Workload
We've got word about what my wife, Yau Neih, will be teaching. She'll have 14 hours a week (class time, that is) split over three courses: Newspaper Reading, Oral Conversation and Listening Comprehension/Oral Conversation. We've also been told that she'll have two groups of students: 2nd year English majors and a group of non-English majors for the Oral Conversation. (One of those required courses. I'm sure you collegiate types will remember those.) The Dean said that the latter class might have as much as a hundred students! The Dean still needs to work out the details. He and our boss were talking about how to deal with the number problem. One suggestion is that Yau Neih put in an extra two classroom hours a week and split the monster class into two large classes. The other suggestion was to split the class but have me teach one of the sessions. We nixed that right off. Not only don't I have the required bachelor's degree, but I skipped out of most of the teaching ESL sessions when we had our training. It wouldn't be fair to stick those poor kids with such a poorly qualified instructor. Plus I'm hardly a good conversationalist. Does China really need 50 of their best and brightest learning how to nod politely while someone else does all the talking? Now if they wanted me to teach them how to write poorly crafted weblog entries, it would be a different story...
posted by John @ 9:44 PM
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