Hi Raquel,

 

Sorry to have taken so long in getting back to you, but your email arrived in the middle of end of term. I was swamped with exams to mark this week and have just dug myself out of the morass.
 

At the University where I am teaching now, SYU, they are not looking for teachers this coming term, but they will probably be looking for the fall term. There is a college associated with the university, Lambden college, that may be looking for teachers for the March term as they only sign up their teachers for a term at a time.

 

Our contracts with SYU are from September 1, 2006 to July 15, 2007. As I mentioned, the Lambden college contracts are single term contracts, 5 or 6 months.

 

Usually the contracts will follow the terms or semesters at the school. Many schools in China offer one year contracts (which are usually 10 or 11 months in actual fact like our SYU contracts), some offer two year contracts, and some will do six month or even shorter contracts. Generally a one year contract will get you a round trip airfare reimbursement (many places put a maximum amount on this so watch for that as the maximum often won't cover the entire cost -- especially coming from the center of Canada). A six month contract generally offers half of whatever the one year contract offers for airfare.

 

Salary varies a lot. Private schools tend to pay more, but you may have brats to work with, large classes, and long hours. The first school I worked for in China, in Tai'an gave me my best salary at 6000RMB/month. This is a pretty good wage for China and you can live very comfortably on that here, but it doesn't go that far in Canada. In big cities like Shanghai and Beijing the salaries are usually higher because the cost of living in those places is higher.

 

Universities usually pay less, sometimes as low as 3000 RMB/month. At HIT in Weihai, we were making about 3200 RMB for the first 3 months and 3600 RMB after that. It would have gone up to 3800 if we had stayed. Here at SYU we are making 5000 RMB/month, which is one of the best salaries I have seen for a university.

 

You have to look at the whole compensation package being offered by the school though. Do they pay for or supply your accommodations? If not, they should be paying you enough extra to cover the cost of accommodations in the city you will be (in Shanghai or Beijing that will be substantial, but I don't know exact amounts). If so, what are the accommodations? These can vary pretty widely. Do you pay utilities or does the school cover these? Internet? Is there a travel bonus? a completion bonus? any other extras? What is the airfare reimbursement?

 

The cost of living in Wuxi is a little more than Weihai was, which was a little more than Tai'an (taxi's start at 5 RMB here, in Weihai it was 3 RMB, Tai'an it was 2 RMB -- buses are 1.5 RMB here compared to 1 RMB in Weihai and Tai'an). Food is around the same in grocery stores. Here we have a village market for vegetables close at hand, which is cheaper than the chain grocery stores, close to the same in restaurants, maybe just a bit more expensive. There are more Western imports available here in Wuxi, and they are more expensive than buying locally produced stuff, so it really depends are what you need to feel comfortable how much you will spend.

 

As I said, the salary paid here gives you a very comfortable standard of living here in China. We take taxis much more often than buses, we used to eat out almost everyday (now we are cooking most days not for financial reasons, but because we want to have less oil, sugar, msg and salt in our diet), we have a ton of musical instruments all bought here, and are not lacking in anything we feel we need for our basic comfort levels.

  

If you, or your friend, are serious about teaching in China (or anywhere overseas), make sure you hash out all of your contract details in advance and get everything in writing. Even though the Chinese have a different approach to contracts than N Americans (for them the contract is just the agreement for that time and they often want to change it or ignore it as their circumstances change) it is good to have it, if nothing else as a reminder of what was originally agreed to. Make sure you read everything before you sign it. We signed contracts with SYU while we were in Weihei and did things over fax. When we arrived in Wuxi they wanted us to sign copies of the contract in person. The copies here had a change in one area (changing the amount of supplied electricity for our apartment from 1000 kwh/month each to 500). We caught the change, had them put it back to what we had previously signed and everything was happy.

 

There is lots of little things I could say about living in China and I would be happy to share if you or your friend decide to go the China route. Overall I have been very happy with my China experiences. I have found the people to be tremendously friendly and helpful, even if the administration is bit labyrinthine and last minute (we still don't know what course we will be teaching next term and we leave on holidays in a few days). It is definitely worth doing.

 

To teach at a University you need a degree. I am not sure about what Lambden college requires. Many schools prefer that you have a degree, but often they are more interested in having a native English speaker than they are in your level of education.

 

I didn't mention that the teaching at Lambden college is much more an ESL teaching environment. The teachers there teach up to 24 hours/week and are with the same 20 - 40 students for their teaching time. Our teaching at SYU (and at HIT last year) was teaching university courses, generally in the English department. We teach up to 14 hours/week and our courses are things like Western Culture, Writing, Speaking and Listening, News Publication Reading and the like. I almost taught a basic Science Knowledge course this past term, but there was no student turnout so they cancelled the course. I find these courses are more interesting to teach than the standard ESL stuff, but they require huge amounts of preparation and/or marking so while it looks like less time on paper it is at least as much, if not more of a time commitment.

 

At University (and for the middle schools -- junior high and high school) the students have classes from around the beginning of September until their winter holiday (the Spring Festival break, which is usually around 4- 6 weeks beginning sometime between the middle of January and the beginning of February -- it is a lunar festival so the time moves from year to year). Their second term then runs from Feb/Mar until some time in June or July. Then they have their summer holiday. There is also a few days - a week off at both the beginning of October (for National Day -- China's birthday), and the beginning of May (labour day).  It might be hard to get teaching work for April - September. But I do know that there are a lot of summer teaching programs that need foreign teachers during the summer holiday. These are short -- 4 to 6 weeks or even less -- and can pay fairly well, but likely won't give you a full flight reimbursement. There are lots of jobs posted on the Internet and there are many ESL sights that let you look at jobs so you can poke around and search for what might work for you.

 

Hope this is helpful. Feel free to send me more questions. I will have sporadic email contact while in Kunming (between Jan 23 and Feb 25), but will check in at least weekly through Internet cafes if nothing else.

 

Take care,

 

Ruth