Archives for Category "Teaching"
Why Chinese People Have English Names
A friend brought up an interesting point regarding my last post. Why do I keep calling this Chinese woman (who I happen to now be married to) by the English name, Sarah? The name “Sarah” has no legality. It’s more like a nickname. She still has to write her Chinese name on any forms or applications. It’s pretty common, though, for younger Chinese people to have an English name. Sometimes, it’s a translation of what their Chinese name means. Sometimes, it’s phonetically similar (like Li Li becoming Lily). But most of the time, they just pick a name they like and go with it.
When I first started teaching, I was a little naive about how this name-picking worked. I thought students took it seriously, revered their English names, and kept them for the rest of their lives. All of my ILP students were assigned an English name, after all. Of course, a lot of ILP teachers didn’t give this much thought and simply named students after boyfriends or celebrities. Some poor kid was given the name Gordon, because a girl wanted to name him after a Mormon president. And I thought, “Man, what an unfortunate teenager.”
Years later, I found out just how disposable these names were. Older students changed their English names all the time, bouncing between crazy vocabulary words and pop singer monikers until they found something that fit. Famous artists like Jay Chou and Jolin Tsai meant lots of kids wanted to be called Jay and Jolin. Others picked less favorable names like Ice Lemon, Banana, Crystal Bear, and Car. Then when they realized these weren’t that great, they quickly changed to something else.
But having an English name—however silly—really helps in communicating with foreigners, because we’re terrible about pronouncing or remembering Chinese names. Even Chinese friends will call each other by their English names, since it is easier than having to say their full Chinese names. Out of respect, you are supposed to address someone by their full name (or their family name + their title), so a more casual English name is a popular alternative.
A Quick Guide to Teaching English in China
As many of you know, I am writing a book detailing the time I spent living and teaching in China. I’ve been pretty mum about it since the last sample chapter I posted, so here’s an update. The final draft is done. I’ve gotten some great feedback from people, cleaned up the tone of the book, cut out a lot of repetitive dialogue, tightened up the graphics on Level 3, and am finally ready to start the long, arduous process of looking for an agent.
The last time I tried looking for an agent, I wound up with nothing and resorted to publishing that book on Amazon in the Kindle section. I’ve put so much effort into this China book, though (and I know it’s a damn good book), that I won’t be content with a simple e-publication. I’m aware the publishing process isn’t filled with instant gratification; it could be a while before Yes China gets a cover. That’s why, in the meantime, I’ve decided to start yet another project.
Enter A Quick Guide to Teaching English in China. This is a small, 5,600 word “handbook” combining everything I’ve learned from teaching in China. I don’t see it as a conflict with Yes China, because it’s a short, straight to the point how-to guide. It’s meant for people who have already decided they want to teach in China but who don’t know what is expected of them or what they can expect from their new school. It’s also an e-book on Amazon, and it’s only $1.
SARS, I’ll Overcome You
The first Chinese school I taught at in Hefei had English sayings plastered all over the inside and outside walls. As I’ve been looking through my old photos (’cause I’m bored), I came across this particular favorite:
SARS, I’ll overcome you!
As a bonus, I’ll let you in on a little secret. When I was getting ready to leave for my 2005 China trip, I’d been told about ILP teachers in the past being boarded up in their schools due to “SARS being in that city.” I thought they were talking about czars and was both excited and worried about the idea of foreign teachers having to hide from rulers passing through the area.
Chinese Souvenirs: Bottle Opener
Of all the things I brought back from China, this gets more use than any of them. Sure, it’s just a bottle opener, but it looks like a Beijing opera mask! It’s red on one side and green on the other. How cool is that?
The bottle opener was a gift. When I first arrived in Changzhou in 2008 (wow, it’s been two and a half years… I should write about that… but that takes too much effort), I worked at a training school that was just celebrating its one-year anniversary. They made a big spectacle out of it, threw a party at a local hotel, made their foreign teachers perform something, and handed out lots of prizes. I received two items. The first was a toothpick holder that I quickly pawned off on someone else. The other item was the bottle opener.
The following year (that’s 2009 if you weren’t paying attention), I once again found myself working at the same training school when their next anniversary party rolled around. It wasn’t nearly as big of a deal as the one before, though. We gathered at a restaurant, ate a cheap buffet, and went home with no gifts, no cheesy toothpick holders… and no Beijing opera bottle openers.
Getting Time Off in China
Because Christmas fell on a Saturday this year… I mean last year… I was only given one day off of work from my job in the US. This was a bit disappointing, since I had been in school so long and was quite used to getting almost a full month to do nothing. When I was teaching in China, though, I also only got one day off, and that was because I was a foreigner. The Chinese teachers didn’t get Christmas day off. In fact, for the first school I taught at, I ended up working Christmas, anyway, in order to get some end-of-semester testing done.
Of course, I made up for this by getting a month off for Chinese New Year, including extra time that all foreign teachers get (the school doesn’t want/need us around while they do final exams). Again, though, the Chinese teachers don’t get quite as much time off. But even for them and other Chinese workers, there are quite a few holidays in China. There’s Chinese New Year, May Day, and National Day, to name a few, and they’re all longer than Thanksgiving.
At first, it seems kind of unfair. I looked at my company’s holiday calendar for 2011, and it was disappointingly shy of days off. The caveat with holidays in China, though, is that you usually have to make up time to get it off. National Day may be a week-long holiday, but I had to work the Saturday and Sunday before the vacation. So even though I got to relax for an entire seven days, I was technically only being relieved of three days of teaching. I could see the benefit of doing it this way, but I still found it exhausting to work seven days straight. I’m not sure which way I’d rather have it…
Getting Fired by a Training School
English training schools in China aren’t known for having the best work environment. Most of my friends who work (or worked) at a training school hate (or hated) it. So it’s more likely that a foreign teacher would quit than they would get fired. The school can’t afford to fire them, anyway, even if it does treat them like crap. It needs their presence to convince potential students it has a lot of foreign teachers.
Normal Chinese employees, on the other hand, are completely expendable. In the few months that I worked at the training school in Changzhou, I saw a lot of Chinese employees get fired. It was a little infuriating how the school handled these situations, because, if there was an employee it wanted to get rid of, the school would blackmail them into quitting. The school didn’t want to pay compensation to anyone who got fired.
It basically came down to, “If you don’t quit on your own, then we won’t say good things about you to your next employer.” With jobs as hard as they are to come by in China, how could they argue with that? The worst thing I heard, though, was when the school wanted a pregnant employee to quit, then come back after she gave birth, so it wouldn’t have to pay for maternity leave. It’s surprising these places could get away with treating their employees like this.
Chinese Souvenirs: Horns
I don’t think there is any significance behind the horn in Chinese culture, but I wanted to write about it, because this particular item was given to me by the parents of one of my students.
On the last day with ILP, some of the parents invited the foreign teachers to their homes for lunch. The family I visited gave us gifts when we first arrived. They were only expecting female teachers to show up, though, because all they had were purses. The father quickly ran into the bedroom and came back with this decorative horn. I’m pretty sure he just pulled it off their wall at the last minute, but I graciously accepted it.
Because children were present—and my job for the past five months had been to entertain children—I took the horn and pretended to play a song on it. The father said, “No, no, no,” took the horn back, and showed me that you were supposed to hang it on the wall, not play it. Silly foreigner.
Are You Going to Teach English?
Long sigh… yes. But it’s not what you think. I swore I would never teach English in China again, and, as far as the traditional classroom setting goes, I’m sticking to it. As a favor to a friend who helped me get a hotel room, however, I am giving him English lessons every day. Even one-on-one sessions can be aggravating, but thanks to the power of Blurt Out, a book that continues to prove useful after five years, I’ll make it through the next two weeks.
One thing I found interesting as I cracked open this magical book again was the second phrase it covers: Are you going to… It suddenly struck me as amusing how “Are you going to…” is a much longer, more tiring version of “Will you…” yet it’s the more common way of asking what someone’s up to (i.e. “Are you going to watch a movie?” vs. “Will you watch a movie?”). “Will you…” seems more fit for making requests, like, “Will you clean up this dog barf?” I guess you could make requests the other way, too. “Are you going to clean up this dog barf?” though that has a more negative ring to it.
Imagine trying to explain all this to someone whose English is… pretty meh. Oh, how the subtle differences between English phrases make teaching such a burdensome joy. I’m ecstatic to be doing this again.
