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.