If you want to do it for the long term it’s a good idea to get a teaching degree at some point.
Is it possible to get a teaching degree in Shanghai? Or would you have to put your career on hold for two years while you get a degree in your home country?
If Getting a teaching degree from anywhere will help you get better jobs on the margin. For best results just go with a teaching degree from the country that the school you're working at follows. I presume there's one US university that offers M.Ed.s as correspondence courses. For the UK I believe the University of Sutherland and the Open University both do so, and for Australia the University of New South Wales.
Ten RMB is worth approximately 10 pounds sterling, so at a guess 15 dollars
Not even close. 10 RMB is approximately 1 GBP, or 1.6 USD.
As brainfarts go that is pretty embarassing. If a mod could alter it that would be cool. The idea of editing a post on my phone does not appeal.
Expat men prefer dating local women, but expat women practically never date local men
Is there any hard evidence on this, or is it just the usual scuttlebutt?
I know three guys married to Chinese girls and one in a long term relationship. In more than six months in Shanghai I can recall seeing only one obvious couple where it was a Chinese (looking) guy and a Western girl. Some women understandably get bitter here. Stepping off the plane is like aging ten years and gaining twenty pounds.
Plenty of people are doing things of questionable legality in China and not getting in trouble, the government may or may not turn a blind eye depending of the issue, and of whether you're Chinese or a foreigner (a common complaint of foreigners trying to start businesses in China is having to deal with regulations that their local competitors don't seem to comply with). Selling drugs to kids would be an extremely stupid move, but as far as I know the government used to close it's eyes to foreigners selling drugs to each other (though that was pre-olympics, I wouldn't be surprised if they cleaned things up since then).
Selling English tutoring to kids shouldn't be that risky (unless you're sleeping with them, or converting them to Christianity, or black, or something - or unless there's a big story in the news about some evil foreigner abusing his position as a tutor to sleep with his students, sell drugs and convert them to Christianity).
I did give lessons in China, but as far as I know it was legal (or in the grey area).
If there's enough interest to get this throwaway five upvotes I'll do a discussion article on teaching English in Shanghai.
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Thank you so much for this article! Definitely the most helpful teaching English article I've read on the net.
What qualifications do you need to teach business English? I have a bachelor's in Philosophy, and I'm planning to get a 120 TESOL in May, with a 40 hour Business English module on top. Would that be enough?
Also, is it possible to transition from teaching English to some other job in Shanghai (like coding or something)?
You become a Business English teacher by teaching some people and preparing so well that your lack of expeeience doesn't really show and doing that over and over again until you know what you're doing. Fake it 'til you make it. If you want to know more about visas and transferring and changing categories I'm the wrong person to ask. I strongly suspect that shifting fields like that violates the letter of the law. Go ask in shanghaiexpat's visa forum/thread. If you can code factual.com seem to always be hiring if one looks at tgeir HN who's hiring thread history. Or perhaps email one of the people at techyizu.org. The local startup scene is their thing. IIRC meetup.com has a few relevant groups as well. Feel free to say if you learn anything in comments.
Thanks for provoking me to write this.