At my former school, I was charged I used bad words and I talked badly about the local government but I had no chance to reason. My students were supposedly 18 year old high school grads, although most were just 16-17 year high school dropouts. The youngsters were to prepare with me for abroad unis and non of the academic material guided me to teach the students any such content. However, I have done so and I have been doing so for ages. I mean I have been using my techniques adding and supplementing the materials as well as going beyond the topics in books, or discussed. Never before my last unfortunate gig I had such issues with either schools or students as I have been well liked by most of my students and managers really had to close their eyes whatever I did in classrooms.

The question is whether we should teach profanities or criticize local or any governments in classrooms. My answer has been we should if it comes to foundation courses to western unis where our students will meet other students either local or from many other countries that at times use words your students may have never heard or found in their dictionaries, and where the uni programs will call for classroom discussions on varieties of topics that may include governments and their actions. How do we expect our students to succeed in other cultures with so different languages when we do not prepare them for such language and approach to discussions? In my case, Chinese students cannot make a clear difference in between formal and informal language and they have a really hard time using either appropriately. My academic program of the uni foundation called GAC has had quite a lot of discussions and techniques for discussions to use as well as it has called to differenciate formal from informal language and students had to be assessed on those too. In GACs, there are no assessments on the use of "f*ck" or "sh*t" words or on how well the student can criticize his/her local government, but shouldn't they know how to use such language when they are to study at a western uni? They are going to have to compete with other students abroad and they're expecting to also find foreign friends as well, aren't they?

Out of all my previous students that I have had in the prep courses programs, some have come back and even visited me in classrooms with the ones going abroad and I've received quite a positive feedback from these Chinese western uni students and grads. One of their points is that our academic programs do not prepare them for the casual language they have to cope with on daily basis. One of my former students, a local from Nanning that's at a University in USA now, has told me that he laughs with his American classmates, but often he cannot understand what he laughs with them about. He's said that he just wants friends as life there's really tough. That's exactly what I have tried to prepare him for and he's well acknowledged that. But should we do that and/or should we be held accountable for it when such practices are used against us then? I'd well reason that it all is solely for the purpose of the prep for western unis, but i don't think that'd be enough for the local authorities, would it? I guess this kinda "complaint" against a foreign teacher is a PERFECT COMPLAINT on mainland, isn't it? Farcely enough, it came at me only after I resigned at the unfortunate place there.

Cheers and beers to all fts