I think Ishmael is right. The article is exaggerating and/or mostly to do with people who are not on the up and up. To make sweeping generalizations that no one should come to China to teach is bad advice and ridiculous.
Janjal may also be right in that this will be beneficial in the long-term.
And cloudtrapezer is also correct. There are many things about China that are actually better than back home. Many things are frustrating, but in some ways China is better. You have to make the best of wherever you are and learn to live with the problems and obstacles.
Lesson plans are prepared in your own time, not paid, in most places. You can spend several hours on some lesson plans that only last an hour.
If an employer then grabs the IP and sells it as their own, usually because they are too mean to buy books, I would get upset.
If an employer wants me to prepare course materials, and they pay me for it, no problem.
IP, seriously? Mummy bear went shopping and bought a toy train for baby bear.
You could also write your own book. Lots of English teachers do you know. Or set up a useful website and monetise it.
I agree with you about unpaid lesson planning, marking etc. but that surely applies to teaching jobs back home? Are they paid separately or just supposed to be covered by overall salary?
So cloudtrapezer joins the right-wing crusade to devalue and trivialize the work of educators, and does so in spectacularly snide and condescending fashion: "IP, seriously? Mummy bear went shopping and bought a toy train for baby bear."
Leaving aside the blatant idiocy of reducing all education to a pre-school caricature: you're right, why shouldn't everyone give away their work product for free? Let's have musicians release their songs free of charge! Let's allow plagiarism! Abolish the copyright and patent laws!
What garbage.
Teachers sharing their lesson plans with other teachers on a collegial basis is fine, but we are talking about deliberate and underhanded efforts by for-profit schools to extract work product for free. It's bizarre that anyone would support that.
Yes, tiger has a point, cloud too. And I've taught ESL in the US on an hourly basis (US20/hr., 1997-9 - employer was the State of Florida, no health insurance), prep time was not paid for, and no guarantee of the number of hours per week from semester to semester. McDonaldization of society. This generally led to underemployment, not overwork. Comparative situation of course, not necessarily relevant to teaching in China.
@Herenow: right, underhanded, bad. For-profit. 'Socialist market economy'. Honesty would be better.
Where When? Come on. I was satirizing the pompous use of the term Intellectual Property. I seriously doubt even American lawyers would have a stab at working out which part of a lesson plan belonged to which teacher. There is so much material on the web, lying around in staff rooms and so on. To say nothing about the generalized misuse of IP by patent trolls and multinationals as a tax on the economy in general and poor countries in particular.
@cloud: thumbdown was a mistake.
