Teach Abroad Blog
Teaching abroad
International School Employment in Beijing, China
Our mission at Teaching Nomad is to help make the process of finding a teaching job in China a little easier. I know from personal experience how daunting it can be when you are looking for a job in another country and how scary the whole process can be. Our goal is to help make the transition easier. We want to help teachers all around the world find great schools to work for. In addition, we personally interview every teacher to make sure that we know what kind of job they want. We never try to push teachers into jobs that aren’t right for them.
Just as we need to get to know teachers before we place them with jobs, we also need to get to know the schools. We make an effort to visit the schools we work with to get to know the staff and see the campus. We want to make sure that teachers will have the best experience possible while teaching in China.
We most recently went to visit one of our international schools in Beijing. This school is located in the Changping district of Beijing, about an hour from the downtown area. The school includes many benefits such as free housing on the school’s campus, paid winter break, health insurance and great pay. The school is great for teachers with international teaching experience and IB experience as they are now accredited as an IB institution. The campus is huge and almost all of the students from grades K-12 live on campus.
The day that we went to visit the school, all of the staff were getting ready to go on an evening outing into downtown Beijing to watch the Chinese acrobatic show. Since the school isn’t exactly in downtown Beijing, it’s really great that the school makes an effort to make different parts of the city more accessible to teachers. The school arranges a lot of outings like this for their teachers from big dinners with local government officials to trips to the Great Wall. From just the short amount of time that we spent at the school, we could tell that the teachers and staff are really a tight knit community. The school has even opened a bar on the campus for the staff to hang out and spend time in. The facilities on campus really are state of art. When we first walked up to the school, one of the first things we noticed was the huge driving range on campus for the student’s to practice their golf skills. We toured the primary school and were amazed by the quality of the art and the performances the students put on and create. After seeing the effects of the educational budget cuts in America, it is refreshing to see schools thriving with enough money to sponsor an abundance of recreational and extracurricular activities for students.
Overall, we thought this school was excellent and that it represents a great potential opportunity for teachers looking to teach abroad. The city of Beijing itself is a great place to live with an endless number of hutongs to visit, Great Wall trails to hike and Peking duck to eat.
Click here to check out just one of the great positions available!
By Sophia Isis, Business Development Specialist
Teaching Nomad is an American owned and operated education Recruitment Company based in Shanghai, China. Our goal and purpose is to help great teachers find great teaching jobs. Year round, we have hundreds of teaching job vacancies. Whether your goal is to be an ESL teacher or teach in an international school, we have a teaching job for you. You can browse jobs online at www.teachingnomad.com/job-search for the latest job openings. Teaching Nomad is here to make teaching in China easier, so please feel free to reach out and contact us with any questions or enquiries!
How studying multiple languages can benefit a child’s future
Largely thanks to the position of English as the world’s second language, here in the UK we can sometimes become a little complacent about learning second languages. After all, if everywhere you go the chances of someone speaking English is fairly high, there is rarely that much of an incentive.
However, by overlooking the need for further language skills, we could be missing out on the potential benefits of language skills. This is especially true of our children, as it has been proved that learning a second language in developing years has many long-term cognitive benefits.
Teach in China and let the adventures begin!
I came to Shanghai, China in 2011 to teach English and since then, there hasn’t been a dull moment. From all of my experiences, my trip to Guilin is one of my favorite experiences. While in this area, I went with some friends to visit Dragon’s Backbone rice terraces. We had a hotel reserved in the Dazhai area of the terraces, so we took a bus to Dazhai from Guilin. On the way up, there was so much rainfall that it caused a mud slide, which caused the road to become completely blocked by all the dirt. It was a little difficult to figure out what was happening since the bus driver only spoke Chinese, but it turned out that we needed to walk over the land side where another bus driver would come and pick us up. When we finally arrived at the terraces, we were completely lost. From the point where the bus dropped off to our hotel, it ended up being about a 2 ½ hour trek up and down the terraces to get there. I guess it was just lucky that two of us were carrying backpacks. Our friend without a backpack had one of the Chinese sherpas take her bag to our hotel for only 40 RMB.
Living Abroad
3 Great Mountains to Visit this October Holiday
China’s five most renowned mountains, or Wu Yue 五岳, have been summited for several millennia, and should be on the to-do list of every china-enthusiast. Because of time-constraints (the October holiday is only seven days long), we will only discuss three today. For pointers on how to combine travelling with a teaching carreer, click here!
Letters and Numbers in Chinese Internet Slang
The use of Letters and Numbers in Chinese Internet Slang
Most internet users know what the expressions U2 (you too) or ttyl (talk to you later) mean. Online, or in text messages many of us use acronyms to save time, but this phenomenon isn’t just limited to the English language. Over the past few years, the use of letters and numbers has become increasingly popular among Chinese netizens. Not just for the sake of brevity, but also to avoid widespread censorship. Disclaimer: As is true of most internet language, many of these expressions can be offensive.
- 88 拜拜 (bai bai)
Typed at the end of a conversation, 88 simply means goodbye. The Chinese word for 8 八 (ba) sounds like the character拜(bai), the transliteration of the English “bye”
- 3Q 三Q (san Q)
This simply is an informal transliteration of thank (三san, as the “th” is hard for Chinese to pronounce) you (Q)。
- PS Photoshop
This English expression is also popular on the Chinese internet. Netizens sometimes use “PS” to comment on (profile) pictures of girls, implying that Photoshop was used to make the actually ugly girl look beautiful.
- 250 二百五 er bai wu & 2 二 (er)
In Chinese (internet/popular) culture these words have more-or-less the same meaning, and are used to describe an imbecile. It can be playfully used between two friends when either one does something silly, but when used between strangers it is an insult.
- 38 三十八 (san shi ba)/三八 (san ba)
Someone who is 38 tends to gossip. 他很三十八- he is very gossipy. The word can be both a noun and adjective.
- 555…
Any number of fives (五wu) sounds like 呜 （wu）an onomatopoeia for crying. E.g. I failed my midterm 5555555 🙁
- BT 变态(bian tai)
BT is an expression that recently became very popular. Often translated as psycho, the meaning is usually not that intense. It can both be used to describe a person who is abnormal or even perverted, as well as to describe a crazy action (adj). The meaning varies greatly as singing in public (silly) as well as groping a girl on the subway (perverted) can be described as BT.
- SB/2B 傻屄 (sha bi)
Chinese kids may tell you SB simply means some body after having called you an SB, but the real meaning is actually very offensive. SB literally means stupid (傻) cunt (屄). Because 2 resembles S in shape, SB is sometimes written as 2B. Also, the character屄 is rarely used, and instead another word with the same pronunciation is written (e.g.逼).
- NB = 牛屄 (niu bi)
When someone does something really cool or amazing (厉害 li hai), online commenters sometimes type NB, which simply means “awesome” or “badass”. Occasionally it is used to describe the opposite: a person pretending to be cool. A poser, tool or 装逼(zhuang bi). As is true of many (Chinese) words, the meaning usually depends on the context. Any character with the “bi” sound can be substituted for (屄). E.g. 牛逼/牛比
- TMD 他妈的 (ta ma de)
TMD simply means damn it, and is used when bad news is received.
Chinese Proverbs
Chinese and English are two radically different languages, each with a long and rich history. Both languages evolved independently from each other, which makes any similarities all the more interesting. Today we will discuss some Chinese proverbs (諺語 yànyŭ) and idioms (成語 chéngyŭ) that have—almost exact—English equivalents. Does this mean that these expressions are universal truths; identical ideas that have developed on opposite ends of the world? Maybe, let us know what you think.
