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.