Teacher Experience: Interview with a Potential Teacher about my Five Years of Teaching in China (2019)

Transcription of Interview with Carmelo Bono

"How did you get your work visa? What was the application process like? How long did it take?"

The work visa is actually paid for ad covered by the school that I work for. They basically just in order to meet the requirements for it I just needed to prove that I was a Canadian citizen, that I had my teaching license and that was about it. But generally, for the Chinese work visas they need a Bachelor of Arts and a teaching certificate to prove that you’re a foreign expert. The school will take care of it for you generally, most places when you go overseas should.

"So anywhere will? Not just in China?'

Yes, most places should, I had a friend who was trying to get into a school in Egypt and they were having problems with their visa just due to whatever situation at the time. They were trying to tell him, “When you get here, we’ll do it.” My friend, he is a pretty careful guy, and technically without a work visa you shouldn’t even be in that country really. But they were saying, “It’s fine, it’s normally how it goes here, it’s just a delayed process.” So, he backed out of that and later on he heard someone had gotten deported because the government showed up asking for their work visa and it wasn’t yet issued. If you ever get into a position like that tell them that you will see them later.

"How did you find out about the maple leaf school?'

When I was in my professional year, we had a job fair or an education fair come through the school and we were in the Agora Circle. It was just going from place to place, school to school. Originally, I thought I was going to be going to England and I actually had an I-Day [introduction day] offer from Engage Education. I put my name in with Maple Leaf not really knowing how I felt about it and was l just like we’ll see what happens. But they were at the job fair at Lakehead in the Agora and to be honest I forgot about my application with them until later when they called me and they were like, “So, were going to be hiring for next year, what do you think?” And I was supposed to be going to England for an interview, but this just might be as good. So, just through the Lakehead Job Fair.

"What was the application process like for them?"

Generally, a lot of these places have you apply through an agency or a recruitment centre if it’s overseas. This one in particular with Maple Leaf, they have recruiters in Canada who go from school to school usually or they pay us teachers to recruit new teachers as well. They will give us a small stipend if one of our friends decides to go to Maple Leaf and work there as well if
they say they were referred by so-and-so. So, Maple Leaf is a big enough school that they can afford to do their own recruitment. But generally speaking, you’ll go to a job fair and there will be an agency there for most other schools that was hired to recruit for that school. The application is paper-based first. When you go into the interview, they will ask you more details about your practice or if you’re a first-year teacher. They will ask you what your aspirations are, if you’ve ever travelled before, are you able to acclimatize to a new environment well, what are your goals? They will ask you about your practice, but I know as well as you do that it’s a different world and as long as you have your head on your shoulders. When I was applying with Maple Leaf, they were asking me questions and I asked them if their classrooms were really that similar to what we have in Canada. My interviewer stopped for a minute and was like, “You know what, not really.” And I was like, “What would be the appropriate answer to a question like that?” And they said, “Well you answered it correctly.” And said, “That is what it would be like in Canada and I have no idea what it’s going to be like in China, what’s that going to be like?” They were like, “Well, I guess just see when you get here.” So generally, they want to see that you’re calm, cool, collect and able to handle different cultures and stuff like that. As a first-year teacher overseas they generally expect that they will mould you into the teacher that they want you to be. So, the interview process is pretty lax, there trying to really reel you in. That is what a lot of first year teachers have to remember that they [the teacher] have the upper hand in any interview, unless they have some black spot on their resume that put the hurt on them. Generally, any teacher going overseas in their first year can really pull some strings to get what they want, give or take. Salary wise maybe not, but what classes you teach and where and what campus you’re teaching on. Sometimes you can have pull on those things being a first-year teacher because most of the schools are like it’s not a big market and it’s really hard to find a lot of new teachers right now, especially with relations between China and Canada being as they are.

"What kind of supports did you have while teaching?"

It’s different now, when I first got here it was like “Well, you’re here, that’s good.” Now it’s like we have a whole system wet up for teachers where a new teacher comes in and they are partnered up with one of the returning staff who volunteers to participate in what we call the China Life Mentor Program. It’s different from school to school, and this is what worked for our school and this is what worked for our teachers in the past. It’s a relatively new thing, but the idea is now… and the reason I’m talking about this and not my personal experience is because my personal experience was very different. I showed up late and then it was a lot of very few new staff and mostly returning staff. The way it is now is what is important and that’s where they partner a new teacher and a veteran teacher up and just kind of have them show them the ropes around what is here in the city, what’s there in the city, how do things work in the school, where do you get you’re photocopying done, etc., etc. Generally, it’s a little partnership program, but other than that we have a big staff at our school campus. We have, I think one-hundred and twenty teachers or something like that, or a hundred and something teachers. So, so support from administration is always a little bit harder, you can get it, but you have to go and find them. They’re busy folks and if you are a new teacher and having issues and the admin hasn’t found you, you can always go and find them. Everyone is on a first name basis for the most part. Everyone lives in a stone throws distance of each other for the most part. So usually it’s a pretty close-knit community for better or for worse. Support systems are here, its just what you make of it. There are people who go off and do their own thing. Then there are people who put back into the system what they got out of it. There are people who just come and go as they please. The system has supports and they are here

"What were the accommodations like?"

When I first got here into Dalian, I was in boys campus and it’s a mixed bag really. So international schools will put you up and others will give you an allowance. Ours is a bit different because back then their salary was really competitive so really no one cared about accommodation. They used to give us a discount on housing so we would stay on campus. They had two campuses where I am; boys’ and girls’ campus. We are split up just because our campus is so big and it’s a bit of a situation of the dormitories, they weren’t really organized before, so they cut everything in half, boys and girls. When I got here, I was on boys’ campus and I was on the first floor. China has really nice places, some really nice places, everything is apartments though, there are no houses here. That’s not really a thing. People don’t rent out houses. China is very much an apartment country. There was a famous poem written called “Apartment House” and when I read them, I know they are not about China, but I imagine that they were. So apartments are, number one, small, very small to big, very big. Very small would be bathroom, living room, and bedroom pretty much that’s it. The bedroom is like a wash closet, the bedroom and living room are technically like a bachelor pad. That’s really small. When I got here, I had a two bedroom, like pretty big place. The first night there, bedbugs. Second night there, I slept on the couch trying to get away from the bedbugs, still got bedbugs. Also had these little creepy-crawly centipede looking things running across my feet every so often. That kind of bugged me, so for two weeks I spent with the property manager trying to get rid of the bedbugs. There was a veteran teacher who was living on the top floor of that building and he said he had just gotten rid of his bed bugs. So I thought I need to get out of this place. So I did. I was there in September and I moved out in November. Part of me didn’t understand what took me so long to get out because then I did find a nice place on the first floor of a new complex. Pretty much a brand new apartment. It was a bit cold in winter because I didn’t want to pay for the heating. I was like, “Winter? What’s winter? It’s not that bad?” But yes it does get pretty cold. I should have bought
the heating. They have really nice places here, and then they have places that are not so nice. The school, they generally tell you, “Well you can come stay on our campus or you can make arrangements to move off campus on your own, out of your own pocket.” So, that’s what I have done every year after I moved out. Some teachers like living on the newer campus teacher dorms, but even then, for me the property manager is a bit of sleaze. I like being walking distance from the school and I kind of feel you’re coming home after work and going to work. There are teachers who I know that have complained about that. Back in the day they were like, “I don’t like living at work.” And that is exactly what happens where you’re staying in your office until seven o’clock at night because it’s only a stone throw away. Or the Wi-Fi works better in your office than it does in your apartment on the dorm campus. That’s the other thing too, having that separation between work is important. So, the school does have places for your to stay or you can move off of campus, either way we pay out of pocket for our accommodations.

"What were some of the challenges you faced and how did you overcome them? "

There were a lot of challenges, five years, a lot of challenges. The biggest challenge, I would say, just spending. Huge challenge there. You have got money and you want to spend it and not save it. So, for that it just came down to meeting my wife and then kind of prioritizing my trips. Seeing that if I saved up instead of doing a trip every weekend, I could do a really nice trip in February. Things like that. So, spending was a big one. Language wasn’t much of a barrier for me because I enjoy learning languages. For me when I got here a lot my friends asked me if I speak Chinese and I didn’t. They wondered how I could communicate so well, and you have to be willing to listen. Sometimes listening is more than just words. So, language wasn’t much of a barrier. Food wasn’t much of a barrier. I eat everything and I love Chinese food. Work was a barrier. Our campus, our school, is never ending work and a lot of us weren’t really taught or shown how to leave work at work. It became a bit of a problem where a lot of our teachers were stressed. With no time to do anything, because back in the day we were expected to assess, assess, assess, assess. Not just diagnostic assessment, not just formative assess, we had copious amounts of summative assessment and it was outrageously ridiculous. They never taught how to time manage, and some of us kind of sought out help and checked things out and educated ourselves a bit further and that we had some leeway with what we did in class. It was hard to get that support from the school because we had a huge turnover in administration at the time and unless they were teaching the same things we were teaching, they wouldn’t really know what we were talking about unless we sat down with them and gave them a piece of mind. But, just how much work was involved and how to leave it at work rather than take it with you every night and spending, that was basically it for me. Some teachers have complained that the food is too oily. But it depends on the person really, but for me I’m not a difficult person to adapt. So just spending and work. And if you do go somewhere, appreciate the money you have and don’t take advantage of it too much. Make sure you learn that you don’t live to work.

"What is your classroom like and what does a typical day look like?"

So, I’m one of the fortunate teachers, I have my own classroom which is great. I think the first four years here I always shared a classroom. Our classrooms aren’t really our own, we aren’t allowed to do much to them. They don’t like when we put stuff on the walls because it wrecks the paint. We have two Bristol boards, no smartboard, we have a projector. Generally, I make it work for me. Decorating my class was the hardest part because every so often you seen your stuff come off the Bristol board and replaced with some random stuff. Then you find out your class is also a homeroom class and that they had to put something up. Generally, if you’re teaching four blocks of something that you’re in the same classroom for they will try to keep in that classroom which is nice. If you wanted to get a smartboard or something like that or a bookshelf, generally, you have to do that yourself. It’s not easy, you could, but it’s not easy. I use a lot of whiteboards, like miniature whiteboards for student to student. Classroom size is the best this year. The biggest I have is twenty-eight. The smallest I’ve got is twenty-five. In the past I’ve had somewhere between an average between twenty-eight students. The smallest class I’ve ever had in the past was for an English class of maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven and the largest class was thirty-two in my first year. So, this is by far the best year Ive had. My class isn’t quite my own, but I make it work. I’ve got a projector and that’s really all I need. Most of the students are doing a student-to-student activity. Each of my students have a cell-phone. Some of them have an iPad too. Each have a laptop that was part of their tuition at our school. So for the most part I use Edmodo which is an online classroom. But I use that for the most part and pass everything to my students through there. They all laugh and get very upset at times because I try to leave all of my notes on Edmodo. Once in a while they will be like, “Sir can I get this on paper?” And I’m like, “I could do that, I could put it on paper for you, but how many trees are we going to kill in the process of this?” They start laughing and are like, “Sir, please. Look at how many other teachers are printing off three-hundred pages a day.” I try to go paperless, but its difficult to say to the least. Classroom, not bad, day-to-day we have to be to the office for 7:30am and were expected to be there until 4:30pm. Classes end at 3:40pm and we have office hours from 3:40-4:30. Were expected to hold at least one tutorial session a week. No one is really sure what exactly that entails, but each teacher does try to utilize that for the students because the students generally do need that extra help. Usually I try to get to the office by 7:00am, but sometimes depending on how my son is being in the morning or how late I sleep in I’ll be there at 7:00 or 7:30. Our homeroom starts at 7:40. Homeroom is twenty minutes and each block is about seventy-five minutes after that. WE have an exercise break from 10:35-11:00. Every Monday, exercise break is a flag ceremony and it’s kind of like how we do in Canada the monthly assembly announcements. Something similar to that idea. Except this one they raise the Chinese flag, the Canadian flag, and then our school’s flag. They read out some announcements or some other things. Whatever they are going on about that week. Some teachers have clubs after school. I used to and then when we had my son, I kind of took a step back from that. Typical day-to-day, 7:00 to about 5:30.

"What is the curriculum like? Did you have to make any adjustments?"

BC and Ontario Curriculum, it’s not different it’s not the same. It requires time and reading. When I first got here, I studied up on the curriculum of what I was going to be teaching and it was pretty much the same thing as Ontario. Now it’s a little bit different. Now even though they follow the same principals and pedagogy, the way that you present it to the administration, the way that you do your lesson plans, the way that you use abbreviations is all different now. Core competencies here are similar ideas to application, thinking and inquiry, understanding, communication, and knowledge. So instead of assessing marks to them they are student reflection pieces. The students are expected to use this self-reflection to improve themselves throughout their high school career. We have big ideas which we have in Ontario. But now the way that they kind of make everything match up its like… we have know, do, and understand. The same as in Ontario objectives. The know, do, and understand all come from the curriculum so basically the big idea, the curricular competency which is basically in Ontario we have the learning expectations like overall expectations and specific expectations. Here we used to have something similar but now they call it curricular competencies and generally they are just ambiguous statements of things that students should learn or could learn. The easiest way to explain this is BC is trying to turn every class, every unit into inquiry units. So, instead of having a structured content aspect to their education their trying to incorporate more opportunity for students to develop their own learning interests, their own pathways through the class. So, an English class doesn’t really have to have a novel study per say, or it could depend on how the teacher wants to structure it or present it. At first, I didn’t have a problem adjusting to the BC Curriculum because it was very much similar to Ontario, now every teacher is, or was, having a huge headache with it because of the fact that were being told one thing but were being expected to do another. So just like Ontario talks about fewer summative assessments, more authentic assessments, things like that. That was always a goal I felt in education with BC, but it’s just not one that I’m seeing through our school. So, like right now the BC Curriculum is being divvied, like its just been passed out once again. People are now taking this new curriculum and trying to relearn it. They want us to do all these assessments and they were trying to tell us to follow the curriculum, but the new curriculum doesn’t use any of those assessments. Making the adjustments is just like a cultural thing. Our school tries to appease to the idea of, “See, look at these high marks, look how hard your kids is working at our school.” We make them work hard, we make them do well. That’s what is kind of observed by the culture here, how hard and how well the students are working. That’s the big adjustment for us as teachers. There are tenure teachers come to our school and they are like, “What is wrong with me, why does this seem so much harder than usual?” It’s because of the way that they are trying to deliver the curriculum. It’s a new thing and people are still learning. Our school is pretty young, maybe twenty-five years, but ever since it started its been changing, it’s been growing. It’s got a new school here, a new school there. Admin are being moved around all the time. Teachers are coming and going. It’s really hard for a place like this to really hold true to one pedagogy or one idea with changing admin all the time. We got a new superintendent at our school and he had a lot of good ideas. He talks a real big game, but you can see it’s not easy to make the changes. As much as you want to think that your heart is in the right place and you’ve got the right ideas its not that easy. It takes a lot of time to change what is already there. You have a lot of people doing one thing and you have to start with one person doing something else. It takes a lot of adjustment depending on what kind of teacher you are, where you come from. A lot of our teachers come from Ontario, more and more teachers coming from BC now, but there are always lots of jokes being passed around like, “And then we asked the Ontario staff what they think, and the Ontario staff seemed to think…”

"Do you find that there is a difference in how students are taught? Is there a shift toward tech in the classroom or experiential learning? Is it effective?"

 It’s hard to speak in general, but I’ve seen a lot of teachers take experiential learning and really go miles with it. But then there are other classrooms that don’t. It’s not something that’s really mandated in our school, it’s one of those things, with the new curriculum coming in, that people want to see, it’s something that people want to hear about. But it’s not something that is really supported yet because then you get those questions of what have you been doing for a month? Where is all of your assessment, but its like formative assessment, the kids have been working on other stuff. Sure, we could do assessment. Then you have other teachers that are making it work, putting it kind of in the middle, assessments and experiential learning but you have to be in the right class to do that. When I was doing it, I had my food and nutrition class that was the easiest way to do because that class is built on the use of experience. Versus a class like accounting or math, it’s a little bit more difficult. They have their expectations that they are trying to meet but they find ways to make a trip the theme park do geometry. I’ve heard a few different cool experiences with math and science, but I also hear a lot of people just asking them why aren’t you doing the same as everyone else. They could but everyone else is doing the things that are paper based and they aren’t utilizing experiences with the students. So I wouldn’t say that we are there yet. Its coming but were not there yet. In terms of tech, tech is growing. We don’t have smart boards but at this point smart boards are outdated. You have a projector, laser pointer, a mouse that can hook up wirelessly and you pretty much have a smart board. Tech wise some of our campuses and system have them. Our school doesn’t. but like I said we have a white board and a projector, not exactly a smart board but it accomplishes the same job. For me I use Edmodo, Socrative, Kahoots, the whole nine yards, Dropbox. When the problem is we don’t have any experts on those things here. It’s one thing for to do something really good and then stand up and say, “This is how I did it and it worked really well.” That’s good, but what happens when a English teacher goes up to an physics teacher and asks about using experiential learning in their class, but that’s the end of that conversation. The physics teacher doesn’t know anything about the English curriculum. They don’t know. It hard to get into those discussions and we don’t have a lot of Pro D time in our department that we can just focus on those topics unless they were brought up by administration to have that discussion. But at this point they don’t want to talk about technology in the classroom because they know it will cost them an arm and a leg. As far as experiential learning goes we don’t really have that expert support here yet, they’re still trying to develop teacher-to-teacher advice on that topic.

"How did you find time to travel while working at Maple Leaf? Where have you travelled?"

That the easiest question. You make time, you just make time to travel. Where have I gone. I’ve stayed in Asia while I’ve been here because I don’t think it is a part of the world I will travel to when I am older. With Asia I never really knew what to expect here and I’m glad I got to see it. I’ve been everywhere from China to Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong. The places I haven’t been are Myanmar, Borneo, Timor-Leste, Papua New Guinea are the only ones I haven’t been too. If you do get a chance to go to Asia anything you want to do you can find online and I do suggest you go online to take time and look at what you want to see if you are kind of limiting yourself to one trip. If you do work in Asia, then just throw on a backpack and pick a flight and go. When you are working here it is really easy, too easy maybe.