This is a warning about Zhuzhou Institute of Technology
This school has managers who are incompetent self-serving cheapskates
with divide and conquer divisive approach to control, continually passing the buck between one manager and the next, never taking responsibility for their decisions refusing to organise meetings to solve problems preferring to be secretive and underhand in their approach.
Director Liu head of Teaching Affairs is quite racist and opportunistic with a quick-thinking approach that is quite anti the concept of a considered approach
to important issues such as textbook acquistion.
This has been a major concern and caused great stress and anxiety over the time since working here to myself and many students studying here.

These are my feelings and thoughts regarding working at the school.
I was silly and stupid to trust Miss Yangs positivity to use the workbooks as a textbook. They workbooks were too unsuitable for classroom use, especially the Freshman students were always unhappy about their use in the classroom.

At the initial meeting with Miss Yang, my intention and desire in showing Miss Yang these books was to get hold of an Evaluation Copy of the Students Books that went with the workbooks. But nobody was listening to this concept. I said, very honestly, that I didnt have a copy of the Student Books, but I had read enough about the series to believe they were worth trusting and I really wanted an Evaluation Copy to look at.
There is an attitude here that a good teacher can cope with any kind of classroom materials.
But its not fair when taken to an extreme like this. I knew it would be very tough to try to make the workbooks work, and during the winter holidays I put a lot of miserable thought into trying to make these books work. So why did I accept Miss Yangs positivity about using them?
It was a mistake about unreal trust in the maturity of attitudes. I thought the students would have the maturity of thinking to look past the limitations of a weak textbook. So to this extent my teaching wasnt trusted by the Freshman students.

I also prepared many materials for the Comic strip course again with positive support from Miss Yang along the lines if you believe in what you are doing you can make it work. But the reality was this course was disliked strongly by the concept that it was unofficial and would never be supported fully by the university You can make it work but we wont support it. This is a catch-22 situation. It had to be cancelled after a while due to poor attendance.

I NEED TO EXPLAIN MYSELF IN MORE DETAIL

Managements attitude towards textbook sourcing and acquistion that has had a detrimental effect on teaching quality. In particular, Miss Yang, Director Liu, Mr Guo, Director Su have distanced themselves and made themselves difficult to contact regarding this following issue.
At an initial meeting to discuss possible courses I recommended using the Cutting Edge Series as I knew it was a quality textbook series and that Books 4, 5 and 6 were at an appropriate level to be taught to English major students at Freshman, Sophomore and Junior level.
At this meeting I presented the Workbooks as these were the books I had with me and I asked the school to order the Students Books, that were, of course, the textbooks intended for use in the classroom. However, their attitude and decision was to use the Workbooks I had with me as they were cheap and easy to photocopy for the students. So I was basically willfully encouraged to use the Workbooks as the textbook in the classroom. There seemed to be widespread ignorance of the quality of the Student Books and also the purpose of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and that these books had been benchmarked to the descriptors.
(The Student Books follow the philosophy of task-based methodology, the communicative language approach and lexical approach, together with a balance of the four skills with strong emphasis on listening and spoken tasks this mix is known as general English)
Anyway, I gave some trust to the school that their positivity towards using the Workbooks in the classroom would be respected by the students, that they would look past the limitations of using a weak textbook. So I made great efforts to consider ways to overcome limitations and provide supplementary materials. The sophomore students were more supportive about this as some of these sophomore students were actively involved in the decision to go with the Workbooks, and to photocopy them on behalf of the Freshman students However, the Freshman students werent so happy about this decision. While the sophomore students were in a fairly small class of nearly 40 students, the Freshman students were grouped together in a large class of around 70 students. For a while the Freshman students were moderately accepting about the Workbook that had been diligently photocopied for them. Later the class was split into two classes. The concept of working the book wasnt respected by the Freshman who became bitter and resentful of its use in the classroom. To them it didnt matter that I tried to dress it up with powerpoint presentations and photoshows expanding on the few discernible topics in the Workbook. So after some pretty major complaining, these workbooks were abandoned in favour of materials sourced from the internet and a quality film to keep the students happy. It has been quite challenging and at times stressful experience for myself and family including sleepless nights and so on.
In this semester, the school ordered Student Books 4, 5 and 6. They are of course much easier to teach from and acceptable by the students. However the workbook experience in the previous semester has left an enduring bitterness in the minds of some of the students that is difficult to overcome.
Recently some students have been repeatedly trying to show a well-known Pirates movie before class and I thought that was a bit rich considering it wasnt my decision at all to go with cheapskate textbook material. Their sense of humour about it and cheapskate mentality is risky towards the ESL profession in China and disrespectful to their fee-paying student charges all for the sake of saving a few yuan here and there on materials. It is really a bit more sensible for China ESL industry to fairly assess the relationship between English textbooks written and published in China and geared towards the CET and TEM tests (and often taught by Chinese English teachers) and overseas-written-but-published-in-China English textbooks such as the Cutting Edge series, that are more allied with the Cambridge Main Suite and IELTS but could be seen as useful companions to the CET and TEM tests.