I think I’ve said this before, but the biggest problem with teaching kids in China is the structure of the school. Not the physical foundations of the schools, although sometimes they confuse me. No, I mean, the way the schools teach. It works like this:
- First, and most importantly, the schools teach to an exam, so everything the kids learn in school will be on the exam.
- That being said, when the laowai English teachers come in, they are not teaching to the exam.
- The kids have long days. Where I was this week, the kids go from 7:50am until 5:30pm, but they also get a two hour lunch. However, much of those two hours, from what I can see, is mandatory nap time, which is cool, but…
By the time I get to the kids, they want kids time. They want time for themselves. I don’t blame them. Much of this school thing is a charade for the rich parents of the kids in school. See, parents have to pay to send their kids to school here. There is no government assistance, although within the last year or so, the government has been helping kids in the countryside get schooling. The parents want to see kids “learning” English, which means waiguoren, which means white people, if possible. And the schools don’t want us to teach so much as they want us to play a lot of games.
All of this results in a student base that doesn’t care (especially the younger they get), and a school that tends to look at its bottom line, rather than the quality of education. To say it is tiring and discouraging would be under-exaggerating it. Just a smidge.
So, I’m planing my Andy Dufresne moment. I’m looking for a way to break out of here. Right now, despite what the other teachers are saying, I am crawling through a mile of shit, and somewhere ahead of me is the opening into the rain, and into happiness and a Starbucks job, perhaps. Yeah, I’m getting excited at the idea of working at Starbucks over working in China. That’s what it’s like here.
