Despite my rather alarming financial circumstances, I am continuing to trenchantly refuse the solicitations of an extremely dodgy-sounding and woefully disorganised Chinese school which for the past month or more has been offering really quite a respectable fee to undertake a course of lectures on legal English for them.
The guy who's trying to organise things is a youngster, still in college, and simply hasn't got a clue what he's doing. Every time he e-mails me, he tells me something different about the plans for the course. I'd only been keeping the door open this long because I wanted to try to help him, and I thought there was a slight chance that if he took my advice about how to structure the course then I would feel able to participate in the project after all.
Things were starting to look promising. It seemed that the original plan to teach the course via video links to several other remote venues had been abandoned. But then.... perhaps it wasn't. It seemed that he'd agreed that the course should be delivered via class teaching in small to medium-sized groups, rather than through mass lectures. But then..... well, it was going to be delivered by a mixture of classes and lectures - with no indication of what the balance between the two kinds of teaching would be, or why. And the class size might be 50-70..... which pretty much makes it a lecture anyway!
At least the course has been trimmed down from the utterly absurd 300+ hours they'd initially been talking about (full-time, during the day, five days a week, for 10 or 12 weeks). They're now suggesting a 5-week course, with classes or lectures in the evenings. Every day. Yep, seven days a week for five full weeks. Crazy. And my contact didn't even seem to think that this was a significant change, couldn't fathom why I might not want to work every single evening for five weeks straight, after I'd told him that I might be willing to work two or three afternoons per week.
And, of course, they still don't have any appropriate materials to use.
And the contract! Oh my god - the sample contract they sent me was just flabbergasting. The chap told me I could rewrite any terms I wasn't happy with; but that would have meant re-writing the whole thing.
The following is the gist of (what I hope will be) my final e-mail to them:
Dear XYZ,
The plans for this course seem to be constantly changing, and it's all sounding very chaotic. Therefore, I'm sorry to say, the company you are working for does not inspire me with any respect or trust.
Please don't take this as a personal criticism of yourself: you seem like a nice guy, and I appreciate that you are trying to do a job under very difficult circumstances. But I really don't think you are appropriately qualified to be attempting to do this job, and you haven't been given the resources that you need.
It's really not a question of money for me (I quite often work for very little money, or for no money at all, if I believe in the project): I just don't believe that your company will be able to deliver a course that provides value to the students; and so I don't want to be involved in it.
I offer you a few final observations on what you have told me so far, in the hope that they might be of some help to you.
1) The course is still far too long just for an exam preparation course, as we originally discussed in January. If you are going to provide 100+ hours of teaching, you need a much clearer definition of the purpose of the course and how much content you want it to cover.
2) Even if you do provide a course of 100 hours, it would be much better to spread it out over a longer period of time. Students simply will not be able to attend evening classes every single night of the week; and once students start skipping a class occasionally, it becomes easier and easier to find more excuses to skip class. If you try to schedule classes every day for 5 weeks, I guarantee that you will get very poor overall student attendance - and thus very poor results at the end of the course. I would recommend reducing the number of study days to 2 a week, or at most 3 a week, and extending the number of weeks.
3) You need to pay a lot more attention to development of course materials. You cannot teach (or lecture) from a textbook. I know it's quite common in Chinese schools and universities, but it really is a terrible teaching methodology and most foreign teachers will refuse to do it. The first book you showed me is a self-study book, so it is particularly inappropriate for use as a basis for lectures (though some of it might work OK in small-group classes). The other books you mentioned sound as if they are specialised textbooks on topics like company law and contract law; these are probably much too high level for this kind of course, and again will not really be of much help in providing material for use in class. What you need are textbooks on legal English. Unless you can provide some appropriate books for your teachers to use, there will be a huge amount of preparation work required in order for them to produce their own materials. You're not allowing enough time (or paying enough money) for that preparation work to be done properly - which is the main reason why I think the course will be a bad one.
4) There is a big difference between teaching in a class and teaching in a lecture. If you are going to use both methods, you need to make it clear in your timetable how much of each kind of teaching there will be in each part of the course. In my view, it would probably be better to teach a course like this entirely in classes.
5) I do not believe that a course like this can be delivered effectively via video link only (not even the lecture component, and certainly not classes). I don't think any experienced and principled teacher would agree to this style of teaching for these topics. I would strongly urge you to abandon this idea. If you have students in other cities, you should try to find them teachers based locally so that the course can be delivered properly - in person, in small-group classes.
6) Curriculum design, materials preparation, and teacher recruitment really need to be handled by an experienced senior teacher (maybe not someone who will teach on the course themselves, but someone who would be capable of doing so, someone who understands the demands and difficulties of the content well: that would mean a native English speaker with experience of teaching legal English). Until your company appoints such a person to co-ordinate the course planning, other teachers such as myself are not going to have any confidence in the company or the course.
7) The sample contract you sent me is completely unworkable, ridiculous. I would have to rewrite it almost entirely before I could consider signing it; and I'm sure almost all foreign teachers would feel the same way. No-one is going to agree to work for your company at any time, in any place, for a whole year. There's no point in sending out a contract like that. It is only going to put people off the idea of working for you. That contract really makes a very, very bad impression.
I am sorry to be so blunt, but I really want you to understand why I am so strongly opposed to this course.
I hope you can fix some of these problems and that you will eventually be able to provide a worthwhile course. But I'm afraid I do not believe that you will, and thus I do not want to have any further involvement with this course.
Best regards, Froog
It's really not a question of money for me (I quite often work for very little money, or for no money at all, if I believe in the project): I just don't believe that your company will be able to deliver a course that provides value to the students; and so I don't want to be involved in it.
I offer you a few final observations on what you have told me so far, in the hope that they might be of some help to you.
1) The course is still far too long just for an exam preparation course, as we originally discussed in January. If you are going to provide 100+ hours of teaching, you need a much clearer definition of the purpose of the course and how much content you want it to cover.
2) Even if you do provide a course of 100 hours, it would be much better to spread it out over a longer period of time. Students simply will not be able to attend evening classes every single night of the week; and once students start skipping a class occasionally, it becomes easier and easier to find more excuses to skip class. If you try to schedule classes every day for 5 weeks, I guarantee that you will get very poor overall student attendance - and thus very poor results at the end of the course. I would recommend reducing the number of study days to 2 a week, or at most 3 a week, and extending the number of weeks.
3) You need to pay a lot more attention to development of course materials. You cannot teach (or lecture) from a textbook. I know it's quite common in Chinese schools and universities, but it really is a terrible teaching methodology and most foreign teachers will refuse to do it. The first book you showed me is a self-study book, so it is particularly inappropriate for use as a basis for lectures (though some of it might work OK in small-group classes). The other books you mentioned sound as if they are specialised textbooks on topics like company law and contract law; these are probably much too high level for this kind of course, and again will not really be of much help in providing material for use in class. What you need are textbooks on legal English. Unless you can provide some appropriate books for your teachers to use, there will be a huge amount of preparation work required in order for them to produce their own materials. You're not allowing enough time (or paying enough money) for that preparation work to be done properly - which is the main reason why I think the course will be a bad one.
4) There is a big difference between teaching in a class and teaching in a lecture. If you are going to use both methods, you need to make it clear in your timetable how much of each kind of teaching there will be in each part of the course. In my view, it would probably be better to teach a course like this entirely in classes.
5) I do not believe that a course like this can be delivered effectively via video link only (not even the lecture component, and certainly not classes). I don't think any experienced and principled teacher would agree to this style of teaching for these topics. I would strongly urge you to abandon this idea. If you have students in other cities, you should try to find them teachers based locally so that the course can be delivered properly - in person, in small-group classes.
6) Curriculum design, materials preparation, and teacher recruitment really need to be handled by an experienced senior teacher (maybe not someone who will teach on the course themselves, but someone who would be capable of doing so, someone who understands the demands and difficulties of the content well: that would mean a native English speaker with experience of teaching legal English). Until your company appoints such a person to co-ordinate the course planning, other teachers such as myself are not going to have any confidence in the company or the course.
7) The sample contract you sent me is completely unworkable, ridiculous. I would have to rewrite it almost entirely before I could consider signing it; and I'm sure almost all foreign teachers would feel the same way. No-one is going to agree to work for your company at any time, in any place, for a whole year. There's no point in sending out a contract like that. It is only going to put people off the idea of working for you. That contract really makes a very, very bad impression.
I am sorry to be so blunt, but I really want you to understand why I am so strongly opposed to this course.
I hope you can fix some of these problems and that you will eventually be able to provide a worthwhile course. But I'm afraid I do not believe that you will, and thus I do not want to have any further involvement with this course.
Best regards, Froog
2 comments:
Your instinct is clearly to give this one a wide berth, Froog. Trust that instinct.
Even if the young guy is on the level, this bears all the hallmarks of a nightmare waiting to happen.
My nightmare is that it might happen.
At the moment my instinct is that they're too incompetent to find any teachers or any students; but, under my prodding, they keep revising the intended timetable in the direction of being slightly less ludicrous. I fear that they might now be nearing a point where they might be able to dupe some people into signing up for it.
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