Category: Teaching
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Notes on Resuming my TEFLtastic Educatrix Career (with Toddler in Tow)
Earlier this week, I found out that this particular blog of mine had somehow made it onto the improbably mammoth and random Top 2300 Travel Blogs list, clocking in at number 18 on the Teaching English Abroad category. Aside from calling it by the wrong name (hello, Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai, y’all,…
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What The Hell Am I Doing Here: Notes on End of Year Work Festivities in Shanghai
It’s Saturday and I’m at work. I’ve been here since, oh, 8 o’clock this morning and at the rate things are piling up, I doubt I’ll ever leave. Teaching on Saturdays is a new thing, something that was explicitly written into my contract as something that just wouldn’t be done. Not that contracts mean…
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Who Needs A Comfort Zone Anyway? Building Character Abroad: The Employment Edition
Back when I lived and worked in Canada, employers generally expected me to be qualified for my job. They wanted the certification from year-long+ accredited courses, plus, say five years of verifiable, solidly referenced on the job experience. This was difficult when I was 19, as I’d only been working a few years at utterly…
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Notes on working in China (the bossing-teachers-around edition)
As you may have heard, I have changed jobs. By this, I mean I am no longer unemployed. Or at least, unemployed in the technical sense. I have a day job now, and it isn’t teaching. Nope, I’m back in the director’s chair again. The last time I did this gig was about…
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Saying Goodbye AGAIN: The annoying heartbreak of being a teacher that nobody warns you about*
*I was going to title this post Apostrophe to the End of Term (or, Isn’t it Byronic, don’t you think?) but decided it would be way too obscure and nerdy and not even all that clever. The cleverness factor would have been bumped up several notches, however, if only I had still been working at Shanghai Ocean…
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I May Have Just A Wee Bit Too Much on My Plate
It’s just after 7:30am on an inexplicably cool morning. Shanghai is invisible under the fog. It’s just as well as I’m still in bed, under several layers of duvet, strong, lightly milked coffee in hand. I may or may not be staring at the wall opposite . I’m freaking tired. I just spent four days…
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Amber Roshay Moved Back to the US and Wrote About it (And Also Wrote a Book That We’re Giving Away Here)
Some of you might remember the lovely Amber Roshay from her interview last year. She was the one whose students had prepared an awesome and very emotional surprise party for her. She’s also a very good friend of mine- one who happened to leave Shanghai and move back home to the US at the beginning of this…
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Hey Zhou: A Totally Impractical Guide to Hangzhou and Fuzhou
I’ve been on a bit of a ‘zhou bender in the past month, flitting around the Eastern seaboard of China with two 4-day stints in Hangzhou and one down in Fuzhou. Given this, I should be writing a top ten list of places to visit, delightful things to see, local delicacies to sample, cultural curiosities…
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Hello, Dalian! A Totally Impractical Guide to That City up by Korea
And by impractical, I really mean it this time. I have absolutely no information that might be of use to you here, unless you get sent up for work at the very last minute, as I did, and need to know where you can get really good sushi (*hint hint* the Grande Teda Mercure hotel…
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Notes on my Supposed Unemployment: The September Edition
Remember how I’ve been going on and on for months about being unemployed? How it felt weird to be so suddenly unstructured and aimless after decades of chronic employment? Yeah, well, I lied. Kind of. I am unemployed, by the day-job definition of employment. At 6am most days, there is nowhere I need to be…
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14 Notes on teaching English in a Chinese university, in the middle of a quiet burnout and impending unemployment
1. Two weeks ago I renewed my gym membership, which I had let lapse about six months ago. Sometime last Autumn, I had figured that the five flights of stairs I had to climb 8 or so times a day between classroom and office were enough to keep me going through winter, combined with…
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3 Short Scenes from the Chinese Classroom: Why I Probably Can Never Go Home Again
Scene 1. ‘Happy April Fish Day, teacher!’ My students are knee deep in plastic snack-sized dried fish wrappers. It’s April 1st. There’s a huge grocery bag three quarters full of unopened dried fish packets under one of the rows of desks. It was a gift from a friend of a friend in Fujian province.…