Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Late Night Post

As summer approaches I look forward to spending some time on Center Street here in Harbin. Have a few of China's best beer, Harbin Beer and catch a performance at one of the beer gardens. Another simple pleasure of the summer is to have an evening meal on the sidewalks. Another nice aspect of the city is winter has it's IceLights and in the summer there are many nice sculpture of living plant shaped as dragons, pandas. For teachers who chose to stay on through the summer this can be a great time for travel or just to kick back and enjoy life away from the responsibilities of teaching. Or for those that are more ambitious, you can make some extra money if you have the right set up. As long as your paperwork is up to date, you can always pick up work at some of the local schools who usually receive an influx of students during the summer holiday. You know, Chinese don't get much of a break, they are constantly in classes. Too many in my opinion but it does work to my advantage if I want to push for more classes and therefore more cash. Hey the way the economy of the world is at this time I hark back to my roots, make hay while the sun shines.

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Friday, April 24, 2009

Time Flies

It has been a long time since I posted, let's just say that I have been very busy. If you have read much of the blog you know I teach for a couple of different reasons. One, I like it most of the time and the other reason is to make a living. Nobody will get rich on a foreign teachers salary but it certainly is sufficient to provide a comfortable experience.

I guess it is just not in my nature to want to be an employee. It doesn't make much sense when you can build a good following and a good income from teaching. Currently I am doing about 24 classes a week. Which is an extremely heavy load. Most teachers at a university teach no more than twenty hours, averaging around 14 hours a week. So I work over a full 40 hour week. If you can navigate through the culture and get some help you can always increase your income here in China.

I'm currently getting my status from a business university and I have 6 classes freshmen and sophomores each class for two hours a week. Not really enough time for each class but one of the teachers had a mishap and could not continue his contract. So it seems they just adjusted the students schedules to the number of teachers available.

In future posts I will get into some of the challenges that you might face as a teacher. Hope it is not going to turn into just another rant. Ha ha.

Worldtour

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