bluechi
How do you deal with greedy cram school owners who don't appreciate you?
I had a really bad experience at a buxiban in Kaohsiung this last year. My contract is up so I don't mind talking about it, but it's a popular franchise English school in kaohsiung. Other English teachers in Kaohsiung probably know the specific school I'm talking about.
It's a medium size school with 5 foreign teachers and 6 local teachers. It's busy and everyone works really hard to keep things running smoothly.
My issue isn't with the other teachers but the owner/manager. Every single time I get into work he's sitting at the front desk and doesn't even look up to greet me. Almost everyday I would go to my classroom and 5 minutes later he'd come in semi annoyed/angry about something that had happened the previous day. I don't mind getting feedback, it's an important part of working and teaching, but it was the kind of problems he would bring up and the way he told me.
Usually it would be a complaint from a parent of a student, like "my child scored bad on this test" or "why can't my kid speak English as fluently as this other kid". Other times it would be about some pointless part of the curriculum I skipped (because it was literally pointless) or telling me I have to focus more on a particular skill for the students that he had decided needed to be improved, like phonetics, even if they had good phonetics and there were other more important areas to improve.
I don't mind the feedback but the way he approached it every day was bordering on the line of aggressive. And it was never a conversation, it was him angrily talking at me, me nodding, and then he would leave before I could even respond. I don't think he actually cared about fixing the issues he was talking about, it was more his way of asserting his dominance(?) to keep staff inline.
The reason why it bothers me most though was because how hard I worked. I always stayed back late marking work and always had my lessons prepared. Even though he didn't care about the feedback he was giving me I always made sure to put effort into fixing them.
The last straw for me though was when I overheard him talking to one of the parents about me. A mother was talking to him about her child not doing well in some classes and he was blaming me for everything. The way he said it was so demeaning, as though I was a terrible teacher who didn't care about her child and that he had spoken to me but I didn't listen.
It was honestly so humiliating when I realised that's how he spoke to the parents about me. He doesn't put any effort at all to make the classes or curriculum better. He only worries about collecting the exorbitant fees from parents and asserting his dominance to staff.
This is more of a rant to get it off my chest rather than shaming the school. But I just wanted to warn others about how it can be sometimes. If I was to redo the last year I would've quit in the first month and found a better position.