Dear Dave,

I felt that I had to reply to your post. I understand completely and utterly. I also see that you are disillusioned with teaching these students. It sounds as though, you are trying to conquer the problem and I admire you for that.
I am working at a private school and teach every level from the small children (5 and 6 years) to high school level. I do not mind teaching at the private school, as the classes are small and the majority of the students are willing to learn.
However, I also teach at a middle school and find it increasingly tedious and difficult. Some of the classes are really creative and want to learn English. The others are just a waste of time in my opinion.
I don't know why I bother, because it appears as though the students would rather talk amongst themselves, do homework or read comics. They can get really noisy as well.
A lot of the problems stem from the fact that the class sizes are far too big. I have about 70-80 students in each class. The classrooms remind me of Victorian England, where the teacher is on a raised platform, giving off the superior-inferior impression.
I do not like this style, as the difficult classes have no motivation and seem to be under the impression that the teacher is always right!
I feel like a gameshow host myself, running up and down the aisles, trying to get them to speak in English not Chinese.
I have tried several ways to make my classes more interesting, from games to quizs to roleplays. It really annoys me, that some Chinese English teachers have said all I do is play with the students in my classes. They prefer the spoonfed approach of choral repetition which I loathe and detest. It is not really teaching the students anything at all. They seem to think that the students can learn many new phrases/sentences/words and so forth, based on the text book. It is not very ideal as some of the students have difficulty with simple pronouns and sentence structures.
I wish that I could teach the five, creative, motivated classes oral English and let the other classes be. However, this is not going to work, so I am just going to battle forwards, thinking of new ideas minus choral repetition.
I wondered if anybody here gets the impression that we native English speakers are not always welcome in some schools and universities in China.
Personally, I do not care about earning lots of money, I see the need for ESL in China and think it is about time this spoonfed approach was thrown away. Do I have a point?

Thank you.

Take care. >-|