I actually missed this thread due to the volume of posts being put up. But that is a good response and I thank you for writing this!

Back in 2011, I think Mickey D's hired at least 30,000 newly graduated college students. You will not be in poor company if you happen to be hired working there. I have known stockbrokers and financial advisors who have retired or gotten laid off and they now work at supermarkets. Either way you will interact with people with ideas, life experience, and you can have intelligent conversations with at least some of your colleagues.

The fact is, people are always working a full time job they may not like but will pursue other things that they do like. The multi-sided nature of people seems to be lost on some posters here. I think trolling for responses like forcing us to make a choice on "working in china" or "working at supermarket/fast food chain" shows how unintelligent these people may be. I sometimes wonder reading what they wrote if they have ever held a job before in their lives. A son or daughter of some rich yuppie type who likes dicking around and doing nothing certainly would not have a firm grasp of what work entails, and how it broadens your perspective.

This is a surprisingly important thing. What can demotivate me with teaching English in China, is that I find most co-workers to be insecure or immature arseholes with too much of a point to prove. I kind of like my current job, but I keep my distance from the other teachers and find that I can have far more intelligent and stimulating conversations with my students that come to see me than any of the foreign teachers. At least I am at a university these days and am therefore not penned in with the other foreign teachers in the office at the same time.

In fact, in a weird and bizarre way I miss the supermarket work that I used to do part-time when I was young. You got to work with old and young staff alike. I had a strange job where I worked in the children's clothing department originally until a few structural changes took place and I covered a few other things like electricals too. My mates took this piss and said that this job was gay, but I actually found that being the only male non-management member of staff on that department proved to be absolutely excellent on a social level and I was even able to date colleagues that were completely out of my league.

Sure, the managers were arrogant arseholes with a lack of respect for the staff that work for them, the best managers were usually not the well-educated guys from middle-class backgrounds, but those who worked up from the bottom, they could relate to their staff far better and understand their needs. One such guy, even told me to prioritize my school work over my job, despite the fact it was probably not in his best interests when it comes to getting people to do overtime for him.

The best example I can give of stupid colleagues being the ultimate demotivator, was a brief 2 week period where I was unemployed, skint and had far too long of a university summer holiday to endure than I'd like. I took some warehouse work with an agency and found that I was working with people that I just couldn't relate to at all, they were thick as pigshit and only ever talked about the same old laddish topics of beer, birds and holidays at shitty resorts in Spain or Greece. Being a university student who did not need to pay tax or care quite as much about life in such company was not a good thing either. They were also very racist to the foreign employees on the site, who despite having very poor English worked far harder and had a better attitude than any of the local staff. This job was so depressing, but thankfully I got a website design/marketing project that I had also applied for at the same time and left straight away for it with no notice period.

That experience did not half motivate me to study harder at university though!

Back in 2011, I think Mickey D's hired at least 30,000 newly graduated college students. You will not be in poor company if you happen to be hired working there. I have known stockbrokers and financial advisors who have retired or gotten laid off and they now work at supermarkets. Either way you will interact with people with ideas, life experience, and you can have intelligent conversations with at least some of your colleagues.

The fact is, people are always working a full time job they may not like but will pursue other things that they do like. The multi-sided nature of people seems to be lost on some posters here. I think trolling for responses like forcing us to make a choice on "working in china" or "working at supermarket/fast food chain" shows how unintelligent these people may be. I sometimes wonder reading what they wrote if they have ever held a job before in their lives. A son or daughter of some rich yuppie type who likes dicking around and doing nothing certainly would not have a firm grasp of what work entails, and how it broadens your perspective.

Interesting that it's come to this - a choice between teaching in China or flipping burgers. Granted it's more an intellectual exercise than it is anything to be taken seriously, but I feel this is a good thread because it can also address the fact that there are and have been for a long time many FTs in China who went there with few qualifications. Even in this forum, such teachers have been referred to as incapable of getting a job beyond that of a pizza deliverer in their own country. Truth be known, many of those "pretend teachers" ended up doing a damn fine job while choosing to develop their skills as teachers. Others did not.

I think that there is a very real feeling among China's foreign teachers that things are just way too sketchy now. That is, there's no real security as private schools are facing harsher penalties for employing back pack teachers and the like, and universities etc. are seeing more clearly the need for hiring experienced and credentialed teachers.

Someone in this thread mentioned taking the time to get the training to be a legitimate teacher. Great advice. One reason this advice is worth heeding is that there is a quickly growing need in the West for qualified teachers because of the growth of international schools and a rapidly increasing influx of foreign students. Generally, these international schools pay quite well and have excellent benefit packages.

After seven years of teaching in China, I can empathize with anyone who has found it a rough go. Nevertheless, I'm glad I did it. Sure there were some hard times. In fact I ultimately developed a simple mantra in regards to employers: "One lie, goodbye." Needless to say, that meant "goodbye" more often than I would have liked. It took a couple of years to find a job I could really get into and an employer I could trust implicitly.

Bottom line, though? I really love China despite its hardships. Fascinating really - absolutely fascinating.

I think it important to note, too, that often when one becomes seriously involved with another country one's eyes are a little more open. That is, we notice the negatives more than we would in the comfort of our own environs.

I will return to China, but not as a teacher. That ship has sailed. But there's so much more to see and so many ridiculous platitudes and assertions that have been thrown out by those who've really not gotten out and about and form their opinions based on a small sampling of such a wonderfully diverse and dynamic country.

Does the education system suck in China? Yep. Generally speaking.