed to put in the exact number of sheets. There was no changing this rule, it had been made by someone higher up and must be followed.

Finally, frustration sent all the foreign teachers to boiling point one day at the Xiamen branch. There were about six foreign teachers and we had a Chinese man in charge of us. He was our instructor on how to teach. He called a meeting one day to tell us how we should teach pronunciation. We were handed some pages full of pronunciation symbols that look like this. This is how Chinese teachers teach pronunciation to Chinese students.
 

æ	a	cat, bad, trap		ɛ	e	bed, net, dress
ə	@	about, comma		ɪ	I	kit, bid, hymn
i	i	happy, glorious		ɒ	Q	hot, odd, wash
ʌ	V	dug, run, strut		ʊ	U	book, put, foot

We were horrified and explained in no uncertain terms that we would not teach this way, we didn’t know what these sounds meant, we had never learned to speak this way, and did not want to use them.

He was stunned to think we had learned our wonderful English pronunciation without such a list but there was no getting around this. It was a directive from Head Office and all foreign teachers must use this method.

After 15 minutes of heated discussion, he would not budge. We would use these symbols or reap the consequences. We all looked at one another, said in our sweetest voices, okay, we will use them if that is what you require, he breathed a sigh of relief and we all walked back to our teacher’s office, tore them up and chucked them in the bin. The subject was never raised again.

It’s a funny old world.

 

A special girl called Twilight.

Twilight was one of our favourite students at the first university we went to teach at, in Longyan. She was one of Peter’s students, and considering they were all very shy to start with, Twilight was pretty outgoing and confident. She got involved with anything happening on campus and was willing to give anything a go. She taught me some Chinese, although I was a terrible student, and she would run messages for us whenever we needed help.

Twilight on the right, with her parents in 2006.. They took Peter and I out for lunch one day when we were living in Longyan.

 

This is an excerpt from my book. I wrote a lot about Twilight. "The Chinese give a great deal of serious thought when it comes to naming their children. Twilight’s family name is Ma. This word means horse. Her first name means going a long way, being successful. The Chinese are inclined to use words as names, words with quite beautiful meanings. So her name meant ‘going a long way like a horse, and having a successful journey.’ It would be comparable to us calling our child ‘Happy Successful Kerr’.

When Twilight started university her father also chose her English name. We asked why he chose Twilight. She said because it not only means the end of the day but also dawn, so this name could mean the beginning of a day, a new dawning in her life, with a long happy day in front of her. Lovely isn’t it?"

Twilights mother cooked lunch for me when I visited Kunshan.

Twilight was a Longyan girl, and knew the place like the back of her hand. If we wanted to buy something she knew where to find it. China is a funny place when it comes to shopping. Although they have the shops along the streets, often shops are also on the second and third floors of buildings but all hidden away, and we were stunned at times to find all sorts of things one or two levels up. (When I was in Putian I couldn’t find the post office. There had to be one, but I never saw it. That’s because it was on the second floor of a building.)

Sometimes I would praise Twilight for finding some shop I wanted she would just say, ‘the sign is there’, but of course all in Chinese and unreadable by us.

Kunshan downtown. Note the motor bike on the right. Mother driving, father behind, holding a toddler all wrapped up against the cold.

 

So Twilight, like Alex, became part of our Chinese family while we were in Longyan, and we used her frequently as our translator.

While I was in China this month, I visited Suzhou, and Twilight is now a married woman with a baby and lives in a town called Kunshan, halfway between Shanghai and Suzhou. Once she knew I was going to Suzhou, I knew, come hell or high water, she was going to meet up with me, and so she did. We had two days together.

Twilight in 2013 with her baby and husband. Note the heavy clothes. It was around zero this day, freezing cold, having snowed a couple of nights before. One tiny heater was on, but everyone wears many layers of clothes rather than use heating.
 

Twilights apartment block. They live on the 8th floor.

 Her baby is two months old, and her and her husband run a small engineering factory. At the moment her mother is staying with them to help with the baby. Actually, having a baby in China is very different from what we are used to. The new mother has a woman, usually the girl’s mother, come and stay with them for at least the first month.  The new mother does nothing for the first month, and I have heard is not supposed to bath or do any work, concentrating on caring for her baby. In Twilights case, her mother is staying on for some months.

No space goes to waste. This little plot of veges was planted outside their factory. Someone is caring for this little garden. The blue is the side of a chook pen. Unfortuantely the cabbages did not like the recent snow, and they looked a bit the worse for wear.

Twilight and her husband came and picked me up from Sam and Ethel’s place in Suzhou and took me to their place in Kunshan, also driving me around Kunshan, as I had never been there before. It was a lousy day, cold, bleak and wet, but I have to say that Kunshan is a really nice place. It’s a new city, built around 10 or 15 years ago, clean, well set out, and most people seem to obey the road rules.

I took this picture above through the car window. You will notice several tall black things, one just to the right of the power pole. China has a couple of nice months of weather during spring and autumn, but the rest of the time its stinking hot or freezing cold. Up north although the winters are freezing, during the summer, the weather supports tropical plants easily. So there are many palm trees around the cities in China. But palm trees do not like the cold and snow, so all the cities wrap up their tender trees for the winter, giving them lovely warm overcoats.  Here you can see some palm trees with their winter coats on. In the spring they will all come off, and lo and behold, back to tropical trees again.

One of the buidings in Kunshan's downtown. It's a shame it was such a lousy day, none of the pictures give a very good impression of the place. But this is one town that I could happily live in. On a good day it must be really nice.

 

Twilight took me to her home for lunch, prepared by her mother. So we had a good meal of fish, pork, and noodles, amongst other things. Like all Chinese, they tucked away a large quantity of food and were constantly urging me to eat more, more, more. I just couldn’t keep up with the Chinese appetites, no matter where I ate.



Oh well, you'll just have to tip your computer sideways. I don't know why it has done this, the original is the right way up and I have loaded it and flipped it several times, but it will not load the right way up.

Twilight features a great deal in the book I wrote about our first year living in China. I had taken a copy to give to Twilight. Here I am holding my book, ready to give it to her. We were having lunch at one of my favourite restaurants in Suzhou, a little dumpling shop at the In City Mall. The last school I taught at was in this mall.

  She always had a soft spot for Peter, and has kept in touch with us over the years. After we finished our year teaching in China, we had three weeks travelling, and both Alex and Twilight came to Suzhou to meet up with us for a few days before we came back to Australia. It is rare to see Chinese people display emotion, but when we were at the airport, Twilight was sobbing her heart out as she was saying goodbye to us. She will always have a special place in our hearts.

 

A pair of card sharks.

Well the weather has gone, its sitting over Sydney causing mild mayhem, having dumped tons of rain on the coastal cities on the way down.

One small place close to this house sit is called Springbrook. In 3 days they had 1.4 meters of rain. That is around 45 inches of rain!

Now, the sun is out, the air is very humid, things are heating up again, and the grass is growing like crazy. One of the amazing things about Australia is their grass. It can be dead, dry brown grass, even to the point of dry ground, but give it a decent shower of rain and its green in a couple of days.

We went for a drive round Coomera River yesterday, and the river is not far under the bridge and the lake and the river have combined into one huge brown muddy area. It must take the run off from quite a large area of housing.

 

Bundaberg is taking a pounding, still terrible flooding there, but most other places are seeing their rivers drop.

Peter and I play a lot of cards. When you move from one house sit to another, you can’t take too much stuff, but a few packs of cards are easy to carry around. For a while we will play one game, and then change to something different. At the moment we are playing a game called ‘hand and foot’.  http://www.ehow.com/how_2085502_play-hand-foot-card-game.htmlhttp://www.ehow.com/ehow-mom/

It’s sort of like Canasta, where you have to make runs of numbers. Seven of one number, regardless of suit makes one run. If you have seven 9’s with no wild cards, that’s a red run and worth 500 points. If you have some wild cards (jokers or twos) then it is a black run and worth 300 points.

 

 We are inclined to change the rules to suit ourselves. So we decided that before you could pick up the foot you had to have one red set and one black set laid on the table and before you went out you had to have two black and two red sets laid on the table.  We also play with four packs of cards instead of two, so we have more chances to make runs and get higher scores.



 

Today after cleaning the pool, Peter doing some tidying up outside and me doing some work inside, we decided to get out the cards. The plan was for me to win, well my plan anyway, but Peter had other ideas.

 

 You can see here the half-finished sets of cards on the table. You can also see some finished sets on the table. There is also an empty small red bowl, and two coffee cups….after all you need a cup of coffee to get the gray matter churning satisfactorily.

Unfortunately, this picture below says it all. It’s not my hand with the thumb up, but I blame him for my losing. After all, he put out the nibbles in the red bowl, some sort of corn chip covered in some chilly hot spicy stuff. Fair blew my brains out! I’m pretty smart, but I do need my brains to beat him at cards.

 

The birds are shellshocked but we are fine.

Well it’s been a hairy night, but we have not sustained any damage. The wind is still howling through the tree tops and we are still getting a few heavy showers passing across. We have been outside tidying up, well Peter mostly.

Clean up Pete with is big muscles and fancy see through poncho.

 The radio this morning said that 203,000 homes in Queensland are without power and some of them will have to wait for some time to be reconnected. Telstra also has had major problems up north and the 000 numbers are not working, there are no phones, no internet connections etc in much of the northern areas of the state. So quite a few people are without outside communications.

 

  

Debri on the driveway. It doesn't look too bad in this picture.

 

Parts of Bundaberg, Brisbane, Maryborough and Gympie are underwater or going under. In fact all the towns from Cairns down have been affected in some way. Here on the Gold Coast, the rivers are up and areas of the hinterland have had up to 400 mls of rain in the last 24 to 36 hours. That is around 12 to 16 inches of rain. That’s a lot of water and it all has to go somewhere.

  

Debri under the trees by the carport.

 As for us we have got off surprisingly lightly. A large amount of small twigs and bark has been peeled off the gum trees and is now adorning the lawns and driveway. A few smaller branches have come off and one is reclining at the bottom of the pool. The pool is surprisingly clean, often the wind will deposit all sorts of leaves and stuff there.

The poor birds are sitting the trees looking very sad for themselves, very bedraggled and the tamer ones we feed daily are sitting there demanding some breakfast.

The television has just said that some windows have been broken by waves in a restaurant in Burleigh. It must be pretty wild down by the beach.

We're in for a rough night.

For a change the radio and television are not running their programs. Everything is live coverage of the weather, with constant updates and weather warnings.

 Poncho Pete sorting out the pool. It is nearly overflowing so will release a little bit of the water.

Here on the Gold Coast, where our house sit is, we are just seeing the beginnings of what they tell us will be a fairly nasty 24 hours. The wind around the city and around the coast is bad, people hardly able to stand up in it, especially around the high rise buildings, the hotels etc which sets up a funnel for the wind to whip through.

The little fountain pool is overflowing.

This house is on the western sheltered side of a highish hill, and the weather is coming from the east, from the ocean, so we are more sheltered than some of the areas. That is good, but the tall gum trees up the back of the block are certainly moving around a lot. They are forecasting winds of around 100 km an hour, with some gusts more than that.

 

The trees up the back.

 

The ground is absolutely sodden. Peter and I have been outside making sure everything is ship shape for overnight. We keep some beach balls on the pool, they are supposed to keep the ducks away, although no-one told the ducks, they still visit sometimes. I threw them over the fence ready to collect and put in the shed and lol…the wind took them down the driveway onto the grass, so I had to retrieve them from the soggy grass.



Pool balls having a rest in the shed till the rain is over.

 I think the ground here is basically rock, there is top soil on top, but really the majority is solid rock so I don’t have any worries about the ground slipping. Anyway this area has been through other bad weather like this and been fine. The only thing that I will keep an eye on is the tall gum trees up the back. If one of them comes down, it could get the house, but I don’t think there will be any problems.

They are forecasting between 100 and 200 mils of rainfall over the next 24 to 36 hours. That is 4 to 8 inches. We have had 60 mils in the last couple of hours, and around 6 inches so far, maybe more.

Fortunately there are no thunder storm associated with this weather. That would make it really bad, although there are hundreds of people without power now all along the coast.

The home owners have got a handy little rain gauge on the end of the clothes line. For the past couple of months it has been dying of thirst, now it is saving 60 mls every couple of hours.

 The poor bedraggled birds are looking a bit sad, sheltering where they can. The tame ones are coming to the back door ordering their dinner, haha, and sucker Peter is handing out some bread for them.


My blue coat. This is my faithful blue coat I take to China for the cold. It has saved me from minus 7 afternoons in Suzhou, snow in Tiananmen Square, and freezing cold winds all over China. Today for the first time I have used it in Queensland, we never need anything warm here, but I have found out it is not waterproof. Windproof yes, but it lets through copious amounts of rain.....lol...

Off to make a coffee and watch the news again.

Mr Noah, we need your ark.

Well the weather has turned slightly nasty.  We had a tropical cyclone roaming round up north for a few days, and then it lost some of its intensity and became an ex-tropical cyclone. But instead of dying out, as these things are want to do, it has gained strength from the warm air around Australia and the moisture over the Coral Sea and although it hasn’t become a cyclone again, it is dragging warm moist air in from the ocean and dumping it on the coast.

Gladstone has been badly affected and Bundaberg is flooding badly now and is going to get much worse. These are times when the Bureau of Metorology site is kept open much of the time. Knowing what is going on is really important. Also, the local national radion station, the ABC, instead of having a national program has only local programs with constant news of the flooding along the coast.

This is the current warning list for Queensland. Pretty extensive.

Warnings current:

Ocean Wind Warning 1 (QLD),

Coastal Wind Warning 1 - East Coast (QLD),

Severe Weather Warning 1,

Severe Weather Warning 2,

Fire Weather Warning,

Severe Thunderstorm Warning (QLD),

Flood Warning - Fitzroy River (QLD),

Flood Warning - Burnett River (QLD),

Flood Warning - Kolan, Baffle, Boyne and Calliope Rivers (QLD),

Flood Warning - Coastal Rivers - South (QLD),

Flood Warning - Burrum River (QLD),

Flood Warning - Mary River (QLD),

Flood Warning - Sunshine Coast Rivers (QLD),

Flood Warning - Stanley & Brisbane above Wivenhoe Dam (QLD),

Flood Warning - Lockyer, Bremer, Warrill & Brisbane below Wivenhoe (QLD),

Flood Warning - Condamine-Balonne Rivers (QLD),

Flood Warning - Macintyre, Weir & Border Rivers (QLD),

Flood Warning Summary (QLD).

 This ‘weather event’ as they are calling it, has turned into a bad affair, with inches of rain falling right down the coast and causing serious flooding.

Big seas are pounding the coast.

  

 

 The Maranoa River breaks it banks at Mitchell, causing the worst flooding in the town's history. Picture: courtesy of Maranoa Regional Council Source: The Courier-Mail

 Here on the Gold Coast, our house sit is well above any flood level, if we flood then the rest of the city is under water, we are at the base of Mount Tamborine and in a slightly hilly area. We have also taken note of all the radio and television advice to get the house storm ready. So we are expecting lots more rain today and much higher winds.

Some places have had over 500 mils of rain in the last couple of days. That is half a meter! The run off from that is enormous. Also because of the low pressure there are storm surges working their way down the coast giving very high tides. The strong winds, averaging around 80 to 100 km an hour at their peaks are driving big seas too, so the beaches are having problems with erosion.



A flooded property at Lowmead north of Bundaberg. It later disappeared under floodwaters. PIC: Supplied


Here on the Gold Coast, so far we have only had about 100 mils, around 4 inches, but we expect the worst to be this afternoon and tonight.

Bagara, around Bundaberg has had tornados, power cuts are everywhere, and everyone is told to keep off the roads. The winds further north, around Gympie are still cyclonic, and that seems to be heading our way.

 

To give you an idea of how high these rivers get, many bridges will be underwater, and the rivers can be 5, 10, or 20 meters higher than normal.

“The Burnett River at Walla is currently around 22 metres, which is above the December 2010 flood (20.10 metres). A peak slightly above 22 metres is expected in the next few hours due to local runoff, with further rises expected during Monday and Tuesday.”  BOM site. To complicate matters, all the local dams are releasing water because they know there will be much more water flowing in over the next week or so.

So we are expecting a rather wild 24 hours to come. I'll keep you posted. Just in the last few minutes the rain has increa

The Next Big Thing Blog Hop

The Next Big Thing Blog Hop

And now for something completely different! I’ve been tagged by Joan Small  to join the Next Big Thing Blog Hop – a chain letter for readers without any threats or bribes.  Readers are encouraged to follow the blog hop forward to the next writer to be tagged and back to the previously tagged. It’s a great way to find new authors.

Joan Small  is a self-published author, primarily of personal development books, but she has also ghost written autobiographies and collaborated in the writing of a Young Adults fantasy fiction novel. Joan’s book ‘The Energy Book for Life – The Guidebook to Energized Living’ is empowering, and energizing. Joan provides wonderful examples of many aspects of energy; she looks at health, vitality, the power of the mind, and the energizing effects of the people and environment we choose. The Energy Book for Life is a must read for anyone who wants to be happy and put everything into perspective. If you want to bring positive changes into your life, read this book today ... and then teach it to your children. It has been described as ‘a masterpiece in its field’. 

AND NOW FOR THE NEXT BIG THING......

  

THE TITLE OF MY BOOK IS:

China or Bust! A rookie’s guide to living and surviving in China as an ESL teacher.

 THE IDEA CAME ABOUT WHEN:

Peter and I were living in China teaching English and sending home lots of letters and stories to friends and family. I would get replies back saying how much they enjoyed the emails and that I should put them all in a book. I kept them all, but the thought of actually collating everything seemed too daunting and too time consuming. However when I was studying for my Master’s Degree in Writing over the past couple of years, I decided to try, and eventually the finished manuscript was the thesis for my degree.

 GENRE ?:

Travel/ auto ethnicity/ and a how-to book on living in China.

WHICH ACTORS WOULD PLAY THE PARTS IF IT WERE MADE INTO A FILM?:

I can’t’ see this made into a movie. It’s a really good read, but I don’t know if it is movie material.

A ONE SENTENCE SYNOPSIS OF MY BOOK:

An English teacher goes to China to teach, but she does not speak one word of the language, so learns to cope with daily life in a country where the culture is mind-bogglingly different, leading to  many funny experiences.

IS THE BOOK SELF PUBLISHED OR REPRESENTED BY AN AGENCY:

Self-published but also being translated in Chinese and being published by Xiamen University Press for the Chinese market in 2013. It is also available as an e-book and being purchased by Australian libraries.

HOW LONG DID THE FIRST DRAFT TAKE?

Around six months was spent on the first draft as I was also studying.  But the first draft was easy, and in my mind it was being collated and going nowhere. Once I decided to be serious about writing, it took on a life of its own. It took another six months or more after I decided to make it my thesis. It was re-written several times, with huge changes being made and then a publisher here on the Gold Coast was interested but wanted it to be a 'how-to' book as well, so many more pages and further research was needed.  It was being edited and tweaked for several months after that.  But there comes a time when you have to say ‘finished’. That was about the middle of 2012.

 ANY OTHER BOOKS IN A SIMILAR GENRE?

I have not been able to find anything else like it. There are books about living in China, but I have not found anything with the ‘how-to’ information I have included, such as how to get a job, how to find an apartment, doctors and hospitals, personal safety, how to use the complicated bus and train systems when you can’t speak or read a word of the language etc. I have covered everything a person needs to know when going to live in China to teach but cannot understand any Chinese.

WHO/WHAT INSPIRED THE BOOK?

Really it was the need for a thesis, and I had kept these emails for several years, and the idea just wouldn’t go away. In the end I had to give in to the urge and start writing.  I have written poetry and short stories for many years.

 WHAT ELSE MIGHT INTEREST THE READER?

I think uncovering the mystery of a county like China. The whole lifestyle and mind set is different. The whole way of living is different. Getting an insight into their culture is fascinating. Also the how-to information is clear and easy to understand and follow.

NOW FOR MY TAG TEAM:

JOAN SMALL:

ANDY MCDERMMOTT

DR MICHAEL CLANCY

PENNY GARNSWOTHY

 JILL SMITH

CHRISTINE DALGLIESH:

DI HILL

RICKY HUNTER