Teaching in Hong Kong
I’ve been documenting about my teaching experience for the past few weeks over at Ho Yan in Hong Kong. I decided to keep it separate mainly because it has nothing to do with illustration, but also if potential clients want to know a bit more about me then they can see what I’ve been up to.
I think Hong Kong is a good place to get teaching experience, however, I think it depends entirely on what you want to gain from it. Before I came to Hong Kong, I applied to loads of places but I never heard back from them partly because I wasn’t even in Hong Kong; so why would they even hire me, which is totally understandable. I don’t regret it though as I’ve been able to see other schools and language centres.
My only gripe has been with language centres. I wrote about it here and had a bit of a rant about it. By the way, they’re my own opinions and not an overall generalisation as I’m sure there are amazing language centres who treat and respect their staff like normal human beings. So today I worked at a local language centre as they said they’d give me an hours break, fine, even though it was from 9-6pm. When I actually saw the schedule for the day no break was mentioned. I asked about it and one of the staff told me there are no breaks on Saturdays; so they pretty much lied to me. I worked from 9-6pm without a lunch break or a short 10 minute break in between each of the sessions. This is going to sound really unprofessional, but I had to have my lunch whilst I was teaching. You would never do that in a teaching environment, I mean, it just looks unprofessional. But what was I supposed to do? They even told me to eat really quickly before the sessions had started… urgh. I was pretty pissed off at this point. Apologies if I sound mega negative! May be I’m having bad luck with language centres!
I really don’t want to put anyone off as I believe that if you want to gain more experience working with group work, then great. But I think private tutoring is another route to go with if you want to make extra money. I’m tutoring at the moment and I love it as I control over what I want to teach, plus the flexibility is excellent as it fits around my schedule. I do feel more prepared during my sessions; I like doing one to one work as you get to know your students a lot better.
Anyway, I’d like to hear your thoughts about it. Are you currently teaching abroad? Or are you planning on moving soon? Whats your experience been like so far?