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[Burl Ives]

So what's the next step, is what I ask myself.

I started out in a little city. Lonely Planet says 5 million but the
city itself would have had less than one. The four and a bit more were
spread out in the surrounding counties. I loved it. It was an inland city
on water and I got there on the cusp, just before they got all their
development money together. The school was a jumped-up teacher's
college two years into its university status and they where still working
out of the old campus, a beautiful little place on the lake with trees and
seedy old buildings. It was just off the edge of town set in a crapulous
village next to a defunct factory with the campus straddling the main
road out of town. It started as a one-year stint but I couldn't leave
and I stayed for two. Almost everyone who goes there stays, two
years, sometimes three.

After that I moved to the provincial capital and found it a disgusting and
dangerous cramped mire of sleaze. I promised them another half year
on top of the six months I'd contracted for but couldn't make it. I split
at contract's end. By then I'd learned to scout schools and this last
summer was train ride after bus ride after freebie accomodation and
nights of worry in school after school trying to find *the* one. That plan
evaporated in arguments and angst and I took a punt on a last-minute
advertisment I saw and some pleasant follow-up emails. So now I'm in
an eastern city supposedly seven million strong. It's wide open and
urban and everyone's a businessman. It ain't half bad but I'm seriously
bored. The school is modern enough to have an old campus where I
have my pad and a new campus where they have everything else plus
trees on sticks. As far as I know, that's what schools do these days, they
develop out of their old selves and build university towns outside of main
cities. I saw it going on everywhere I went: Hunan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang,
some of Jiangsu. Its a regular industry in Guangdong.

I don't know for sure but I think the kids in the modern places don't need
foreigners that much. And the schools are more completed corrals. In
my first school they had no idea what I was doing and I, if not always
happily and even if with no greater idea than had my leaders, then at
least passionately, taught my meagre best. Here, I get telephone calls
when I let the students out early.

Is it a phenomenon, or what?

[Roger]

I can see several PHENOMENA in your thread - the phone calls after you let your kids out of class early is one.
The other one I recognise as such is campuses in no-man's land. Yes, this is a trend, self-contained university or college "towns" way out of cities where the land is chaper, the PSB too far away to bother with enforcing rules, and the nightlife next to zero.
SOme of these study centres are really huge, with student populations in excess of 10'000. SUch high numbers notwithstanding, the facilities are inadequate for most of us to survive with our bodies and minds together.
My current employer is a huge college in the green boonies of one of China's richest provinces, miles away from any civilised area; teachers get bussed to and fro, while the poor kids have to stay on campus overnight. They hate this campus, and I would hate living there too.
And, irony: I am supposed to be staying on campus over night, but due to on-going construction (expansion of an already very large college) I cannot be expected to stay in such a noisy and potentially dangerous place.

[Burl Ives]