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Knowing how much to work for in China

By on 16 March, 2011 in China, Teaching
100 yuan note from China

To be rich is glorious: Mao worship has taken a different tack in the 21st century.

The Problem: Knowing what a fair wage is for foreign teachers in China.

ForeignTeacherPay.com was created to solve a simple, but important, problem: it is difficult for English teachers to know how much they should work for in China. There is no real minimum wage for foreign teachers, and pay varies based upon factors as diverse as geographic location and (most worryingly) employer honesty.

When dealing with a new teacher, employers know that they are negotiating with someone with little knowledge of the hiring market, so it is not uncommon for schools to give lowball offers, just to see what the response will be. Unfortunately, these lowball offers frequently are accepted, with foreign teacher believing that “cost of living in China is low” and “Chinese teachers only earn US$200/month; you can live like a king on $500″. Of course, these statements aren’t necessarily untrue, but it burns to travel all the way to China to find you’re working at 80% (or less) of the salary of someone with similar qualification.

So, how can we make foreign teachers better informed of what the job market is actually paying?

The Solution: ForeignTeacherPay.com

I’ve created ForeignTeacherPay.com as a free and open resource for foreign teachers in China. The site allows teachers to anonymously report their salary, how much they have to work to earn the salary, and other, optional, details (student level; perks offered by the employer; the teacher’s own qualifications). Most of the form is optional; as long as you report how much you earn, how many hours you teach, and where you teach, you can fill out the survey.

I hope that English teachers can use the site as a way to negotiate the best possible salaries for themselves. The more people contribute to the site, the more useful it will be – please take a few minutes to fill out the survey!

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Aside

Garfield Cat

By on 5 September, 2007 in China, Teaching
ugly-catAt the [tag]Changchun[/tag] Foreign Language School my classroom was a listening lab. It was a difficult room to teach in since the kids all sat behind glass partitions and had computers to play on.
Anyway, as I learned to use the (all-in-Chinese) computer software, I spent lots of time listening to conversations that I wasn’t interested in, such as one about a student’s pet:
“I hear you have a cat like Garfield cat.”
“Yes, but it is not so nice.”
“No?”
“No. It is not so fat.”
“But it is still beautiful.”
“No, it is ugly. It wasn’t expensive, either.”
I also got to hear lots of discussions about body weight.
“Mary looks like a snowball.”
“James should have two chairs to sit on.”
“Jenny’s cheeks look like they have baozi in them”
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Aside

ESL Games: Wheel Of Fortune!

By on 8 August, 2007 in Teaching

Materials Needed:

  • Deck of specially labeled playing cards
  • Blackboard (to keep score)

Instructions: (I play the game with cards because I’ve not been able to make a wheel durable enough to withstand my students; unfortunately, CARDS OF FORTUNE! is a stupid name for a game.)

Stupid cards :-(

Teacher prepares a deck of cards, some given monetary values, some labeled as “Bankrupt!” cards, and the rest marked as whatever special cards you want. I’ve found the most success using a deck of 14 cards broken down like this: 4 $100 cards, 3 $150 cards, 2 $250 cards, 1 $500 card, 2 Bankrupt! cards, 1 Pick Again! card, 1 Lose a Turn! card.The game follows the rules of Wheel of Fortune. Student picks a card from the deck and, if she picked a money card, guesses a letter. If the letter occurs in the sentence, the student gets the amount of money on the card for each instance of the letter in the sentence. So if the previous sentence was written on the board (poor students!), a student drawing a $100 card and guessing the letter “e” would get $2100 for her team.

Helpful Hints:Remember that the number 250 can mean “You’re stupid” in Chinese. Here in Northeast it does, I don’t know if it’s the same everywhere. My students all seem to enjoy geting a big laugh at the expense of whoever drew the $250 card, and no one seems to get their feelings hurt, but it’s just something you might want to be aware of.Additionally, my students get a really big kick out of the idea that the value of the cards is in American Dollars, so you might want to play up the foreign currency aspect of the game.

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Aside

So Tell Me A Story

By on 3 August, 2007 in China, Teaching

One of the activities I liked to do with my high school kids was having Q&A or Tell-Me-About-Yourself sessions. It took the kids most of the first semester to feel comfortable enough to talk in detail about their lives outside of school.

Once they opened up, quite a few of their responses have been pretty funny:

“My mother’s favorite words are ‘I told you!’ and ‘It’s time for you to do homework!’ My father’s favorite words are ‘What are we having for dinner tomorrow night?’”

“My favorite activities are thinking about myself and looking in the mirror.”

Some of the stories were not so funny:

Student: “When I was younger one day I fell into a hole.”
Me: [Laughing] “Well, what happened? What did you do while you were in the hole?”
Student: [Serious] “I sat and thought about my life.”
Me: [Still laughing]
Student: “The found me after eight hours.”
Me: [Suddenly not laughing]

It tuns out that she had fallen into a three meter deep pit in the sidewalk. It’s not uncommon to come across unmarked, hand dug, goddamn deep holes. Holes that are left unfilled pretty quickly get filled with trash from apartments. The hole my student fell into was being dug for sewer line repairs–the workers had taken off for the day leaving their excavation unmarked. She sat in the dark for a third of a day with busted sewer pipes to keep her company.

Yeah, I felt pretty awful about laughing. [tags]teaching, changchun, china[/tags]

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