Job Discussion Forums

[Mr. Ed]

Whom will I be teaching?

You have been offered a college or university job and you wonder whom you will be teaching. Many will suggest that it will depend on the level of college or university, the smarter students landing in the top tier universities and the less intelligent landing in the lower tier colleges. And, this may be the experience of many teachers, or, it may be self-fulfilling.

All college and university students must take the College Entrance Examination. This test does not indicate intelligence level, IQ level, educational abilities or accomplishments. This examination only tests memorization ability. Those who are accomplished memorizers score high and enter the better universities. If you teach a memory type course you will find these students to your liking. Actually you can complete your teaching assignment in 3 days. 1st day give them everything they need to memorize. 2nd day give them the test. 3rd day have a beer with them as they try to forget everything they memorized.

Every college and university has a dual entrance score requirement. A lower score for locals than for outsiders. The test score determines which students are eligible for admission. Prior to taking the test students must opt and pay for consideration by particular schools. If a student aims too high and gets frozen out and their parents have money, they may land in a Joint Venture school.

I have found students at the low 4th tier vocational college just as capable as my students at a top ten university. At the lower school more students seem to have a higher intrinsic motivation than the arrogant students at the top ten school.

The 4th tier students do appear to be from poor families and seem to have a narrower world view.

Generally speaking, I find it more rewarding to teach at the 3rd and 4th tier level. To each his own.

[milkweedma]

A very interesting post I thought.
One question though: What is it about the lower tier students that makes them more enjoyable to teach/interact with, if they do tend to have a more narrow-minded view of the world?

[nickpellatt]

I have taught at a college where lots of my students failed their entrance exams...I would also suggest that they can be rewarding students to teach, and again, my students where most often than not, from poorer families.

Their view on the world may be more restricted, and in my limited experience, they did have the typical Chinese patriotic ideology, but thats cool. Im not really bothered by their poltical ideologies anyway....although some people do get frustrated with the 'you are not Chinese, you cant understand' ideas that they often have. The upside was that they found everything new and fresh, and didnt have that jaded, uninterested vibe that I have found other students in other settings give off.

A simple example of this, is with the board game Scrabble. I did occasionally play this with small groups of students and because it was all new and fresh to them...they really got into it, and started really looking at how words were made, noting new words, and speedily flicking through dictionaries to find words...I think its quite a good, fun activity for students and can be useful in making them think about word formation.

My more affluent students in other settings, are at best disinterested, or even hostile to it. I guess the higher up the social ladder they are, the more demanding they become.

I dont think this is unique to China though...I would think a lot of students at Ivy League colleges would be snobby and uninterested, yet students from much lower backgrounds would be rewarding to teach ... as long as you manage to engage them of course!

[Sinobear]

Very good post, Mr. Ed.

My first 6.5 years was teaching design at a private college. My students failed the university entrance exams but were rich enough to pay the hefty tuition.

The past five years I�ve been with a JV program teaching at a third-tier college. The students also have failed the university entrance exams and there�s a mixture of lower income to fabulously well-to-do students.

I also find some generalizations about my students:

The ones with the best informal English want to go abroad whether their parents want them to, will allow them to, or can afford it.

The ones whose parents have already decided to send them abroad usually have the worst English, attendance and participation. I think either they want to defy their parents or they think that their professors will want to speak Chinese to them.

The ones who hate English and refuse to lose face by trying will become your xenophobic, ultra-nationalistic CCP members who will only wake up once they hear any of the verboten words used in your class.

Although all of my students admit that they�ve disappointed their parents and didn�t work hard enough in secondary school, it is a small minority of my students who feel that they�ve been given a second (or last) chance to obtain useful skills and get a chance at a career rather than just a job.

Where I work now, the students have intense competition for a very limited number of positions in their field. On average, three percent of the students will bust their chops to excel in hopes of working in their chosen field. There�s about 15% who want to go abroad (willingly or otherwise), a good 60% who are there because their parents chose the college and they themselves don�t know one way or the other what will happen after they graduate. Another 10% already know that they�ll work either for their family or in a position arranged for them by their family. The remainder are divided up between those who will marry and get with child ASAP in hopes of never having to work a day in their lives, those whose parents have a lot of money and jr. hopes to inherit quickly (and the money they inherit will increase perpetually).

I feel that generally, the college students today (much like some of the FTs who want to come to China) suffer from an intense sense of entitlement. One can understand the students feeling due to the propaganda they are spoon-fed and the one child policy, but the FTs?

[Moon Over Parma]

I agree with some of what Sinobear is saying.

[Mr. Ed]

I have found some excellent articles that may help college and university teachers.

The dynamics of Chinese face mechanisms and classroom behaviour: a
case study
Xiaoxin Wu a
a Foreign Languages College, Guangxi University, Nanning, China
Online publication date: 15 December 2
Evaluation & Research in Education
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t794297791

The Four Great Lies, Sun Yat-sen University

Mute English - China's New Latin, Sun Yat-sen University

PM me for a pdf copy