Job Discussion Forums

[Teatime of Soul]

[Lorean]

Drawing from my experience, 60-70% of student relationships will end up bad for you.

Some possibilities as follows:

The leech
ME. ME. ME. Doesn't understand win-win. Expects their teacher to be available 24/7 for free tutoring. Thinks servitude is your joy.

The leech spawn
ME. ME. and my uncle's-cousin's-brother's'-father's-younger-sister's-niece. Always has a relative in desperate need of an English. A FREE English teacher.

The moron
Quality zero. Living proof of non-existent Chinese University standards. Watches in complete oblivion to your discontent as you proof read his plagiarized essay.

The Lover
Has known you for 10 minutes, and already misses you! Instantly falls in love with you. Not that your passport and fat wallet have anything to do with it.

I have had two good experiences. One was with a student who had their heart-broken by a foreign exchange student. Another student who started off by asking me to play badminton. Both students not only have a high level of English, but also understand win-win.

I had another group of students ask me out for a birthday-lunch. Nine students in all. The gave me some useful input for the class.

[u24tc]

I can't be bothered going or meeting up with my students.
In class, I chat with them, have a laugh... as soon as class finishes...I forget all of them =)

[Nemesis]

Hey, thanks for all the replies. The "dimwit" student's invitation wasn't sitting well with me, so hearing different takes on it was very helpful.

I will not go drinking with him.

Hey, why do I call him a dimwit/dullard etc? Well, I was pretty shocked when I started this job at just how ill-prepared for study my second year students were. Kids were showing up for IELTS training classes with no books or pens. Kids were sleeping at the back. In a class of 40, only a handful were even listening to me.

The school I'm working at has a rule: all students have a "right" to attend class, and so can not be asked to leave for any reason.

And so, in my first few weeks of teaching, I sought to fix the problem of the slackers by shaming them with very loud, very intense tongue lashings in front of the class.

After a couple weeks of that, I was feeling pretty stressed out. I'm not a loud, emotional person at all, but I can pretend to be, if needed. And so I found myself "blasting" students pretty much every class. That would be enough to frighten them into being quiet, but not enough to get them to do the work.

So, instead of watching my kids like a hawk and going military on them when they slack, it seems much easier to just ignore them. I'm not here to turn water into wine for 8 bucks an hour. Yeesh. Let's be real.

I use words like "dimwit" and "dullard" to help me ignore problem kids. When I'm at the front of the class lecturing, I don't "see" the dullards and dimwits. I need to focus on the "students".

Dunno if that makes sense, but...

[tw]

I would usually only socialize with "good" students and at the end of a school term, like treating my best students to dinner when I was teaching in Dalian. The hardest socializing was in Changchun when my wife and I took some of my best students to dinner, then to a bar to do some serious partying. During the second term, the only students I partied with were other FTs' students who became good friends with my wife.

[johnchina]

Lorean, I like your categories!

"Another student who started off by asking me to play badminton."

My students often ask me how they can get a conversation started with foreigners. I ask them how they get conversations started with Chinese people. So far, I'd say less then 5% of Chinese students I have taught can answer that question. And it's not that they don't understand the question or have poor English (or even a poor teacher!) - they are just bad communicators, even in their own language. I think this is something a lot of FTs here are unaware of.

The proportion of Chinese people who understand win-win is also low.

Nemesis - I've taught at schools like yours. The best you can do (as you clearly now know) is work with the ones who are prepared to work with you. The phrase "meeting someone halfway" comes to mind.

I socialise with students who meet me halfway, but only after the course has finished.

[entropy_rising]

I think I come from a different teaching environment from most of you (this is an assumption, so correct me if I'm wrong:)), so I seem to have a different perspective on this question. I'm teaching "spoken English" at the high school level. I have several classes of about 50 students each. I teach them once a week for about 40 minutes, while at the same time they are taking a much more formal English class with a Chinese teacher every day of the week. The administration, who has extensive contacts with Australian schools due to their desire to set up exchange programs, has made it very clear to me that they want this class to be sort of experimental, conducted in contrast to the more formal English classes the students are taking, that they want me to "motivate" the students to speak English through enthusiasm and "awe" at the "foreignness" of it all rather than the threat of grades (therefore, my class is not graded at all, and the students know this). There's a desire to flirt with what they are cutely dubbing "Western" style education (as if all our classrooms in the West are awesome circuses and performances where we learn calculus, chemisty, and English Literature because it's just so damn fun!).

In this situation, I've found, for the most part, it to be an advantageous thing to meet with the students occasionally outside of class. For me, the suspicion that they may be using me for tips on the test or to "return favors" is effectively gone because its an open fact that there's no grading in my class. I feel kind of good with this no-grades thing because it sets up this unintentional "natural selection" system where both the students who participate in class and the students who approach me outside of class are simply those students who have a genuine interest in the language and the culture, making my job, as I perceive it (which is to improve the English-speaking confidence of those students who are interested in it), a lot easier.

So although my situation is in many respects not very analogous to yours (high-school level, no grades, "spoken English," the administration's blessings regarding going wacky and experimental), my no-grades situation has created a similar situation where much of the class is sleeping or studying other subjects on the side, and I, like yourself, have also developed a similar system where they can do their thing so I can focus on the real students.

I found myself in a similar situation as you earlier in the year when 3 students invited me to eat lunch with them after class (that's another thing, less ethical dilemma as the high school students invite me to much more innocent activities). These 3 students where not sleepers or other-subject-studiers, I actually at first found them to be a little disruptive as they sat at one of the tables in the back and would often whisper to each other, then laugh at some sort of secret shared joke. Like you, I was reluctant to encourage this kind of behavior.

But I thought about it for a moment, and briefly considered the possibility that, unlike the sleepers or the studiers, perhaps these students were being disruptive because they were smart students, and were finding my classes a little too boring (since it was one of the first weeks and I dismayingly found most of my students incredibly deficient in English skills; my lesson plans were thus designed accordingly). On this though, plus a little but of pure impulse, I decided to go with them, and later on, I found this hunch to be correct. These three students are very bright, enthusiastic, and their English speaking level is much higher than their peers. I'm very glad, now, that I decided to go with them (and I still go for lunch every now and then) because I feel these extracurricular meetings are "English language supplements" that help them get what they want out of me - not a good grade, but rather, sufficient English language stimulation, something I'm willing to provide.

So, seeing that your student in your mind is a dullard, I think most of the people who have replied to you are giving the right answer - if it's someone you've identified as not so bright, there are probably ulterior motives involved in inviting you for drinks. But I also have to disagree a little bit with some posters' blanket belief that socializing with the students is always point blank a bad thing; although we (English teachers) have all been sculpted by our teaching environment to be very skeptical of these sort of things, this I know, there may be a diamond in the rough, someone who wants to learn English, and not through "private tutoring" sessions over beer but over casual conversation about something both you and he/she talking about - something you both can enjoy. But I'm sure you can definitely use your discretion to figure out who these students are.

Best!

[Brian Caulfield]

Only drink with your students during class time .

[shenyanggerry]

Johnchina, Your post reminded me of one of my students. As part of fluency exercises, I give my students a topic, a minute to think and then they talk about it for two minutes. I do it as pair work. At the end of the semester, I ask students to write a kind of course evaluation while I'm doing individual oral exams. One of my students wrote that because of this exercise, she found talking in Chinese about a subject easier. I was pleasantly surprised.

[johnchina]

Shenyanggerry - I have had an incredible number of students tell me that they couldn't even answer my questions in Chinese, let alone in English - and we're not talking subjects like nuclear physics here!

I think a lot of it is down to the very blinkered lives people here tend to lead. If your 'life experience' in it's broad sense (including reading books, listening to others) is so limited, you have little or nothing to contribute or say.

Me, me, me - I push in front of people in lines.
Me, me, me - I have to be allowed to pass this class even though I never came to it or did the work, because I'm a special case.
Me, me, me - I don't care what other people think, so I don't read or discuss issues.
Me, me, me - Do other people even exist?

[OGFT]

[KevinT123]

In my more naive early days as a teacher in China, I have been out socializing with students. I stopped when it occurred to me the folly of what I was doing. I learnt that few young Chinese males have any common sense whatsoever when consuming alcohol and don't know when to stop. Supposing they became seriously ill through alcohol consumption or suffered some kind of serious accident? Who would be to blame? I know who most parents, government officials and school administrators will blame and it wouldn't be the student. The consequences could potentially be very bleak.

Furthermore, in such a dishonest and unblanced society as China is, you are only feeding ammunition that the student or other associated Chinese people can use against you in a plethora of situations. I know that Chinese students can lie and distort facts severely when things do not go their way. You are handing them the keys to a form of blackmail. Their parents will be told that it is YOU who invited the student out to get drunk and not the other way round. Too risky!

[johnchina]

Excellent point, Kevin.

[Neilhrd]

I think the key point here is how many students are involved. One on one situations are very risky because you have no witnesses if allegations are made later. This is especially important if the student is of the opposite sex.

However I see no harm in having lunch with a group of my college students in a crowded canteen. Most of them are hard working and genuinely want to improve their spoken English as well as find out more about Western culture than the cliches in their text books. But I never let my guard down completely in such conversations. I never drink alcohol in front of students. It is against my contract and and so opens the potential for blackmail and in any case drinking at lunchtime makes me sleepy in the afternoon. I always pay for my own food and I avoid the usual taboo subjects.

My students seem to understand and respect these rules. In my experience the pressure to engage in fudging or outright corruption over testing and grading comes from school owners, parents and Chinese teachers in that order. Rarely if ever from students themselves.

[KevinT123]

When I made the comment above, I was specifically referring to the situation posed by the OP. That being one or a small group of students inviting a teacher out to consume alcohol. Obviously, there is a big difference between that and eating a meal with a group of students in the canteen. Trusting the witness situation in China is also a dangerous proposition. Regardless of how well you get on with the students, there may be situations where they turn their back on you if merely to preserve their own bacon. It has to be borne in mind that we are all an expendable commodity in China and can expect no loyalty from Chinese citizens.