my five years in China, I’ve worked in an international high school, a middle school, a couple training centers, and a kindergarten. Despite taking my work seriously, I often struggled to achieve the results I desired in the classroom. Most vividly, my first experience in a training center (in Shenzhen) began with me dreading work every day but ended in a difficult goodbye. I want to begin by sharing an anecdote about that experience and ultimately give some answers to the simple question that was incessantly burning my brain during that time: “How to make my teaching better?”.

Have you ever regretted taking a job teaching English? Have you worked in different schools or companies? If you’re going to teach English here in China, what type of job fits you the best? Do you even like teaching? These are some important questions I will address in this article.
After just over four years in China, I’ve worked several different types of teaching jobs. They were different in pay, different in intensity, in different cities, had different objectives, different working hours, and I had different levels of satisfaction overall. However, sometimes I get the impression that English teaching all gets lumped into the same category. To start, let’s take a look at some common options for teaching jobs in China.