Having said that I don't agree with the blurb in the recruitment posts, in my last blog I mentioned that many foreign teachers were completely unprepared for just how little China knows about the rest of the world.
I don't mean to infer that before arriving in China its necessary to do a quick course on the combined histories and social mores of every country outside of China's borders. What I am trying to stress is that its NOT enough just to be able to speak English. Its also necessary to change your entire worldview a complete 360 degrees and prepare for a complete re-thinking of what you considered to be "the world".
Even if you have travelled widely and/or lived in a variety of cultures, if you haven't been to China before then most of the places you have been will have common points of reference.
From South Africa to Papua New Guinea people understand what's meant by The Second World War. From Switzerland to Australia they've heard of Hollywood and Queen Elizabeth the Second. We tend to think of film stars as being universally known; the impact of rap has been felt from Mombai to Wellington:- we regard points of commonality as extending around the globe.
China, however, although being a culture that has endured for 5,000 years, has done so without reference to the world outside what is now known as China proper, its closely neighbouring countries, and small areas that the average Westerner has never heard of.
All the huge empires of the West were commonly influenced by movements such as The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, The Industrial Revolution, Colonialism, Feminism, Hippiedom and Greenpeace. Certain cult movements such as the Dungeons and Dragons phenomenon; musical protest groups and things such as Live Aid; "Worldwide" news events like the Princess Di hype are considered to have permeated every prominent culture in the modern world.
I personally have discussed the British Royals with a Chimbu tribesman in the central New Guinea Highlands; Michael Jackson's nose with Zulu villagers and the old group Cream with a family of remote cattle herders in a peasant hut hidden in the depths of the European Alps.
But in China, a civilisation which remained static for most of the course of history, the majority of these events went by unnoticed.
Since the brutal power quests by Nationalist and Communist forces began at the end of Dynastic rule the average Chinese was more concerned with survival than with the assassination of archdukes, the abdication of foreign kings or the invasion of unheard-of small European countries.
During the Mao era food was an all-encompassing concern which left no time for strange entertainers who ate their guitars; who held press conferences from their beds, appeared on-stage in their underwear or heroes who wore theirs on the outside.
Although the Opening and Expansion took place 30 years ago those thirty years have been a time for clawing themselves up first from the remnants of a feudal and then a militaristic society for most Chinese. There's been no energy left over to learn about people who painted their fingernails black, or cut their hair like cockatoos, or shaved their heads and wore workmen's boots from choice rather than necessity.
The relevance of all this for those who come to teach in China is immense. I have sat in Starbucks while foreign teachers have told of standing speechless in front of an entire class while their carefully prepared lesson for the day containing quizzes and discussions about "well-known" popular idols was met with blank looks and incomprehension.
I've comforted colleagues who don't want to get out of bed because their last class which was carefully structured to include components of general knowledge was received in stony silence.
And I howled into my own soggy pillow for hours after my utter inability to reach behind any of the polite smiles the first time I presented a class on popular music.
When all of the above is coupled with a profound lack of geographical knowledge of any place in the world which does not exist within Chinese borders some teachers arrive at the conclusion of Chinese arrogance or xenophobia. Indeed for those who love to slap quick, neat labels on sociological groups: - while the Germans get labelled collectively as humourless and/or disciplined, the English as either a nation of football hooligans or the sexually frigid and the Americans as loud and overbearing, the Chinese are inevitably thought of as either arrogant or inscrutable.
The sad, sad thing is that these stereotypes, as is the nature of stereotypes generally, once disseminated into the province of received knowledge,become very hard to dislodge. Those who have spent time in China totally misunderstanding that it is their own inability to imagine a worldview different from the one they assume to be common to the "whole" world, inadvertently spread these misconceptions.
If the idea that the only qualification for teaching in China was the ability to name objects and concepts in the English tongue was qualified only slightly, there is a good chance that a lot of the misconceptions that exist and get perpetuated between the East and the West could be dispelled.
Armed with only a little preparation, supplied with a modicum of knowledge, made aware of the huge and disparate connotations which attach to the concept of education in China and the West, it is possible that those "who grew up speaking English" could play a much more important and positive role here than they currently do.
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