Teaching in Beijing
Three years in Beijing — ESL, first-grade homeroom, and a phonics program. I still sell teaching resources on Teachers Pay Teachers.
After coming back from playing poker in Latin America, I had a couple job interviews in the US and none of them felt like good options — the pay, the work, what I’d actually be doing. Teaching in China made more sense: demand for English teachers was extremely high, pay was relatively good, you get apartments and benefits. Beijing is an extremely modern city. It just seemed like a better option than anything else available.
I generally enjoy teaching. I’d done some volunteer ESL work with refugees at Michigan State, and being around kids, helping them learn — there’s a lot to like about it compared to most jobs. Not a perfect fit for me, but a decent one.
Year one: National Day School
First through fifth graders, about 16 different classes, roughly 40 students per class. I saw each class once or twice a week. You never actually get to know any of your students at that volume.
It wasn’t very me. Extremely basic English — songs, flashcards, simple vocabulary — just trying to get kids engaged and saying stuff. But as a first job in Beijing, it was way better than a lot of other options.
Huijia International School
Year two, I moved to Huijia and the setup changed. Instead of rotating through a ton of classes, I had two first-grade homerooms — about 40 students total, shared with a Chinese homeroom teacher. The same kids all day.
That fit me better because I could control my classroom. My own room, my own students, my own systems, my own way of doing things. I became team lead for the first-grade English department — four foreign teachers, keeping everyone on the same page. The only school where I actually got to see how kids grow over a year.
It was also exhausting. Management politics, crappy demands, teachers who weren’t really qualified, lack of curriculum or support.
While at Huijia, I was also working on All Language Resources in my free time and studying for my TeacherReady certification program. Pretty busy.
Phonics
My last year, I moved to a public school with lower pay but more free time — ALR was getting traction and I needed hours for the business. But the teaching itself was the best it had been. A business guy at the school was testing a phonics curriculum, and I got to go deep on systematic phonics instruction.
I built out the system — teaching phonetic sounds over a semester, tracking improvement. Made phonics cards and hired someone on Fiverr to illustrate them with decodable example sentences. Started selling the materials on Teachers Pay Teachers. They still generate some small royalties.
The phonics work was the part of teaching I enjoyed most. Understanding how children learn to decode written language and then building a system to teach it — that was genuinely interesting.
Where I stand on teaching
Mixed feelings. Appreciative of what the opportunity was at the time. It’s genuinely good work. But it’s not a great fit for me long-term. The sensory environment — noise, social demands, politics — is draining in ways that probably connect to the autism, beyond normal job fatigue.