Teaching English in China
This is what I usually tell people when they ask what I was doing in China. There is nothing quite like taking a job overseas -- that plane ticket really stares you in the face. I made a point to contact other foreign teachers at the school just to ensure that it was legitimate, but I did keep enough money in the bank for an emergency return ticket. I heard about the job on the internet. There is a site explicitly for openings in China, run by expatriates: www.expatsinchina.com. However, a better known site for teaching English abroad is www.ESLcafe.com. There are openings all over the world that are posted on this site, and for most of them you only need to be a native speaker with a college degree in any field. In reality, this is frequently fudged. My school forged college degrees for anyone who didn't have one -- "File Fillers" they called them -- and there were a lot of non-native speakers who landed jobs teaching English. 
There were 6 month and full year contracts that the school offered, and teaching hours were usually between 15 and 20 hours per week. The school had classes of all ages and abilities, but I taught kids from 6 to 18 years of age -- around 500 students in 25 classes weekly. I did not teach alone; the Chinese teachers at the school really were the ones who pulled the weight. Their classes meet about 3 times a week, and a foreign teacher comes for one of those classes to be a guest speaker who would focus on pronunciation and conversation. Amanda and Carolyn (their English names) were two teachers I had several classes with. Each teacher used different techniques with their students, and due to being issued a weird schedule (I taught at 6 different branches with about 15 different teachers), I got to see many different ways to approach a lesson.
The school's sign said a lot. The Chinese like things gaudy. If ever there were a place for hunter-orange tuxedos, this is it. The "r" in "American" is backwards.
Most of my students were around 10 or 12 years old. I had initially thought that it would be easier to relate to high school students, but I quickly found this not to be the case. The older kids were too embarrassed to answer questions or repeat my pronunciation. Their younger counterparts, however, would easily laugh at jokes and play games and they were easier to work with in an amusing, non-verbal way. Some of my older students had reached an impressive level of skill: students in one class could outperform a teacher in another. In general, all the kids worked hard. Some had gray hairs by age 10.
For one school sponsored outing, we teachers (Chinese and foreign) planted trees in a rural village and taught an English class for the students there. The first time these kids had seen a foreigner was the year before when our school first came to the village. The spartan school was dark and had no electricity but the kids made up for the lack of material comforts with their impeccable behavior. Their teacher had obviously instructed them to repeat whatever the foreigner said, which created a strange trampoline effect. I would ask "How are you?" Their explosive response of "HOW ARE YOU" nearly knocked me through the chalkboard. They were nervous not only because a crazy foreigner was babbling at them, but because there were 40 Chinese teachers from our school and a television crew documenting the event, all crammed into the meagre space behind me. I'm sure the afternoon was more lucrative in terms of advertising than it was in education. Things calmed down a bit with the exit of cameras and reappearance of the children's Chinese teacher. I spoke Chinese with some of the students. Most of their parents were farmers or worked in a nearby factory. None of them had been to Shenyang, even though it was only an hour's drive away.
Some students drew flattering pictures of me in their handwriting notebooks and others sang me a song 
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