The Future Conditional by Eric S. Henry

Author:Eric S. Henry [Henry, Eric S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, History, Asia, China, Language Arts & Disciplines, Linguistics, General
ISBN: 9781501754920
Google: FtH1DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2021-05-15T05:28:31+00:00

Teachers

Chinese Teachers

The one defining characteristic of almost all the Chinese teachers in private English schools is that they are women. During my original data collection period in 2005, Hong Ri’s Chinese teachers were 95 percent female. Another children’s school listed all of its eighty teachers in a promotional newsletter; only six were male. Washington English did not have a single male Chinese teacher. Male teachers are more common at higher levels of education, such as in university teaching, and are more likely to have opened their own schools. As we will see, though, male teachers can more easily draw on extended social networks for capital and expertise. The higher expectations placed on them as family breadwinners also often led them to manage their own businesses. The reasons for these disparities are complex and have a lot to do with gendered expectations in both education and employment. Of the two streams in Chinese education, arts (wenke) and sciences (like), women were often discouraged from the latter. In my experience of university classes for English majors, women usually outnumbered men two to one and language learning was often described as a gentle (wenrou) pursuit, something that required a woman’s patience and grace.

The parents of students told me almost universally that they preferred female teachers for their children. Women were thought to be more kind, nurturing, active, engaged, and committed teachers than men. Women follow the child’s progress more closely, I was told, and put extra effort into tutoring should the student fall behind. Headmasters and administrators recognize these preferences, often describing ideal teachers using similar feminized adjectives. Teachers, however, often complain of parents who are intrusive, bullying, and hypersensitive to their child’s progress, a relation that seems to be linked to the gender dynamics of teaching as well: parents like female teachers because they are easier to push around. With less financial security, female teachers are more susceptible to threats from both parents (to withdraw their child from a class, for instance) and administrators. Female teachers are therefore often relegated to secondary roles in the industry, teaching children or review classes, while men are the school’s “rock stars,” leading large lecture courses or occupying managerial positions.

Beyond the gendered aspect to teaching, however, teachers’ backgrounds are quite broad. They come from a range of socioeconomic and household situations, educational backgrounds, and places of origin. Typically, though, teachers at a school like Hong Ri are in their twenties, are unmarried singletons (i.e., they have no brothers or sisters), and have some kind of college or university education. Although many majored in English, it was common to meet teachers who had a background in disciplines such as foreign trade, economics, accounting, tourism, Chinese literature, sciences, and so forth. A handful of teachers are a few years older and married with a child of their own, but unless they have significant household resources for childcare, women generally leave teaching jobs to take care of their child full-time.4 Teaching English is often thought of as a transitional

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