Interview, hiring and protocol: teaching in Chinese universities.

we are sitting around in the airport
here in Hmong should the Hong Yun and China we're actually leaving at the end of my contract I've just taught for one full year we just say to university semesters and it popped into my mind I'm sorry if you get some noise pollution you may hear some announcements overhead but we're sitting right near the airport that I could actually do a video just sort of got the structure and procedure surrounding getting hired at a Chinese University if you want to teach English at the university level in China and I don't know what that entails but for getting a job and then once you have the job so just yesterday I was saying to my my girlfriend Melissa we had a farewell dinner so at the end of the contract many of the professor's not all how many professors came to the network six professors one two three four about six some of them okay so a bunch of the professors took me out for dinner to say goodbye the students were actually supposed to meet me at the airport to say goodbye to me here at the airport at the gate before I got in the plane to leave that didn't work out but whatever the thought that counts and I also showed my girlfriend just as we were packing the other day the actual contract I have and the life insurance and other benefits have health insurance life insurance so I just point out that in general I get paid more than a real Chinese professor with a PhD like one of the women we met at the dinner last night had a PhD and I get really all the benefits of being a professor okay not all not all I can't publish articles in an academic journal here but I get a surprising number of the benefits of being a real professor in China just as an English teacher inside the university system now reciprocal with that or conversely or this side of the room I'll say to what extent is my work at the same level as a real professor in China real person with a PhD one of the few things that bug me here I think I mentioned to you a couple months ago babe when my exams are scheduled my exams were scheduled in normal class time and not during the exam break right and I just said why you know it's a real course I think my students do more work in my course in I do for a normal Chinese language course or normal course the Chinese professor and I said why shouldn't they have exam for my classroom instead of just taking up one of our class let's taking normal class time now I'm sure they have their reasons I guess that it's probably because of their arrangements in terms of how the exams are and vigil a didn't scheduled and I might have to cooperate with with other people by the way so we're here at this airport were the only foreigners here you know babe when I was just outside now some of these women were actually taking photographs of me yeah secretively - they didn't ask my permission sometimes people ask your permission Oh secretively yeah people are snapping pictures of the foreigners we're trying to be nonchalant okay I guess I mostly just notice it when people actually ask me all right cool but if people were secretly photographing me walk out in the porch here so there are some ways in which and that's obviously from the top down there's some ways in which from the organizational level on down my course is not treated as seriously as a real course taught by a real professor such chosen out the exams are scheduled it's also true I don't have to do staff meetings I don't have to do kind of what would be a waste of time for me those kind whether those are I mean some of the staff meetings here are completely psychological prep sessions some of them are completely political and some combine the two and then some concerned technical workings about how that what the department's doing that I couldn't get you so give an example you remember grace our friend in the bar friend and also kind of my boss but a yeah a senior professor here but she's very friendly it was one day she had to go to a meeting it took all day so she was like late to talk to us or something yeah because they took her to a graveyard to see the corpses of heroes who had died fighting the Japanese right fighting as the Japanese in World War two or the sino-japanese war yeah and why did they do that they did that to try to inspire the professor's to work harder this semester right so again a kind of a mix of like psychological and political like you know what's what's this meeting about we're going to you know we're going to a break good so I don't do I don't do any of that stuff I think so there are a couple things to mention right now 2017 2018 what you wants I know this girl okay Tim she's oh oh that guy dropped five play you see she want me to tell him this guy just dropped like this all do a good deed here divisions any losses warning no Lucci you no need to fight the wolf lie there you go guy drop 5 by and I point out them oh I think so right now 2007 2018 it is incredibly easy to get yourself hired if you have a bachelor's degree if you have the basic qualifications if you can do the paperwork and come over and teach they have a crisis in being able to hire foreign teachers I'm not going to explain why it comes down to paperwork and legal changes and details are just not worth explaining it but right now is an incredibly easy time to get work semester by semester obviously they hire on a semester basis you know it's tied to the academic calendar so you can't just sign up any time but it is a really easy time to get to get a job here thing one they always want to interview you face to face of course some of them are gonna be resigned to interviewing them by Skype but most the time they do want you to fly over and it can be face by face sorry face to face I don't think people here in general I should expect you to teach a demo lesson there's no interest in that which is a difference from Japan or different from some other cultures they don't explain to teach cause there is zero interest on the part of the professors in observing you teaching class that's one of the strangest things here and that can work in your favor from work against you like I'm proud of my classes I'd be totally happy if senior professors came and walk yeah absolutely but the sense of which can work against you as let's say a couple of students complained about the way you teach class the your boss is the people in charge they have nothing to compare that to then they only know what the student says about you right yeah that nobody has senior but nobody's going to nobody's gonna come inspector individual at your class or watch you teach at no stage neither at the application stage hiring stage nor nor during the whole year of teaching so I mean that's that strange you can be prepared for that obviously they do expect you to show up and teach on day one as if you're completely prepared they will not give you any training they will not give you any instruction they will not give you any guidance oh I think I mentioned that in earlier video I they expect you to show up unpack your suitcase and start teaching again I was completely fine with that but you for example wouldn't have been sorry so my girlfriend Melissa is not 25 but you know if you had just shown up to teach you needed you know you needed some kind of treasure for that's again a big contrast to the Japanese the big Japanese are very enthusiastic about team building and job training and training on the job and evaluation none of that happens over you but I think the main thing the main thing I want to don't warn people that make this video is when you're first applying for the job so they will want you to fly over and do a face-to-face interview if it's at all possible those people the people who interview you initially by email by Skype and face to face they will be in the international outreach department of the university so that Sun is gonna be called the Foreign Affairs Department or something like that but the weirdest thing is those people are gonna be really friendly and really helpful and they're gonna be a big part of your life during this first setup stage and then they completely disappear and when you meet them most of them are professors so you're not expecting that to happen so like you know I met professor Chen and professor Lee who you saw last night yeah those two people work for me at the beginning because they're in international affairs Foreign Affairs what do you want to call it at the international outreach office so they're the people who interviewed me and hired me and they set up the flight you know for me to fly over and do the interview and fly back and this kind of stuff mm-hmm they did all that fussing and then they then they were vapor that disappeared and that's because the responsibility for me is then handed over to the English department or possibly to another department like foreign languages depending on the arrangement your University so for us we actually have yeah foreign languages and we have ethnic minority languages from within China we have a couple of different departments handling these things sooo I mean there are some things like that you can you can kind of watch out for I don't know do you have anything you want to pop in and say I mean you'll probably get job offers to teach English if you have a bachelor's degree because when I came to visit you in February right I got offered three different jobs in a matter of two weeks that's a point and from what I've experienced is people are really they're really gung-ho about making connections with people so you know if at least here in mancha you know I don't know about other places China I think another place even more so come on yet it's true yeah like if one person if one Chinese person knows a foreigner they're going to tell like every other person they know that is interested in learning English or teaching English that there is an a foreigner like there was somebody that you could potentially hire to be a why would you mention your job offers included one that was university level teacher and those there were only two universities in in dong in mine anyway so you know like it's not like you could have had more but yeah that's an interesting question if we'd been in Kunming maybe you would have gotten a bunch of offers from universities maybe not but the attitudes are having to change now cuz I remember how it was ten years ago and definitely even just one year ago when I was in conveying a lot of the a lot of the universities coming pretended as if they had plenty of foreigners to take on these jobs as if there were a lot of foreigners competing for the few jobs teaching at the university level specifically yeah today that's definitely not true and that's gonna be less and less true no I think it was kind of I don't know why they were so self-confident even one year ago and couldn't Ming because I saw the reality for those teachers were face to face they were pretty sad sack munch including a lot of these 65 year old guys the guys were trying teaching at the end of their careers you know it no background so if you want the job the thing I generally say that I generally warn people is it's really only worth doing if you're here to learn Chinese or if you're here to learn some other language you might get you know you could learn Burmese oh dear world here on the border with Myanmar you could learn some of the language is nothing but already language what have you depending on what part of China Rim but the educational component of it for you can be rewarding but no there's absolutely no sense in which the other components of it are rewarding enough neither financially or otherwise I mean that is fundamentally why it would be so hard from to get foreigners to come and teach here if you're down for this job in mainland China you're better off doing the same job in Japan in South Korea in Taiwan obviously in the Western world in Europe there's just no compelling argument to do it unless it's for your own education in terms of language education but other than that I just emphasize again you are given all the benefits of being a real professor here almost all of them I'm paid more than my own boss I was earning five thousand quai a month my boss a senior professor who'd been a professor there for ten years approximately was earning only four that was a quiet month and I was a little bit shocked when I first learned that and otherwise people do really make an effort whether going out to dinner with you trying to find other work opportunities for you trying to set you up with side hustles with other jobs outside yeah people do a pretty good job taking care of you but all of that relies on one of course you have to have a BA minimum and you have to speak Chinese you have to speak enough Chinese enough Chinese to get by right and if you don't then this would just be insanity to come over here and do this those King without speaking at least kind of level three Chinese or something that would really be suicidal it'd be impossible for you to survive out here and yeah we felt that the other day we bumped into two foreigners in downtown moksha which never happens to there no foreigners and we were shocked it was one black guy among white guy they neither spoke Chinese nor English and we just thought how do they survive even one day you know if you can't speak English of course it's fine if you can speak Chinese but they couldn't speak Chinese and they couldn't speak English yeah and they were wandering around hopelessly trying to find a money changer which also doesn't exist in moksha well she's a small city there's stuff there are no for it is just there is no money change right yeah all right guys so that's it that's my guidance about that