Job Discussion Forums

[Roger]

I did not know until two days ago that I have university teaching experience from a stint I did.
Reason?
It's those fanciful names the Chinese give their educational enterprises...
My first employer was a "normal school". Humble name, students majoring in English, me teaching them English Literature and other highly sophisticated things.
They were going to be English teachers.

These days, I am working in a "college", and my FAO informed me that in point of fact they are an "university". Huh?
The girls I teach are between 20 and 24 years old, but you could easily mistake them for kids 14 to 15 years old. Behaviour, intellectual prowess, interests, general educational level, outlook on life...

Since when do SECRETARIES graduate from an UNIVERSITY?

Yet that's happening here, with me lending a helping hand.

Reading their textbooks (secretaries' textbooks have bilingual texts on "Mr Wang, the Director, is hiring a new secretary!"), I feel transported back into fairyland, the land of CHinese job fairs where all you need to get a good job is...have incredibly unconvincing CV's and good connections to corroborate your wildest claims of having worked for multinational companies and earning 10'000 RMB.

In my view, something is going the wrong direction in China: Too many "college" or "university" (synonym) graduates, most of whom patently undereducated, yet aspiring to get a lucrative white-collar job.

Ask my girl students: "HOw much do you count on making in your first job?"

I heard answers such as "Maybe 1000!" and "I think 7000 RMB is OK!"

But not knowing what's going to be expected from them in terms of abilities and competencies!

Is that, perhaps, why half of last year's graduates are still looking for a job of their dreams???

[MyTurnNow]

[Wolf]

Roger has yet another interesting point.

I've been thinking along these lines lately. My English Lit students - with one foot out the door - really don't seem to have a good grasp of essay structures. Okay, sure, they wrote in English so even the best aren't perfect, but many (too many for a senior class) seemed to lack basic organizational skills in their writing - and I can't chalk it up to "oh it's their second langauge" or "oh it's a culture where logical writing isn't done." I don't beleive the latter - I've proofread a couple of my boss's papers that he presented in Europe (he's a PhD in Entomology) and he can present an argument just fine. And all of his education was "in country." So there IS a tradtion of organized writing.

Sure, academic writing isn't the be all and end all. But I think this is one symptom of what Roger is talking about. It's a problem that's too big for me to even think about for very long. Other than teach my students what we have time to cover, what can I do.

It will, in the end, be the Chinese who make the significant changes to their own education system.

[Michael T. Richter]

[jppu]

On the subject of academic writing, I teach post grad - yes, MA student in English Literature at a military university - which I thought would be a nice change from traditional ESL teaching. And it is. I like it here a lot. But they just turned in their first set of papers last week. HORRIBLE, DREADFUL!!! It's an American Poetry course and they are giving me fifth grade level book report garbage that would be for Social Studies class. Their level of written English is quite good (as is their spoken); their analytical skills are non-existant. They will have to do them over. I showed them to the Head of the Dept. who is really cool and she said, "some of them act like they're brainwashed and don't have an original idea i their head." THat's very telling, isn't it. I would say they are trying though so I must give them that much credit. We'll see how their rewrites go.