If only. Chinese builders do not believe in central air conditioning. Every room gets its own damned air conditioner. Unless your budget is much, much greater than any teacher’s will ever be.
ShanghaiTEFLer
Karma: 100
Monday to Friday I am actually teaching for an hour and a half a day. If you’re getting paid by the hour don’t take less than 150. I’m getting paid by the month at that job. When I was working in public schools I’d teach maybe five 35 minute lessons and one hour long lesson a day. So I’d get paid for three hours fiftyfive minutes though I was there from eight to three. You can still save quite a bit.
Depends how well you negotiate. I got 15K in my “contract” for my non-visa job and actually get 13.9K. I have a friend who negotiates hard and then negotiates again if they yry and make him pay taxes. It works for him. But legally, yes.
I work every day and make a little under 24,000 RMB a month. That’s 3,840 dollars. My rent is 2200 a month and that’s my biggest non discretionary expense. I spend max 1000 a month on the metro and taxis and maybe 1000 each a week on alcohol and overpriced food and coffee. That’s under 12000. This is with me cooking less since I came to Shanghai than I did in the average week at home. And if you’re not a boozehound you can save even more.
And if you don’t, strictly speaking, have enough money to set yourself up once you get over here you can get free accomodation by trading English tuition for accomodation. Normally kids and I’ve never had an extended conversation about it with anyone who’s done it but I’ve met people who did it. And if the family you start with are shit there are plenty of others.
MileyCyrus appears to know more than me about the legal ins and outs. I have heard the required insurance referred to as bodybag insurance but at the same time I’ve friends who woke up in a hospital after an epilectic fit who just left. No one chased them for any money. I imagine if you go bankrupt you scrape together the money to go home and do so unless you’ve pissed off a powerful person enormously. I know of people who are in their third stay in prison for running gambling dens so whatever else they do they don’t deport people for comparitively petty shit like going bankrupt. Or they might, if you declare it on the form applying for a new visa.
On a similar note, if the border guard or visa desk guy asks if you are working on a tourist or student visa the answer is no.
As far as violent crime goes I’d be surprised if Shanghai was as violent as New York or London. Gotta watch your wallet/purse/bag though. There are professionals all over.
True. Shanghainese/Wu is at least as different from Mandarin as French is from Spanish. But the majority of Shanghai residents are first or second generation immigrants. More or less everyone under the age of 40 speaks Mandarin to one extent or another.
Thank you Wesley.
Awful. If you have bad asthma don’t go. It has improved steadily for the past five years but it’s still quite, quite bad.
Most people who speak good to great English, really. Most shops, barss and restaurants with staff who speak good English. The pressure to learn Chinese is substantially lower than elsewhere. You will not have the benefit of anything resembling total immersion.
You become a Business English teacher by teaching some people and preparing so well that your lack of expeeience doesn’t really show and doing that over and over again until you know what you’re doing. Fake it ’til you make it. If you want to know more about visas and transferring and changing categories I’m the wrong person to ask. I strongly suspect that shifting fields like that violates the letter of the law. Go ask in shanghaiexpat’s visa forum/thread. If you can code factual.com seem to always be hiring if one looks at tgeir HN who’s hiring thread history. Or perhaps email one of the people at techyizu.org. The local startup scene is their thing. IIRC meetup.com has a few relevant groups as well. Feel free to say if you learn anything in comments.
Thanks for provoking me to write this.
If Getting a teaching degree from anywhere will help you get better jobs on the margin. For best results just go with a teaching degree from the country that the school you’re working at follows. I presume there’s one US university that offers M.Ed.s as correspondence courses. For the UK I believe the University of Sutherland and the Open University both do so, and for Australia the University of New South Wales.
As brainfarts go that is pretty embarassing. If a mod could alter it that would be cool. The idea of editing a post on my phone does not appeal.
Teaching English in Shanghai
I know three guys married to Chinese girls and one in a long term relationship. In more than six months in Shanghai I can recall seeing only one obvious couple where it was a Chinese (looking) guy and a Western girl. Some women understandably get bitter here. Stepping off the plane is like aging ten years and gaining twenty pounds.
If there’s enough interest to get this throwaway five upvotes I’ll do a discussion article on teaching English in Shanghai.
As far as I know student visas can be extended indefinitely. Being on your second tourist visa is okay, on your third risky and your fourth they will not extend it. I’m sure if you’re actually travelling it’d be different but if you’re obviously resident on a tourist visa they don’t like it.