I have been thinking of finding a formal English teaching job here. Thought it would be good to get some work experience and hopefully improve my confidence and Chinese. I’ll admit all the horror stories I’ve read here has made me reluctant and I keep tossing up whether I want to do it or not.
But anyway, my impression was a typical job would be about 20 hours a week for 50-60k a month, which sounds like a pretty sweet deal. But I’ve been looking more carefully at the ads and it looks like a lot of them you only get paid for teaching hours, and you’re still expected to stick around the school, or there is lots of gaps between classes but not enough time to go and do anything else, so you’re basically spending 8 hours a day there anyway.
Is that right? It doesn’t sound so attractive to me. If that’s the case, I think I’d be better of being a wagie back home, especially with the apparent high odds of having a prick of a laoban…
But I’ve been looking more carefully at the ads and it looks like a lot of them you only get paid for teaching hours, and you’re still expected to stick around the school, or there is lots of gaps between classes but not enough time to go and do anything else, so you’re basically spending 8 hours a day there anyway.
I know a lot of people where this is the case.
It ends up being a 10am-8pm kinda deal.
“20 hours” means 20 classroom hours. Pretty sure that even the most seasoned, streamlined teachers will need at least an additional 2/3 of that many hours (12 to 15) per week for prep and admin. New teachers will (should) probably spend more than double that.
Your standard schoolteacher in North America generally considers 25 classroom hours a week to be a very very full schedule.
20 hours is a full time job (or maybe more).
I have a bachelors but nothing teaching related and have no desire to do it long term. I just thought it would be a good way to get myself out there since I’ve never held a proper job; conditions seemed good and it’s easy enough to find something.
I’ve done a few sub jobs but they mostly just threw me in the deep end - hand me the textbook at the start of class, “here you go, good luck”. I found it very exhausting.
As I say I don’t think I have a personality suited to teaching, being very unconfident. If all jobs are as described in above posts perhaps I shouldn’t try it, but at the same time I hoped in this way I could improve on my shortcomings.
