Last year I was working at a university in a large city in central China. I had been there for about a month when I was told thayt a new teacher who was very well educated would be arriving soon from the USA to teach there. I met him a week later, he was actually a nice guy, and he offered to show me his resume. He had never taught before, but he had degrees in literature and linguistics. He arrived on a Z-visa and for two weeks he did nothing, there were no classes for him. Then he was given his schedule ( he has signed the contract by this time )

Shortly after that he was given the textbook. He said to me "This textbook is like reading double dutch, I can't undrstand it , how am I going to teach?" I thought that was not a good sign. Then I told him to create his own lesson plan if he did not like nor couldn't understand the textbook. "How do I do a lesson plan?", he said. By then I was feeling worried for him. But I was very busy at that time, so I said I would talk about it later. Several days later he was scheduled to begin his first class. He told me that he was "very anxious". When he went to his first class I was also teaching in the same building and happened to to have finished my classes for the day.

He asked if would discreetly observe his class and later comment on it. I stood about twenty metres away from the classroom door ( it was wide open, hot and no air-con ) I pretended I was sending text messages, tried hard to listen, and looked in the direction of the classroom every now and then. He told the students where he was from, talked about his home state for a while, asked who each student was, and then he shook hands with each of them.

What hapened next was a complete disaster for him! He asked the students what they wanted to do next. He stood there like a stunned mullet, and the students were staring at him intensely. "C'mon guys, help me out here, it's my first day", he said. That was excruciating for me to watch, I can't imagine how this American "teacher" must have felt! He then asked a male student " How about you, what do you want to learn, what should I do?".

Afterward he said to me that he was f....d in there, couldn't teach, and should never have come to China. The following morning I found him hiding in his university hotel room. He seemed to me to be pretending to be sick, presumably because he was too scared to teach his classes. By the way, he had a panic attack once when his phone ran out of credit ( he did not know any Chinese ) Things came to a head, when, not only did the university refrain from processing his RP, but, even worse for him, he did not have enough money to fly home. So he had to plead with his family to fund his ticket back. But they would not give him the money, because they said that he was weak, and that he was a "quitter".

I pleaded on his behalfwith his family to buy a ticket because his visa was about to expire and he was starting to panic seriously. That stupid university employed someone just because they had a few fancy bits of paper, thus ending up with egg on it's face!

I know that someone with five years teaching experience and no degree would have been a much better choice!