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 whole week wasted!!!

Just a quick post today. I have wasted a whole week and it is partly my own fault. I applied to do some online tutoring for a school I worked for in China. This school, which will remain nameless used to drive me nuts with their rules. I think it was a power thing, them making sure us foreigners, who actually knew far more than they did about running a school, making sure we didn't get above our station.
Anyway, it was a lesson in futility.

This private school had branches in a few cities. This is the mall that they opened a branch in. They were not large schools, and the students were mostly adults, motivated and lovely to teach. There had been a fashion show on when I took this picture. There were four floors and a huge basement which was a massive supermarket.

This dumpling shop in the basement of the mall, made the most fabulous dumplings. For about $2 AU I got a filling bowl of the best dumplings you have tasted.

Back to the subject of these lesson plans. We were given topics, words and general subjects. We had to make our own PowerPoint presentations which became hour long online lesson plans. Instead of the school giving us lesson plans we had to do all the work for them. They took me about 3 hours each to find the information, collate it, and get the ppt ready. Then it had to be approved by them, which it often wasn't, partly because I am a bit green with PowerPoint  but mostly because there were no written instructions and they changed the rules and moved the goal posts partway through the process.

Anyway, I had to make up 10 of these lesson plans, which I then had spend more time working on. I quit yesterday after sending my third lesson plan for approval. The teaching assistant wrote back and said it didn't cover the required topic enough, which actually was fair enough. Mind you, a lesson plan called, My Big Family, then teaching information on advantages and disadvantages of the one child family, was a bit weird.

But I followed orders and changed the lesson plan to include sufficient info about one child families. The teaching assistant then sent it back minus the one child stuff saying they thought they would change the name of the lesson plan after all, and just make it about big families. I decided the argy bargy involved wasn't worth the hassle. I had spent maybe 40 or 50 hours last week making lesson plans, doing a demo class, getting feedback, but not earning one penny so far. I could see hours and hours of more argy bargy ahead, so asked them to take me off their teacher list before I even got started.

I'm not a quitter, I really do stick at things but this just was not worth the hassle. One of the things this school would do, was deduct stuff from your pay each month, but you never knew about it beforehand. ( I worked for them full time for nearly a year, in China).

If you forgot to clock in, more than 3 times I think in a month, your pay was deducted. There were lots of small stuff like that. But the one that I fought tooth and nail about, unsuccessfully I might add, was the time when I was sick. The pay scale was quite clever. You got a base pay, which was really low,  then extra stuff each month that made the pay quite good, including a housing allowance each month,  mind you it was 40 hours a week. Sick pay was a percentage of the base pay, so almost nothing. I think I got 80 rmb per day sick pay, equivalent to $12.00 or so. To top it off, for every sick day, they deducted the equivalent of  your housing allowance. So if you were sick for three days, you got no housing allowance for those three days. It was scam city. I then realized why the Chinese teachers would roll up with fevers and flu. They knew their housing allowance would be deducted too.

Of course this was not written in our contracts, but when I went to the top, and I really fought them over this, I was told it was in the manual, but unfortunately for me the manual was in Chinese. Haha...of course, I can't read much Chinese, and never saw the manual.

There were some perks. The students were excellent to teach. One of the VIP students was a doctor, very high up in the local hospital system. From time to time he would take out the teachers for a meal. This was a really expensive restaurant, the decor was beautiful and the food top of the range.

Another student in the same town took me out for lunch when I was leaving the school to come back to Australia. She was a local business woman who owned a huge factory, a lovely person, busy but so happy with her busy life.

In China is it is normal to have private dining rooms rather than be in a large communal dining room. This was a Japanese restaurant but the food was Chinese. It is the only time I had birds nest soup. These rooms are rather lavishly decorated, probably very expensive, with their own beautifully appointed bathrooms. You can see our reflection in the mirror. Although there were only four of us, the table was set for 8 or 10.

The weather was not good, but the restaurant looked over the lake to the city center.

I'll tell you one more story about this school. In a different city I worked full time for this school. We had a Chinese guy in charge of the foreign teachers. He had a very unEnglish name, as many of them do. Anyway it was his job to oversee us foreign teachers, native English speakers, you know from USA,.England, Australia, New Zealand. His spoken English was okay but not brilliant and his grammar left quite a bit to be desired. However it was his job to teach us how to teach.

When Chinese students are learning pronunciation, they learn by using a set of international phonetic symbols.  This is because they were in school, being taught by  Chinese teachers who didn't know the correct pronunciation for lots of words.  If you are a native speaker you won't have a clue what these are. I had never seen them before, but every student I subsequently had, when the subject was raised were absolutely gobsmacked that I learned to speak English without these symbols...lol.

Here are some of the symbols for pronunciation.

vowels

IPA examples listen
ʌ cup, luck Amer
ɑ: arm, father Amer / Brit
æ cat, black Amer
e met, bed Amer 1
ə away, cinema Amer 2
ɜ:ʳ turn, learn Amer / Brit 2
ɪ hit, sitting Amer
i: see, heat Amer
ɒ hot, rock Amer / Brit 3
ɔ: call, four Amer / Brit 4 5
ʊ put, could Amer
u: blue, food Amer
aɪ five, eye Amer
aʊ now, out Amer
eɪ say, eight Amer
oʊ go, home Amer 6
ɔɪ boy, join Amer
eəʳ where, air Amer / Brit 1 7
ɪəʳ near, here Amer / Brit 7
ʊəʳ pure, tourist Amer / Brit 7

http://www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc-soundsipa.htm

Sometimes we see these symbols in dictionaries. Anyway, we were told by our Chinese guy that we had to use these symbols. He just could not get it through his head that we did not know these symbols, that we have never used them, that we learned English without them, that we flatly refused to learn them, and we flatly refused to use them in the classroom.

There was a very heated discussion for about 15 or 20 minutes. He was adamant that we must learn them and use them. In desperation, we foreign teachers gave in, admitted defeat, said yes we would learn them and use them, and meekly took our copies of these hieroglyphics. We left the room, walked into our teachers office, tore them up, chucked them in the bin and the subject was never raised again.

Ah the memories! I absolutely loved my time in China, I loved teaching, and generally the schools were very fair with everything, but this one private school sent my blood pressure pretty high at times.

Oh well, this was supposed to be a quick post and I got carried away.

The pocket money for the online tutoring would have been nice, but not to be. I'm better off without the stress.