Job Discussion Forums

[Roger]

[joe greene]

To the OP: I have held off posting a reply, because I have been where you are, and I empathize with your position. But you must move past this. Any educator who takes his/her vocation seriously will come to a point in China (or anywhere else, for that matter) where he must make a choice: 1) fight the power or 2) work within the system. You have made your choice with your present school. If you go to another place, you can change your approach.

My only advice for you now is to consider the repercussions for your students. You can move on to another place with few problems; however, those 20% of the students who have taken a shine to you will, in the end, suffer due to their close association with you. Some will come out unscathed, but others will be fingered as the "small minority" or "small handful" that supported you in contravention of their leaders. Those few will carry this stigma until the day they graduate and possibly even beyond.

[dwhansen]

My dear Joe Greene, thanks for writing. I�m sure you offer good �advice� to someone, thinking it might be me. I�ve heard that through the centuries that foreigners who permanently move to china, gradually lose their own culture and become more and more Chinese. Based on your post above, I think you have. For one thing, telling me, ��but you must move past this� would sound laughable in any western culture unless you�re my mom, my boss, or my wife. I just reread my posts and realize that I actually DID ask for advice. I don�t know if you remember western culture, but westerners mostly mock those who try to advise others. I�ve forgotten who it was who said something like, �If someone is so stupid that they need advice, they probably aren�t smart enough to heed good advice.� It�s my fault. I asked for it. Since arriving in China, I have heard the phrase, �let me give you some advice�in Chinaaa�blah blah blah�� more times during the first week here than I�ve heard in my whole life. Thank you again for helping. As for your two choices, I�ll take both 1 and 2. They are both good choices and are not mutually exclusive. As for changing my approach, that is good advice indeed. I won�t change my teaching methods or style, but with your and others� ideas, I will learn to develop a technique to introduce my methods that is more palatable to my students and masters.

As for your paragraph about my students who have �taken a shine to me� I don�t remember having written anything about their taking a shine to me or having a �close association with me�. 99.9% of my students do NOT have anything approaching a close association with me. Though most all of them would like to be my �friend�, I simply don�t allow it. I know many FT�s here invite students into their home and become friends, but I don�t. I�m an adult and rarely �play� with them outside of class�only for a party or a party-like dinner. Now the truth is that I�m in defiance of the whole �relationship thing� here and I know it hurts me, hurts my chances, and reduces my effectiveness to some extent. So be it. By my students improving their abilities, learning more in less time, and making friends with other students and people outside of their majors, I don�t see how they will be negatively stigmatized in any way. I don�t remember writing anything about my students being in �contravention of their leaders�.

I�m no trained grammarian or linguist, but I think I understand the weakness of using the �passive voice� and indirect messaging. It breeds fear and erodes confidence. This is a Chinese trait. I don�t like it. When someone uses the passive voice without naming the subject or the �doer� of the action, the message to me, sounds weak, spineless, and, well, Chinese. You wrote that my students �will be fingered� by someone. You don�t say who will finger them. I believe that every day, Chinese culture is changing fast. I believe that employers will more and more hire employees based upon their abilities rather than their relationships, examination scores, and mostly worthless diplomas. The stigma that my best students will carry is one of confident performance and high quality. Never have I told them to forget their basic Chineseness--their culture, or families. I tell them that they are free to �hope for the best� and utilize their and their family�s relationships and guanxi, and they are also free to improve their abilities so they may be recognized by future employers as being worthy of higher pay, greater prestige, and more security.

Thanks again, Joe. I know you want the best for my students, me, and the FT profession in China.

[Susie]

"By my students improving their abilities, learning more in less time, and making friends with other students and people outside of their majors,..."

Just wondering OP, what evidence do you have to assert the above statement as a fact. I presume you are talking about the "20%" - incidentally, did you pluck that figure out of the sky or did you do a survey?

"I believe that employers will more and more hire employees based upon their abilities rather than their relationships, examination scores, and mostly worthless diplomas."

Indeed, you may "believe" this to be something that may happen in the future. I wish I could know what will happen in the future! There was a time when scientists believed that the earth was flat - so what, how did the earth's being flat or round affect the price of bread at that time?

Would it be fair to say that you use the teaching technique that you use because you are not a qualified teacher with teacher training certification?

[dwhansen]

Gee Suzie, neato questions. Lets see, golly, where should I begin? My qualifications�after thousands of classroom and onsite hours of corporate, academic, athletic, and industrial trainings over more than 35 years, at least I�m qualified to recognize a competency when I see one�many certifications in various fields.

You asked how I �plucked� my 20 percent figure out of the sky. I�m no statistician, but I keep meticulous records for each student throughout the semester, both qualifying and quantifying their performance and progress. Add to this the 4-7 pages they write to me describing their evolving activities, and if you can imagine this style of classroom facilitation, you would see me continually walking around and between students throughout the class period, stimulating them, asking and answering questions, giving short lectures, filling the blackboard three or four times per hour, and listening to the students talk as I look into their eyes. This is called engagement�continual, focused, disciplined, and purposeful collaboration.

Suzie, I�m not surprised that you compare my belief in competency based evaluation, to the world being flat. I also believe by your tone that you are an academician who has no clue what real business, industry, and technology will require from my students, and I�m sorry to say, your students too. I also believe that you are certified and experienced. I believe that you do great work doing what you do. Remember, I clearly stated that I am simply not interested in doing what you do.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The writings I receive from the students are as close as I'll come to a "survey". I wouldn't trust the honesty of a formal survey from Chinese students if my life depended on it.

[Old Dog]

dwhansen, while I admire your determination to make a difference that you believe will be good for your students, I do not share at all your optimism that your conversion rate will be higher than you claim it to be. My guess is that your contract will not be renewed at the end of the coming term if a body capable of standing in front of a class is available to replace you. If you have been involved in a war of wills, if the administrators and leaders hate you and if you�ve failed in your endeavours with 80% of your students, the outlook is bleak. Further, you say that you are perpetually frustrated, that you don�t care, that you do what you do and will continue to do it. As these are not characteristics that are admired in China, your tenure will probably be quite short.

I think that maybe part of the problem lies in one of several misunderstandings. First, the leaders and administrators invited you to teach Western Culture and Oral English in the expectation that you would do your best within their system. They probably did not invite you to come to impose on them your own view of what may constitute superior ways of education. You probably need to reflect on the fact that �Western Culture� is not regarded in China as one of the high flying subjects in which students are expected to shine academically. It�s a time-filler. How you regard it, I don�t know but my guess is that your concept of its importance does not match that of leaders, administrators or students. Attaching to it an importance that produces �war�, �hate�, �frustration� and failure is probably not a good idea.

Your second misunderstanding comes from the fact that maybe you really have little idea of where your students come from and what they want to make of their lives. Where they have come from in your estimate of between 7000 and 11000 hours of English study � a fair length of conditioning, I would have thought � will not have prepared them for your revolutionary ways. Even were it to be true that they have 7/11000 hours of English study behind them, it would also be true that they would have rather more than that in which they have been conditioned to sit passively in rows, a conditioning first begun at age 6. And here you come, fresh from America with ways and a will that will �repair� in a trice all that foolish training that the Chinese seem to attach some importance to.

You say you have �polled� your students and that those polls produce this figure of 7/11000 hours of English study. My computer tells me that to achieve this, students would have studied English for 42 weeks a year for 8 years and would need to have spent the equivalent of 32 45-minute sessions of English a week to achieve even 8,000 hours. I suspect your research method was flawed in some way. The actual time they have spent studying English before they arrived in your war zone is probably somewhat less than this � and significantly so.

I couldn�t tell from your original post if you are a young blood with little wisdom or an old codger, old enough to know better. To me, it�s always been fairly obvious that you won�t turn a cart-horse into a Grand National thoroughbred overnight. And certainly your posting gives the impression that this is what you have been trying to do. I suggest that you visit some elementary, middle and high schools to see where you students have long-since come from. In particular, I would look at students of Senior Grades 2 and 3 and see where they have come from immediately prior to arriving in your university.

Your Petroleum University may be new, beautiful and well-equipped but it will not be a university that will have been high on the list of preferences of China�s top students. Petroleum Universities, as I�ve seen them, are nice looking places, well-funded, etc. but they are not high-fliers academically. Your students may not be sow�s ears but neither will they be silk purses or even capable of miraculous transformation. You should not make the mistake many ft�s make when arriving here. Mr and Miss Mediocre at home, they they find themselves �university� teachers here. It all sounds so impressive and, hey, presto, they go on to think that they are �Yale in America� lecturers. Petroleum Universities/Institutes and their students do not exist in this rarified world. You need to be realistic about your own talents and insight as a teacher and realistic too about your students.

For the well-being of everyone � yourself, your students, your leaders and administrators � I think you would do better to learn how to work within the Chinese system and to find the skill gradually to inculcate in your students those skills that you think they are lacking and to which you attach great importance. War and hate are not the ways in which to achieve anything here. Reflect on the limits of what you have been asked to do, reflect on the long-ingrained learning habits of the students and then use such inspiration as your developing pedagogical skills present you with to work slowly towards achieving a set of aims that make both you and your Chinese clients happy.

My guess is that you have one term in which to reform your ways and to be rather more productive within the Chinese system than you have been to date. The hate will have to go and the warring will have to go and some degree of harmony and some lesser degree of contempt for the background of your charges will have to appear. My guess is that, at the end of last term, students and teachers, completed a questionnaire on you, your attitudes, your skills, your capacity to get on with people, etc. If it presented the negative responses that I suspect that it will have done, your continued employment would be a very doubtful thing.

Couched as it was, your original posting seemed to invite people to sympathize with you, to understand your noble, if unpopular stance, to encourage you in your ways and encourage you to maintain a general disrespect for your students and their educational backgrounds. I give you no sympathy. China attracts a strange mix of personalities. What you bring to China you probably imposed on others in America. Was it effective there? Did �war� and �hate� achieve anything within the American system of organizational leadership? My guess is it produced a string of short-term appointments and, finally, unemployability � as, I�m certain, will happen here if your ways do not change. Certainly, I�ll be on the lookout to ensure that my employers do not make the error of putting you on the payroll.

My advice to you � and you asked for advice - is to be rather more accepting of where your students have come from, to accept them for where they are at and, by inspirational teaching, bring them from where they are to where you think they could/should be by an evolutionary process rather than a revolutionary one.

I felt sure you must be an arrogant and foolish young fellow when I read the first of your postings in this thread. But later in the thread, I find you are just plain old, anti-social and certainly not a teacher. Maybe you should give up your foray into teaching and concentrate on your Master�s Degree in Organizational Leadership in America. You asked if you should give up, quit and go home. Yes, I think you should. In any case, I�m sure that, at the end of this term, quitting will not be a choice available to you. You will be dismissed. I would dismiss you based on what you have written were you on my staff in a western school.

[dwhansen]

Old dog, thanks for the new tricks,
Yeah the math seems goofy to me too, but it�s what they wrote to me in their final exam letters. At one hour per day over eight years, that�s 2400 hours, one third the amount of their reported minimum. The question is how much of the extra hours are real or inflated. I asked them to count all of the related �studies�, like:
� in the classroom learning English
� studying or reading alone�self study
� in special trainings at night, weekends, and holidays
� watching English training videos or listening to music
� actively speaking and listening to English with anyone
Some of them may have been focusing on their present intensive studies of six to eight hours per day�but thanks for pointing it out that the numbers are certainly inflated.

As for the rest of your piece, wow, great advice�much of what you wrote is dead on and are certainly issues that I work on every day. In fact, I agree with most of what you wrote�I agree also with the administrators that Western Culture is a �time filler� and hardly relevant to the lives of the students. Given �in your face� guys like me, it�s no wonder. You make a great point that I�m no �Yale in America� lecturer�I�m not. In fact, I�m no lecturer at all, which is precisely why I keep my explanations to one or two minutes, so the students can help one another to interpret my spoken and written words. True, true, true, what you wrote about war, and hate�it simply doesn�t work, and yes, I�m a short timer if I don�t reform. Beautifully said about �on the lookout to ensure that my employers do not make the error of putting you on the payroll��The jury�s out on that one among people who know me�some like the influence while others love the contrast�it makes �em look good! Your note calling for evolution rather than revolution, was also beautifully stated�given history, a bad feeling for revolution here. In fact, I think those words are the key to my problems; slowing down, with patience and affection will work wonders. Fired, quit, let go, phased out, whatever�whether or not I�m a teacher, thanks for the advice to go home.

[Ger]

DWH have you got a Bachelor's degree in English language or linguistics or modern languages? If you have, at least you could argue that you have expert subject knowledge so as to defend yourself against criticism from your university's leaders and disinterest from the majority of your students due to your teaching method.

Have you ever learned or are you studying a foreign language yourself? If you haven't got an English language degree, then, by virtue of having fluency yourself in a foreign/second language you could defend yourself teaching approach on the grounds that you have insight, from first-hand experience, into the difficulties that your students as second language learners are having during your lessons.

[dwhansen]

thank you for your inquiry, Ger. Languages come slowly to me. I'm sorry to report that I ask my students to do as I say, not as I do. I'm a bad example of foreign language learning. I do ok in spanish, french, my parents' foreign tongue when I was young, and chinese, but noticed early on that languages didn't come easily to me. I think it was Michelangelo who struggled with learning french who said, "I can spend my time on learning a foreign language, or I can spend my time on the sciences and art. I choose the latter." I'm no Michelangelo, but I have other unique abilities with which I work. They said that Van Gogh would walk into your home with muddy boots and stand on your couch. His friends tolerated him. My language learning, and maybe your students too, suffer from the irrelevancy of language acquisition. When to use it, why, how often, and for what purpose. Oh, by the way, I remembered how I cited statistics about my students' english learning hours. I stated it poorly. My students ranged in total years of study from 6 to 13 years. I posted that their average total hours were 8,000. This was wrong, it wasn't an average. In my original post, I neglected to say that those who claimed 12 or so years studying english, claimed 12,000 hours or so. I didn't do a complete calculation to determine the average between them and the students who reported six years and less than 6,000 hours. I wish, however, that you and other FTs will determine whether or not my suspicions are true...that EL acquisition here is a massive exercise in mental masturbation. I'd love to know how many hours successful 2nd language learners usually spend acquiring the 2nd language, in any language in any culture. I believe there's a big problem here and coddling "the chinese education system" is the weak way out. What do you know about language acquisition statistics? I really don't know anything besides my own experience with polling. If I total my own hours of studying and learning a 2nd- 4th languages, its in the tens or hundreds of hours and I do "ok", and I feel that I'm just bad at it��my English is very poor��Ha ha. I'd like to know some ESL statistics. Does anyone pay attention to such things? Remember, that I'm not a skilled or a certified ESL teacher, but I suspect something is really, really wrong here in China. How many hours do most people spend learning a second language before they reach a level of competency? Am I alone in thinking this system is inefficient? I understand all the cultural complexities, and the students� perspectives, but should I just stop flailing at windmills?

[Roger]

It isn't my experience that Chinese respect a FT any better if he or she can legitimately claim to master more than his or her own mother tongue; unless you can demonstrate a total proficiency in Chinese they won't take you seriously.
This seems to be ingrained in their psyche by their attitude to foreigners in general; if you know their lingo you are "equal", if not you are not equal. Knowing several "barbarian" languages doesn't earn you much admiration.
This is why we are relegated to these asinine "oral English" classes, with the "serious" work being done by CHinese English teachers.

[rickinbeijing]

What you said is painfully true. Even if you have a Ph.D, the Chinese faculty will not acknowledge your expertise to the same extent unless you are fluent in Mandarin. And they will say that "you don't understand Chinese learners" even if you've taught them before and received high marks on your evaluation.

I once worked for a government agency writing and editing EFL textbooks and AFTER I had been asked my advice on several key grammar and usage points they went to other Chinese staff for the same advice. Later, the chief editor insisted that because I was a native speaker I was unaware of the finer mechanical points! This despite the fact that I had taught English in a college-bound high school for a decade and taught for four years in two major state universities. Unreal.

Critical theorists who have overdosed on Foucault like Pennycook insist that mainland Chinese risk loss of their cultural identity to the influx of English but I would argue that they retain such a considerable reservoir of cultural pride (re: arrogance) that this can hardly happen.

I'm not sure the motivation for it. Is it a defense mechanism, unconsciously triggered by a gnawing sense of inferiority about their own educational system or something else? This would be worth generating a thread about, eh?

[Old Dog]

I find that one of the problems in dealing with Chinese teachers and matters of usage and grammar derives from their black/white, one-register approach to English grammar. Often times when I am asked a question, I proceed to explain the nuances of usage in relation to register, the question of grammar in relation to intention, etc. This then results in an answer that is not black and white but one that explores many possibilities. Hence, I have no one definitive answer - but it is a black/white definitive answer that the Chinese teachers want. How, otherwise, can they teach their masses effectively they complain? Their English grammar is a set of inflexible rules, an abridged grammar, that allows of no exceptions or subtleties. The "to be ..." construction is an example that comes immediately to mind. In China, this is taught as a construction that denotes only a future action. To explain that it can be more than this often results in mild bemusement on the part of some Chinese teachers, certainly not an acceptance of the fact that the native speaker with some background in teaching grammar might actually know what he is talking about. They convey the impression through saying nothing that they are sure I must be in error.

[Ger]

Well you've got knowledge of a few second languages so you must be able to appreciate some of the difficulties that foreign language learners have when it comes to using your method of getting them to talk with each other. I think you should continue doing it but perhaps you should throw in alternative lectures.

When I was at university, my classmates and I had lectures, seminars and presentations. We considered the lecturer to be the authority, we wanted to hear him/her speak, we didn't want to talk to other students because we didn't feel confident that we knew the subject, nor did we want to listen to a peer pontificating about something we knew he/she wasn't an expert on.

"I�m looking for an experienced FT who has done anything like this here in China, and hope you will give me your experience. ... I am not ... interested in teaching ESL to elementary level students. That�s why I limit my teaching to universities, hopefully to engage in interesting dialog about relevant ideas and concepts that are important to my students� future lives. Should I just give up, quit, and go home? Or does one of you share my optimism that I�ll engage twenty one percent next term?"

DWH, so you think you'll stay or go home, if the latter do you think you could use your teaching method at a university in the USA?

[rickinbeijing]

Fellow Old Dog,

Yes, you've got it. I would add, however, that much of their fixation on currect usage springs from concern about the English test in the college entrance exam. I've perused more than one recent year of this exam and, surprise, it stresses accuracy over fluency. Moreover, some of the correct answers are either incorrect or open to interpretation. Never mind that some of the grammar questions originated in Chinglish workbooks.

Another partial explanation is that Chinese culture obsesses on finding the best or correct in everything. Ranking and ordering is a pasttime that makes American listmania seem amateurish and frivolous by comparison. It is consistent with this notion that there really IS such a thing as "perfect English." Sorry, Brits, but standard received is not perfect.

What I find fascinating as an amateur linguist is the evolution of Chinglish into legitimate Chinese English not unlike what has already occurred in Singapore. Any takes on that?

[dwhansen]

Ger, Thanks for asking about my plan to stay or go. I'll stay. Guys like old dog, you and some of the others who have posted have given me some highly valuable advice and perspective. You know, in my original post, I certainly indicated frustration and obstinacy. By reading some of your professional and highly experienced ideas, methods and chinese cultural understanding, I'm confident that I will introduce my classroom style more carefully, politely, patiently, and even with more love and affection. I thank everyone again for helping.

Now to your question about my technique in America. In years past, I taught about forty different classes in Community Vocational and Trade Colleges. They were certainly not universities or highly achieved students. In fact, over half of my students were minorities with, in most cases, quite severe criminal records, drug addictions, and other social/personal problems. Their average age was about 30 and they all shared one trait. The academic program they had entered represented a "last chance" to acquire skills to succeed in the job market. Though they were still struggling to merely survive in the white dominated American culture, they were nonetheless highly motivated. The technique I have described is what I did with these students. I see many correlations between my distressed american students and my chinese students except for the motivation thing. These "disadvantaged" American students, however, excelled at overcoming their previous, in some cases, dysfunctional approach to education and to life itself, and they flourished. They broke down barriers between they and their classmates, they stopped rejecting the "white guy's" message, and they developed a highly productive collaborative learning community. In fact, as they brought their life and work experiences to the classroom, we found that everyone took turns being "subject matter expert". The classes were subjects like marketing, management, and one class was titled "Creative Team Process". This course, which I taught several times, was really the best. It assembled students majoring in Graphics Illustration, Web Design, and Computer Animation...all different majors, all stereotypically students who are most comfortable working alone. I was expert in NONE of the technologies. Over the term, they did a dozen or so team projects with different teammates every time. I merely facilitated the schedule, gave a little structure to the process, and they coordinated their individual and team activities. Wow, it was absolutely incredible. Every project turned out to be sooo much better than I could have even dreamed. In fact, if I had more heavily and precisely defined the individual projects' scope, criteria, etc, these projects would have suffered greatly. It's that culture of students that i dream to recreate again here, but, alas, perhaps that is why I've been accused of "flailing at windmills".

I think, however, that with your and the others' considerate offerings, I will do much better this term.