David's Big Adventure in China

Well I’m pretty much finished with the class now. We did more teaching in local schools this week. The classrooms at the local schools do not all have air conditioning so it gets incredibly hot. I taught two lessons back to back and it had to be at least 95 F in there and very humid. My shirt was so wet with sweat that it could not have been more wet if I had just pulled it out of the washing machine. The students are used to it so they handle it okay.
Jenny, our Chinese teacher was telling us that the public schools here are very good and have plenty of money. The public schools are better than the private schools and the teachers are paid much more at the public schools. The private schools are for the children of people who are not originally from the local area. The local governments issue resident permits to people whose families have lived in an area for a long time. Having a resident permit entitles you to send your children to the public schools and other benefits. Since Jenny and her family are from another province they do not have a resident permit for this area and have to pay to send their child to private school. Since Jenny does not have a resident permit for this area she could not get a job teaching at a local public school although she is well educated and well qualified. Apparently you also have to have GuanXi (pronounced Guanji and means connections) to get a job at the public schools. The Chinese government has some of these policies to discourage people from moving from the countryside to the cities to find jobs.
I was watching the news (we get 1 English news channel and it is a government run channel thus the news is filtered and slanted) and they were talking about car license plates in Shanghai. They are trying to discourage people from driving in Shanghai so they are limiting the number of new license plates they issue and they are auctioning off the ones that they do issue. The going price for a new license plate is about $6000 U.S.!
Since my job does not start until September I plan to some traveling but I have not finalized my plans yet. There is an online Business English class that will take several days to complete that I want to do and will plan to do it soon.
I added some new photos in a new album called teacher training. Several of the pictures are from Macao when I went there a couple weeks ago. We saw the dragon boat races when we were there.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 3:33 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.