'A Step Down the Drain': Why Young Chinese Teachers Refuse Homeroom Duty
At the start of the school year, Chinese teachers celebrate dodging the homeroom-teacher post — a job of 6am-to-10pm days, report-prone parents and a few hundred yuan a month — in a standoff now sitting near the top of Baidu's hot list.
At Chinese schools this week, the start of the autumn term has brought the annual ritual of homeroom-teacher selection — and scenes that teachers themselves describe in draft-lottery terms. Those picked for the job are "wailing as if life were over," while those passed over "want to set off firecrackers and celebrate for a week," as one viral explainer put it; across Chinese social media the selection meeting has been likened to Thailand's military conscription draw, where a red slip means years of service and a black one means freedom. A trending hashtag asked the obvious question: with a monthly allowance of a few hundred yuan on offer, why does no one want the job?
The homeroom teacher (班主任) is a fixture of Chinese schooling with no exact equivalent elsewhere: one teacher, on top of a full teaching load, made personally responsible for a single class — attendance, discipline, morale, hallways, parent contact, safety, from morning roll call at six to the end of evening self-study at ten. A widely shared explainer by the Haibao News, liked more than 4,000 times, distilled the complaints into three: hours that outlast the students', an impossible management line — "discipline them strictly and parents report you; go easy and the leadership criticizes you" — and unlimited responsibility stapled to minimal pay.
"A step down the drain"
The genre's defining exchange came when a young teacher asked whether the post counts as career advancement. The most-liked answer: it counts as "a step down the drain" (往下水道走). Behind the joke is a genuine reversal — the homeroom post was once the classic rung toward leadership, and the fact that young teachers now dodge it is a verdict on the job, not on ambition.
The discussion has produced proposals as well as complaints. Geng Xiangshun, an education commentator, argued that schools should create full-time homeroom teachers who do no teaching at all — managing one class's daily affairs, much like the counselors who shepherd Chinese university classes — "so that those who teach can teach, and those who manage students manage." His post described the current job as acting as dad and mom around the clock while being criticized, reported and bad-mouthed, for an allowance that is "not even hardship pay." The topic sat at No. 3 on Baidu's hot list on Monday, evidence the argument has escaped the staff room.
It also lands in a strained season for Chinese teachers, as we covered last week: late August concentrates inspection season, new-class assignments and parent friction into the same fortnight. And the standoff has a demographic floor beneath it — births fell to 7.92 million in 2025, down from more than twice that a few years ago, shrinking the school-age population that once made teaching a guaranteed-crowd profession, as one widely reposted comment under the hashtag noted.
The fixes being urged reduce to three words that have been circulating for days — less workload, back teachers up, pay them properly (减负、撑腰、提待遇). Until one of them arrives, schools enter the new year holding a post that nobody wants and somebody must take.