East-West Station

Big News! Obama won the American general election!

Thanks to the mighty power of blog I can tell you this momentous news literally years before future generations will hear it.

Remember…you heard it here first folks!

A certain Mr Andrew Sullivan over at The Atlantic magazine recently wrote an essay about blogging. What is blogging? What are its strengths and weaknesses? etc etc. Here’s an extract I want to pick a quarrel with:

blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective. A traditional writer is valued by readers precisely because they trust him to have thought long and hard about a subject, given it time to evolve in his head, and composed a piece of writing that is worth their time to read at length and to ponder. Bloggers don’t do this and cannot do this—and that limits them far more than it does traditional long-form writing.

But that seems a rather partial perspective to me. Take just 3 examples from the (English language) China blogosphere…What about old Mr Useless Tree or The Granite Studio or Mutant Palm. Are they not thoughtful writers? Are their posts not very often carefully considered and worth pondering?

I guess a lot of blogging is done in a hurry, but considering this was a piece published in a prestigious “dead-tree” magazine, and therefore by his own criteria should be more complex and subtle and thoroughly thought through, it seemed a bit too prone to sweeping statements: “Bloggers don’t do this and cannot do this”, and too narrow in its definition of what blogging is. He ought to get out in the blogosphere a bit more perhaps.

Oh, and the main reason I read The Atlantic is for the excellent China pieces by James Fallows. Check out his latest.

With thanks and doffed cap to John Lennon, the following is a not entirely fair, not entirely untrue take on my experiences of the Japanese, Thai, Chinese, and Korean education systems.

As soon as you’re born they make your world small
By feeding you country instead of it all
And you need to get outside to see it at all
A young Asian hero is something to be
A young Asian hero is something to be

If you want to be happy, don’t listen to me
If you want to be happy, don’t listen to me.

To kick off, here’s a nicely provocative comment from a Chinese lady on the Dalian Xpat forum…

most of foreigners in china are rubbish(except those who are assigned to work here),they cant support themselves in their own countries and that is why most of them are english teachers (or other languages),coz they can do nothing but teaching their own languages. china is just like a dump(but i love it),so welcome those rubbish from different countries.

and this was followed by a comment from a Russian

Nice comment, I totally agree
(At least I’m not an English teacher)

Well, as I have written before, I am used to comments like this and I suppose there is some justification for them. There’s no smoke without fire, as the old adage has it, and some of the English “teachers” I have met over the years have been unqualified, psychotic, alcoholic, incompetent etc etc. But but but…the majority are normal, likable, interesting and decent people who are capable of teaching English very well. (Just like me! Shucks.)

It should also be said that some “English teaching” does verge on the pointless, particularly when teachers are stuck in, and then stuck with, a class of students who don’t want to be there and indeed often have no good reason to be there other than that the lessons are a parental or governmental requirement. I am lucky enough to be able to avoid teaching classes like these. I teach motivated university students, businesspeople, and adorable little kids.

I am an English teacher. It is my job and it is part of my identity. When people ask me what I do, I say I am an English teacher. I suppose I could, if I was feeling poncy, reply instead that “I teach literature and applied linguistics at a University” but that would be, well, poncy.

Anyways, a couple of weeks ago, via the wonderful haohao report, I came across an interesting article that both analysed and criticised that bally rotter the Chinabounder. In case you know him not, Chinabounder is (was) a young English teacher from the UK who wrote what became an infamous blog about his womanising in Shanghai. He then became the victim of a storm of indignation and media curiosity when a certain Dr Zhang, a university psychology lecturer, demanded he be hunted down and kicked out of China for humiliating and mistreating Chinese.

The article was from a site called The Middle Kingdom Life which has the subheading Perspectives on Living and Teaching in China. It is run by a few people but there is a Dr Greg (Gregory Mavrides, Ph.D.)who does most of the writing and moderating. In his own words… Dr. Mavrides is an American psychoanalyst who has been working in China as a professor and mental health consultant since August 2003.

I left a comment saying, more or less, that while Chinabounder is a prat he does have some insightful points to make about China and Chinese society. But that’s by the by, what I want to focus on is the Doc’s response and the point he made about English teachers in China. He said…

If Chinabounder’s situation was a relatively rare one, there wouldn’t have been any reason to write an article about it. In fact, he is a very common type of male foreign English teacher in China and I just used him as an example, as he decided to go public with his adventures.

I think the claim that the bounder is “a very common type” of English teacher is unfair and way off the mark and I commented back

I have been in Dalian for two years now and have hung out with an awful lot of, mostly male, English teachers and have never met anyone who sleeps with lots of Chinese women and brags about it. I have some colleagues who are young, male, and horny and in some cases absolutely smitten by Chinese femininity, yes, but they don’t sleep around and “break hearts”. They mostly joke about how all the beautiful girls are out of their league! Most of them are after a serious girlfriend…just like everywhere else! Anyway, I think you have an unfairly poor opinion of male English teachers in China, you even use “English teacher” in scare quotes…I do not think Bounder is representative of anything but a tiny tiny minority of English teachers. That’s my experience anyway.

To which the Doc replied

From the situation you describe in Dalian, it sounds like a very special, even unique, city in regard to foreign English teachers. We’ll have to investigate that for future editions of the guide.

This sounded distinctly sarcy to me so I tried to post this comment in response…

I must beg to differ. I am assuming your comment is not intended to slyly point out that I am wrong in my judgment of English teachers in Dalian and am taking it at face value. So, it seems to me extremely unlikely that Dalian is somehow unique…I mean, why should it be? Also, I have talked to English teachers who have worked in Ningbo, Shanghai, Jinan, Beijing, Changchun, Chongqing etc, and they all say that Dalian is very nice, but none of their stories suggest that the “English teaching community” is significantly different than the one here. Could I therefore suggest the point that it is not that Dalian is unique, it is that your opinion of English teachers is unfairly low? Cheers for now.

but the Doc censored it. That is, he wouldn’t allow the comment to stay on his site. More about why not later.

Anyway, this little to-and-fro then prompted another article by the Doc called What Exactly Is An English Teacher?. In this, Doc expanded on his previous comment

And, for the record, I have absolutely nothing against English teachers: they were certainly among my favorite in high school. It’s just that I don’t think it’s reasonable to refer to anyone who can speak English as an “English teacher” (even if they’re being paid as one in China), hence my use of quotation marks. I’m sorry that wasn’t clear to you.

and went on to talk about some of his experiences with “real” and “genuine” English teachers, who, in his opinion, are those who teach English as an academic subject rather than as a language.

This is one definition of “English teacher”, but there are quite clearly others and I found it amazing that the manager of a site purporting to help English teachers in China would be so blinkered and condescending. Accordingly, I attempted to post a reply stating my opinion about other definitions, but again the Doc wouldn’t allow it on his site.

Here it is for those of you interested…

Dear Dr,

Hello again. I came a bit late to this post, but to be honest I found it hard to believe what I was reading! As a manager of a website for English teachers in China, you do surely realise that “English teacher” has different meanings in different contexts? Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that you consider a “real” English teacher to be an English literature/grammar teacher, and a trained and qualified one of course, and probably a native speaker of English. I am inferring this from the following parts of your article;

two genuine English teachers
Because he is a real English teacher
I thought again about how loosely the term “English teacher” is thrown around in China

But this is just one type of English teacher and no more “real” (or “professionally authentic” perhaps) than me or any of my Chinese friends who teach English at Chinese schools or universities. If you ask my Chinese colleagues at Dalian University of Foreign Languages what they do, many of them will simply say that they are “English teachers”…although at University level they might mention a specific focus.

So, what about me? I am not qualified to teach English literature/grammar in England, but I have been an English teacher for 12 years now. I have a TEFL certificate (a month long starter course) and I have an MSc in Applied Linguistics. I am an English teacher: I teach English to people whose native language is not English. I have worked (teaching English) in Universities in Hungary, Japan, Thailand, England, Scotland and China. I have both taken and given teacher training programs, and I have taught general English in Private schools, multinational companies, and kindergartens. And I am not that unusual, there are a lot of people with similar professional experience in the world these days because teaching English is big business! There is also a huge literature, including several academic journals, devoted to the field of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL, TESOL etc) and to work for a university or for a quality institution like the British Council or a respected private school, you have to have a Masters degree or a Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults (DELTA). Both of which take a year or more to get. To work as an English teacher in most universities in developed countries these days, you need a PhD.

What about those teaching English who have no other qualification than that English is their mother tongue? Are they the ones who are disqualifying me and others like me from being “real”? Well, they are there because there is a demand for them to be there. The desire to have a “native speaker” as a teacher is misguided in my opinion, but it is strong enough to mean that there are not enough qualified people to fill the posts. So, you get people teaching English who are not properly trained. Some of them turn out to be very effective teachers and some do not; some of them like the job enough to go and get certified, and most go on to other things.

But please, just because there are maybe more unqualified first-timers (as well as some chancers/sexpats etc) in China than in, say, Japan, please do not assume that there is not a body of well qualified and dedicated English teachers here, both Chinese and native speaker.

To repeat my main point, the term “English teacher” means different things in different contexts and to try to limit it to “English literature/grammar teacher”, presumably because that is what your “English” lessons consisted of at school, is misleading and unhelpful. Please use your site to welcome a broad church of English teachers to China and please give them more professional respect. Thank you!

End of comment.

Again, the Doc wouldn’t allow this on his site, but he did at least have the courtesy to tell me why not. He sent me an email explaining that…As I have spent upward of one year researching, writing, and revising this guide, I am going to use this website as my personal pulpit and not as a forum for open debate…I’m going to use it to proselytize my point of view…Of course there are exceptions, as pointed out in the guide, but I don’t feel the need to air them in a way that casts dispersions (sic) on or distracts readers from the main points that have been raised.

Well, there we have it. It’s not only the CCP that thinks that reasonable and rational discussion is “unhelpful”. If you don’t like the voice of the other side, silence it! (NB The only comments I have censored on my blog have been insulting or abusive ones…yes Dude, those ones.)

On the other hand, it’s his blog (his little domain) so he can do what he wants. Fair enough, I just think it paints a misleading, not to mention condescending, portrait of English teachers.

We’re not that bad, are we? Comments welcome.

Recently there have been some street scuffles in Bangkok between pro and anti-government protestors. The anti-government posse is called Pad and according to the Guardian:

The People’s Alliance for Democracy (Pad) is a collection of rightwing activists, business people and former army chiefs…The movement wants to replace the country’s electoral democracy with a system that would be dominated by appointees from the bureaucracy and the military. It claims the country’s rural majority is not sophisticated enough to choose good public servants.

Bloody peasants keep on voting for the wrong party! Suggestion:Why not switch to the Chinese system?

Anyway, during the street fights one of the pro-government peasants, a 55 year old man, was killed. He was beaten to death with golf clubs. Apparently, golf clubs are “the weapon of choice” for the Pad and this speaks volumes. Golf encapsulates very aptly the gap between the prosperous, leisured, often right-wing urbanites, and the great unwashed of the countryside. What…those Lao bumpkins have the temerity to vote for a party we don’t like? Let’s batter them with golf clubs.

I’ve nothing against the game of golf of course, just what it has come to stand for. Most “golfers” are not really that interested in golf and are arrogant cocks, and the golf courses themselves gobble up water at an alarming rate.

I say ban it! Anyone who disagrees gets pummeled with a pool cue.