Hi, everyone. And welcome back to America Under the Microscope. 欢迎回来【闲话美国】.

Actually, this is a special edition. Hi James.

Hi, lulu, hi everyone, special edition. Why is it special?

Yes, because instead of talking about American society, American life, today we are gonna talk about you.

Me? Why would people want to hear about me?

People, our audience they know you, they are interested in your life as well.

Actually James just had a major, I would say, a major change in his life. Before he was teaching in university. And then recently you joined an international school in Beijing.

Indeed I did, I have changed my jobs. I've gone from teaching college students to teaching middle schoolers at an international school.

Okay. So first of all, congratulations on the new job.

Thank you.

But what is it like?

Today I thought we would just invite James to share with us a little bit of… about his life in international school in Beijing which I'm assume… the thing is our audience, I think there are lots of parents as well, and then maybe there are also international school students.

Can be.

So this would be an interesting topic, a bit more personal touch to it.

First of all, when did you make the move, like it was a month, 2 months ago?

I started applying for the job earlier this year. I managed to land the job in May. And I began working for the school in August, so I've been teaching here for 2 months now.

Ok, and you're fully settled there, right?

Yeah, I've…

Fully settled in.

I moved out here and have been teaching and my life is… here now and I'm really comfortable where I am.

Okay.

First of all, you're in the outskirts of Beijing?

I wouldn’t say it's the outskirts. It's right next to the outskirts.

I see. It's a nice sort of natural surrounding. It's much better than us here, just the hustle and bustle. You've got mountains, you've got green, lots of greenery.

Yeah, that's pretty common for a lot of international schools. They tend to get built more in the suburban areas of cities as there's more land available.

Where my campus is, we got… were surrounded by mountains, parks, not… sadly does come with a few disadvantages. There aren't restaurants or supermarkets that are super close by.

I see. Well, you can't have the cake and eat it too usually, it's the convenience or the quiet… right, it’s the quiet suburban life.

I like the quiet.

But let's talk about the school, let's talk about your work environment.

So the people that you work with, are they mostly Chinese or mostly non-Chinese like the other teachers?

It's actually 50:50, so my colleagues are a mix. And all of them, they come from all over the world, like I have a supervisor from Venezuela. I have colleagues that are from Pakistan, America, Australia, France, Mexico.

And everyone is well educated. My Chinese colleagues have Masters Degrees from top universities. Everyone tends to be have education certificates or trained in education.

Yeah, that's the other question that I want to ask actually. I know about the degree obviously, but do you need extra qualification to teach middle schoolers?

You need to be trained to be a teacher, they don't wanna take you just, if you like, you've taught English before, that’s gonna be okay, it's like no, they want people who have actually been trained in education.

So ideally, they want you to have a teacher's license and lots of experience. They prefer you to have Masters in education. As then you have more knowledge of like education styles, classroom management, things like this.

So they have pretty high standards of what they're looking for teachers.

Yeah, I would imagine a lot of these international schools, if you don't mind me saying that, they offer a pretty good compensation package so they want to look for the best people, right?

So to get the teachers with the qualifications, they do need to provide a fair compensation which they do.

What about the general organizational culture? Would you say it's more friendly, relaxed, or is it more competitive?

At the school I work at is very friendly, I wouldn’t say it's relaxed because we do have a lot of responsibilities, but very friendly.

In general, all of us teachers want to work with each other and help each other, we share resources, we have meetings to discuss how to improve our teaching, we observe each other, give feedback, an environment of growth.

That sounds wonderful.

So our concern is trying to be the best teacher we can and how we can help other people be great teachers.

That sounds wonderful, but a lot of our audiences are actually also middle school teachers or primary school teachers.

I always have a lot of respect for teachers in primary or secondary education, especially secondary education because I know they're under a lot of pressure, they have much heavier workload compared with me. I don't teach kids, I teach adults which makes my life lot easier.

So comparing with what you were doing before, would you say now you have a much heavier workload since you're teaching teenagers?

My teaching hours are less than what I was doing at the university, but my work is more.

There are a lot of key differences. One of the biggest one is management because at the university level, students don't do their work. It's like you don't do your work, ok, you're gonna fail. What should I do, do your work. That's the end of the conversation.

With middle schoolers, it doesn't work that way, because there's gonna be other factors that are leading to them, maybe not following in class, maybe they have stress, other stressors that you're not aware of.

So you have to be much more flexible. You also… one thing that's very important is you never connect your care for the students with their grade.

So even if a student is not doing well academically, you should never ever like dismiss that student. It's still…be friendly, kind, try to be a mentor to them and help them as best as they can.

Even if they're not performing academically, you don't stop being their friend.

Really, that is the cornerstone of a good teacher, especially a teacher who's teaching underage students, I would say young students, because adults obviously you want to care for your students still, but they are adults, so there are boundaries;

but I guess with teenagers you do have to take more care because they are still finding themselves, right?

And you need to be a role model for them, you need to be there for them. They have… and plus I teach middle school, so they're also going through puberty, that means all kinds of other issues they are dealing with, they are starting to get…

Teen drama.

They're starting to get interested in boys or girls, and this can lead to drama and you have to learn how to help them with that.

Actually talking about the actual learning and teaching, how is the curriculum different from, let's say I don't know if you are aware of the curriculum in other like the Chinese local middle schools, but are there any differences? I'm sure they are, right, because international school they use different curriculum.

The curriculum difference is huge.

This is true for pretty much every international or bilingual school in Beijing. In middle school, the curriculum is quite different.

At my school, we follow an American common core curriculum for English, history and such, so it's American curriculum. Math is Singapore curriculum. Or for our Chinese bilingual students who are not international students, they still take the Chinese national curriculum for math, so it's kind of a mix.

What do you teach by the way.

I'm a history teacher.

So is that the same like history, just history or history but covering a specific… I don't know how it works. I don't even know how to phrase this question because for us history is just history. Do you teach a specific period of history or is it…

Ok, yes.

Or history in general?

It depends on the grade level. So like I teach middle school, so the different grades do have different periods of time, so I teach ancient world history. This is like since Stone Age till Rome.

Oh, I see.

And then I teach medieval world history, so that's the Fall of Rome to the Age of Exploration. So thing like Christopher Columbus.

So this is also following the American curriculum, right?

Yes, and that's actually where a lot of students have a little bit of a difference, have trouble with the history because history is a difficult subject for someone who did not grow up in the system.

Because my history classes and history taught in the west is not focused on memorizing dates and names.

So what is the focus?

Analyzing history.

So this is about trying to like understand the past through documents. So analyzing a document, why did the painter author do this thing? What were the effects of certain events? Why did civilization come to be?

Okay.

So much bigger questions.

So are the assignments usually like essay questions that sort of thing, group projects?

A lot of projects mix a lot more writing than they like, because they're middle schoolers, they hate writing. That's true everywhere in the world.

OK.

So they do have to do paragraph writes, they do have projects, they do research projects. Sometimes they will create graphical like posters with like pictures…

Dioramas?

Text to explain things, dioramas, and things like this, but there's also role playing and stuff.

But would you say it's more sort of open ended instead of like standard answer questions.

There is no standard answer in my class.

Just sort of open ended as long as you can support your arguments that sort of thing.

There are well made answers, yes. If they can write and construct a like a logical like introduce your topic, support your topic. Here's the evidence for that, like a good answer, there's such thing as a good answer based on you know writing styles and actual support, but there's no standard answer.

In this episode, we talked to James about his new job at an international school.

In the next episode, we are going to continue the talk, and get to know more of his life there.

So until then.