In 2007, I was teaching at a so-called international school which is located in the outer Guangzhou suburb of Longdong, and which has Australian and Canadian connections.

In 2008, the school acquired the right to operate as a GAC center and I was asked to move from my current department to the newly-formed GAC department.

The GAC program was to be serviced by 2 foreign teachers and 1 Chinese teacher. A second foreign teacher had yet to be recruited.

The program was scheduled to start in 2 months hence and so initially my new duties involved occasional testing (about twice per week) for a period of 2 months. I was responsible for conducting speaking and writing tests for applying students and my Chinese counterpart was taking care of the reading and listening tests.

Actually, 4 weeks into the testing period I was told that I would no longer be required to conduct the writing tests, just do the oral tests. No reason was offered nor did I seek a reason. To be honest, I didnt care; less work for me. I did suspect, however, that I was failing more students than had been expected; about 60%.

On a Tuesday, less than a week before the program was schedule to start, I was asked to attend a semi-formal dinner to welcome the new GAC students. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw that half of the new students were applicants that had failed the oral test because they couldnt string more than 3 words together.

Blind Freddy could have seen that teaching that particular GAC program was going to be a teachers worst nightmare, so I resigned the following day.

I got a very, very hostile response and a few very heated discussions followed. I left on the Saturday, taking a fairly big financial hit in the process. Still, what price is peace of mind?

Apart from the new GAC program, the school was actually quite well-managed and maintained fairly high academic standards. It was hearsay that the program was the pet project of one particular school director who had worked hard to convince the other school directors to take it on. It was a fact that the program coordinator was a senior teacher immediately prior and so the program represented a promotion for him. Failure not an option for certain individuals?