Job Discussion Forums

[naturegirl321]

This new guy at my work was living in Taiwan and said he was working 35 hours a week. Just teaching. I think that's crazy. I did that for one month and thought I would die. Here, I'm at school all day, nine hours, but only teach about 16 hours a week.
How many do you all teach?

[ITCjohn]

At a uni here in Xiamen NG and teaching 12 hours a week (but writing, so there's lots of additional time spent marking).

[latefordinner]

After SARS at my last school, we were doing make-up classes 7 days a week last summer. I went 70 days without a day off, averaging a little over 30 hours a week. Other FTs were doing more, one did over 200 hours in the month of August. Well that was a sausage factory; err, umm, a language mill, anyway what do you expect? Needless to say, we raked in the OT.
At my current school the schedule is rather flexible (read: doesn't exist) but I'm averaging about 15 hours a week.
I am also at work all day Thursday when I do not teach any classes, but participate in lesson preparation seminars. Last week I was told at 10 am that I was giving a lesson in pronunciation to all the CTs at 11:00. (One English coloquialism that they know quite well is, "Oh, by the way...")
I'm not even doing any marking! Well that may change; I just have to figure out how I'm going to politely persuade the CTs to let me horn in on their territory; err, um, assist them in creating and evaluating assignments that more accurately reflect student needs and achievements. (Oh man, I have a hard enough time saying that in polite English, how am I going to put that into Hanyu?)

[Steiner]

Thirteen 45 minute class periods, no office time, no grading. Also do 4 hours of English club which is fun, so that isn't like working to me.

[MartinK]

...

[JDYoung]

The contract says a maximum of 18 50-minute periods a week. I have 16 plus one kiddie class which is 40 minutes. We rotate English corner on-site among the teachers so it amounts to about once every 8 weeks. English corner on a Saturday at two local bookstores about once a month is also rotated but we do it in pairs. Saturday English corner takes up most of the afternoon when you consider travel time. I've also caught the odd "Oh, by the way ..." project but not too often and some of them are quite interesting. This school is very considerate of its foreign teachers compared to some I've heard about.

[Steiner]

Each English corner group is 12 kids, the four top students from their respective classes. So I teach the same "lesson" to the English corners four times a week. I structure activities for them but it doesn't take much work and it's basically a time for the ones whose English is already good to get out of self-study and have a fest using English.

[struelle]