#i thought i'd done it already but apparently it was all in my head 🤣

[gzteacher]

Home stretch.

I have no idea what I'm doing. I've been in with the same company for years working for waaay less that what's apparently normal (I get lots of weird looks when I talk about my workload and salary?? like...) Now I'm getting ready to quit and go with a school directly.

I'm scared. I don't know who to trust really. I turned in my cv. The department head thought it was good. We did the interview. Tons of landmines there, but everything faired well.

(I've not signed anything yet, but they're asking for me work permit and residence permit? Is this normal?)

I'm getting a high school job. It all started when I sent a message to the company about extremely inconveniencing everything has been here. They offered to make adjustments. The adjustment was literally changing a literature course to academic writing... which meant even more work than what I was doing with the literature course, if no change at all.

The other option was to have me moved to a school where I'd teach 19 groups of students, 40 students per group... reading and writing...

One assignment would finish me.

I don't trust their judgement, and I'm not willing to turn a job that encompasses all my majors into glorified babysitting. Those local teachers suffer no foolishness when it comes to teaching language, and unfortunately the reality of too many foreign teachers is either deliberate foolishness or them being made fools of due to miscommunications and negligence from all sides.

I don't want to be a part of that.

I don't want to be like these other international teachers I've worked with who can just whistle gleefully up and down the halls, not a care in the world because they understand zero of the Chinese being spoken around them, about them, over them and near them.

They don't catch any of the nuances, the passive aggressive remarks, the pervasive mistrust, the draconian outlooks, the robotic sentiments, none of that. They get the filtered English. They get to "guess" the tone through missing words and misplaced expressions.

It's a clown show.

I know it seems like I always have a bunch of negative stuff to say... and that... is absolutely true 🤣. The most I've done about it in 8 years and this now: quit the company and sign up with a school directly.

We'll see how it all turns out.

The worst that could happen is the company could get all vindictive and bully me out of trying to get a release letter even if I follow the contract exactly. Despite all the positive comments they've given me before, they could already flip script and turn hostile. Or the new school could be lying about everything. They could be a nightmare of an arrangement a troupe of foreign faces with no presence at the school beyond being just faces.

But I'm going to focus only on what I know is true: the likes me, they're very much looking forward to working with me, they're eager to have me around....

(... trying desperately not to jinx anything 😭😭)

Rather this is fear or intuition telling me to just run to the hills [elsewhere] will be a matter of time, I suppose.

#gz #teaching #teaching abroad #teaching in china #foreign teacher #guangzhou #ptsd