I’m Awarded Teacher of the Year

The Spring semester ended with little fanfare, then about 3 days after I entered my grades into the computer to let my kids know quantitatively how much they suck I received a phone call from one of my collegues in the foreign language department who informed me that my combined (Fall/Spring) teacher evaluations were the highest of any of the other teachers and they would be awarding me with “Teacher of the Year.”

Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised. I always knew I got evaluated, though I’d only ever seen one of them, and I’ve always been told they were good but I’d never gotten any confirmation as to how good they were until I received this phone call. It was a wonderful surprise. The driving motivation behind my teaching (which has now been gauged as THE BEST…EVER) has been my genuine care for my students. Not only in their linguistical development, but in their development as a person. I strive everyday to help my students achieve their dreams and more. To not only succeed as a student, but to succeed in life.

Now that I have concrete, scientific proof that illustrates ON A GRAPH! that I’m the best ESL teacher…IN THE WORLD, I thought I would share with you some of the strategies I’ve used that have made me “Teacher of the Year”…FOR THE ENTIRE GALAXY!!

1. Instill confidence in them. Anyway you can. If you want to be the best…IN THE WORLD…like me, you have to get your students to understand how great and capable they are. This is an uphill battle in China considering their educational background. Chinese educational methods do nothing to develop a student for the future. It is a soul shattering, confidence squashing maelstrom of memorization and ideological programming. There is no room for independent thought hence creativity and analytical thinking skills are almost non-existent by the time they get to college. Chinese students don’t want to learn English, they want to memorize it, and you can’t memorize a language. Language is amorphus and evolving , there is no formula you can plug in to generate intelligble output to received input.

Example: Chinese students hear the phoneme string “input”, “haOW R U,” and collectively respond with the preprogrammed “output”, “Fine, thank you. And you?” Their coherent reply gives the impression of understanding when in fact there is none. Change the input to, “How are all of you doing today,” or “How’s it going?” and the students do not respond. They look dumbfounded because they were expecting to hear something else. They hear but don’t understand.

1. Emphasize usage and comprehension over mandatory test preparation. China’s test-based method of student evaluation is fundamentally flawed when evaluating students’ language skill, comprehension, and fluency. This is due to the fact that the majority of their Chinese English teachers can not actually speak English. So instead of adequately training Chinese English teachers so that they can actually teach English, they, the Caring Compassionate Powers that be, develop inane tests like the CET-4. I’ve had students that passed the CET-4 and CET-6 the first time they took it but could not hold a five minute, casual conversation with me:

Me: How were your exams?

Random student who passed the CET-4: (10 seconds of “Uh”s and “nage nage nage nage”) I go canteen to (“uh” proceeded by miming the shoveling of food into one’s mouth).

On the other hand I have students struggling to pass the CET-4 who have no problem conversing with me on a wide range of topics. The following conversation actually took place in one of my sophomore Oral English classes:

Me: Tell me what you know about Japanese culture.

Student who failed the CET-4: They enjoy eating pooh!

Me: Excuse me?

Student who failed the CET-4: Really. They eat pooh. It’s very expensive to buy.

Me: (sighing) They buy pooh?

Student who failed CET-4: Yes, it’s documented. I read it on the internet.

Me: So….has anybody seen the new Star Wars movie?

This student who had previously admitted to me that s/he had failed the CET-4 twice had no problem perpetuating and expressing his/her racist, stereotypical knowledge of Japanese culture to me in the English language. What does this prove? Obviously, the second student had a higher level of English ability than the first, yet as far as the school was concerned the first student was more apt due to his passing of the CET-4. Proving to me…THE BEST ESL TEACHER IN THE WORLD!! that standardized testing cannot accurately gauge a student’s actual language ability. It only proves, like most standardized tests do, that some students are better test takers than others.

1. Explain to them and make them understand that everything their previous Chinese teachers taught them about the English language and how to learn it is wrong. I don’t mean to make big, sweeping generalizations about the low quality of education provided by Chinese English teachers. I happen to know more than a few exceptionally talented Chinese English teachers, but they are outnumbered by about a thousand to one. And considering this country lives, breathes and exists on big, sweeping generalizations I don’t feel bad using one to describe how much Chinese English teachers suck. I wouldn’t be so brusque about this if it wasn’t so blatently obvious that entire generations of this nation’s children are receiving an inadequate education and this viscious cycle will continue on and on until something is done about it. The fundamental problem is that so many of these teachers can not speak the language. I took Spanish in high school and college. I can speak it rather well. Do I attempt to teach it to anyone else? No. Why? Because when it comes down to brass tax I CAN’T REALLY FUCKIN’ SPEAK SPANISH! Hola! Como esta usted? Yo estoy bien, y tu? does not a fuckin’ Spanish teacher make! If this is all you can really say in English you shouldn’t be an English teacher.

2. Make lessons fun and have them build upon one another. Show how basic skills, once mastered, can be used to construct more advanced levels of communication. Teaching Greek and Latin roots really helped my students excel on their reading comprehension tests. I made them all “codebreakers” for the day and we had contests to see who could decipher common words found in science, math and nature the quickest. Now when they read and their eyes fall upon a big words they don’t recognize they don’t just freeze up and go for their electronic dictionaries but attempt to find the greek or latin roots in it and break the word down and define it themselves.

3. Encourage them to ask questions. Make them understand that their is no shame in asking questions, just like there is no shame in not knowing an answer. If you are going to master a language you have to love making mistakes. That previous sentence is a quote from some famous person I can’t remember, but I can tell you he or she isn’t TEACHER OF THE YEAR this year. I know because I AM…IN THE WORLD. I tell my students all the embarrassing encounters I’ve had since I came to China and made mistakes trying to communicate in Chinese. It helps put them at ease.

4. Do whatever you can. Do whatever it takes. It’s easy to get frustrated teaching over here and it’s easy to give up and I know I come off sounding like a complete asshole on this website but I wouldn’t be over here for as long as I have if I didn’t love helping these students. And if you haven’t figured it out yet this site is for laughs and is not indicative of my true personality. Since I started here at ZUCC I’ve seen 12 of my students from my very first class, who when I first met them wouldn’t speak a word of English, go abroad to study and can now hold entire conversations with me in English. And that’s what it comes down to. That’s why we put up with the all the bullshit. And that’s why I’M THE FUCKING TEACHER OF THE FUCKING YEAR!! SUCK IT!

Here’s a picture of me in action:

Sticking It to the Man

Here’s a tip for all you ESL teachers in China. When you decide that your tenure at the school you are teaching at is drawing to a close, delay telling anyone at the school (Namely your Foreign Affairs Officer, or any teachers that are vying for your sweet “Foreign Teacher Liaison” position.) until the last possible minute. Better yet, don’t tell anyone at all. Take flight under cover of dark. Escape like a thief in the night. I say this because if your school is like mine, and from what my 3 readers have told me, they (schools in China) are all similar, they will try to bilk as much money out you as possible. They don’t see you off as warmly as they welcomed you. No, they release you from your contract as if they were forced to hire you from some prison rehabilitation program, and they KNOW you’re back to your old bootlegging ways.

I’ve been teaching here at Zhejiang University City College for the past two years. Every semester I was highly rated and well liked by both students and faculty. I almost never missed class, barring sickness, and really bad baijiu hangovers. I was always prepared and never lost my temper with students. I also never dated any. My composure and attitude towards my classes was almost always professional yet upon the announcement that I was leaving the bills came pouring in for excess utilities usage.

Since ZUCC began hiring foreign teachers, no one has ever paid a utilities bill. Until now. You see they haven’t changed the contract since they began hiring foreign teachers 3 years ago, yet utility costs have quadrupled in that time. We also had a particularly long, cold winter this year, so my heaters were running quite often. I have no doubt I went over the alloted RMB 200 they provide per month for utilities, but I would greatly prefer a monthly bill as opposed to one yearly bill they calculated at almost RMB 1800. They slid this under my door, at the end of the month when I have the least amount of money, and gave me 4 days to pay. Thanks a bunch.

I told them flat out, “Hey, I know what the contract says about excessive fees and I’ll pay it not like anyone else ever has, but for future reference and for the well being of the rest of the foreign teachers here, why not send them notices when they are going to run over on their utilities allowance and send them smaller monthly bills as opposed to not saying anything for 12 months and then dumping a big bill (with no documentation validating the charges on it [that’s right, I even speak in parentheticals]) on them 2 months before they return home.” So here I am, their best teacher ever (see above post), trying to leave the school as amicably as possible, and they douche me with this massive bill right before summer (we don’t get paid over summer). How am I supposed to pay this and still live comfortably on the meager salary (a pittance really) I’m paid.

Then it hit me. I’ll pay’em in jiao.

For those of you who don’t know (mom and dad) the jiao is the second smallest denomination of money China has next to the fenwhich is completely fuckin’ worthless. Seriously, back in the U.S. when Publishers’ Clearinghouse sends you the fake check for millions of fake dollars and at the bottom it states, “actual value 1/20 th of a penny,” that fake check is actually more valuable than a fen, that’s how worthless it is (please don’t check the math on that I’m just trying to make a point). Realizing that collecting that much fen in the time permitted would be near impossible to pay said bill I decided jiao was the way to go.

In two years I’ve collected a lot of jiao, but hardly the 18,000 I needed to fully pay the bill. However, I did have a lot floating around and I wasn’t going to waste them by just letting them continue to collect dust in my house so I got them all together and bagged them up. If I’m going to be the only person to pay this bill at least I’m going to make them work for it. Needless to say, even with the donations from other teachers (and I can’t thank you guys enough) here I fell far short of the amount I truly wanted, but I had way more than enough to piss off the corrupt bill collectors I had to pay. Here’s a picture of my actual payment with the bill:

Needless to say they weren’t pleased when I presented them my payment, but I explained to them that money’s money and if they expect the teachers to pay suspect utility bills then they need to get used to counting jiao. I got to tell you, it felt pretty sweet. It took’em over an hour to count. Mess with the bull, you get the horns.