Guangdong Country Garden School is a Zoo, and you’re the English Monkey.

Native English Teachers are treated as little more than a student-teacher with a foreign face to appease the parents. Administration has loaded the schedule with trivial tasks (preparing & serving food, dancing like a monkey), and frequently take away the planning period for poorly organized professional development or meetings. This means many Native English Teachers are forced to work late or during lunch to complete their lesson plans and prepare materials for lessons.

The Native English Teacher is required to serve food at three meals daily. A full chicken/duck/fish is delivered to the table, and the administration expects the teachers to remove the chicken/duck/fish from the bone and serve it to students. They also expect teachers to remove shellfish from the shell.

Teachers are encouraged to purchase resources for their classroom, which is absurd given that students pay a small fortune in tuition and fees.

Although there are four teachers for each class of about 20-25 students, the classes are EXTREMELY chaotic and disorganized. I attribute this to the Chinese teacher’s reluctance to establish procedures and rules, fearful of parent/admin backlash for being too strict.

Any glance into a classroom, and you’ll see that Chinese teachers are not mentally present in the class, instead they are glued to their cell phones. They’re communicating with parents, providing real-time updates about what is going on the classroom, as well as managing the mountain of messages from the various work groups.

Chinese teachers are not guaranteed a job from year to year, they participate in teaching competitions, and avoid any parental complaints to ‘win’ their job from year-to-year. This means that Chinese teachers will do whatever necessary to appease parents. They will also prepare elaborate Open Classes, that are not at all representative of how their normal lessons are formatted.

Administration sells tickets for visiting teachers/guests to tour and observe the classrooms in Kindergarten. This means that in any given week, there are hundreds of visitors in the Kindergarten. They walk around, taking pictures and recording students/teachers without seeking consent first. This is particularly concerning, as they are recording students in various stages of undress, including when students are showering following outdoor activities. The visitors enter classrooms, disrupting routines and take pictures of classroom decor, portfolios and students. All without seeking consent first. When Native English Teachers complain about being recorded, we are told that it is part of our job to welcome visitors.

There are also surveillance cameras in common areas and canteens to monitor activity in the school.

There are evening meetings a several times a semester to discuss complaints/suggestions from Native English teachers, very little change ever occurs. Administration does not respect our perspective or experience, and they are not at all concerned about reducing the high turn-over.