Gives you bare minimum pay per hour and claims he/she has all these costs to pay for: electricity, rent, etc and is unable to pay you more, but after 1 year can give you a rise and claims to have all these amazing bonuses which you CAN’T meet.
e.g. 50NT bonus if your students attendance in your class is over 80% throughout the duration of the course. (If students cancel, then that also counts!)
After 1 year, gives you a pay increase of 20NT. (Wow!)
If you come in to the buxiban to do the prep work and turn on the air conditioning, he/she will talk to the admin staff and say ‘‘Why is he here at this time when we have no classes, wasting my electricity!’’
Get’s teachers to call students and encourage them to come to class, rather than the admin staff, as to make it sound less ‘‘I want your money!’’ to the students.
I want to know, are there any buxiban bosses you have worked for who is NOT stingy!
I recently was asked by one of my Chinese co-teachers to sub for her class in the following week as she had some admin duties to perform. This class has only 4 junior high students who don’t want to say a word in class, so i asked her to copy the 4 pages of the textbook used so i could take it home and prepare some activities for the class. She came back 5 mins later and told me she wasn’t allowed to copy the book for teachers, only for students who forget to bring their books.
In the five years of experience I have here, I find them all to be stingy.
Have to keep in mind that it is a business to them, so keeping costs as low as possible is their goal.
Drives me up the damn wall though that it takes an act of God to get a copy made from a book, or to turn on the a/c for more then five minutes before the class starts. New what one my school does is that you can not turn the a/c below 26c. I however turn it way below that to get the room cooled off, then back to their rather high value of 26 (yes I know about the new ‘law’ that businesses are to have their a/c at this number, this however started at my school way before the ‘law’ came about this summer).
I get away with ‘breaking the unwritten rules’ more then the Chinese teachers, but they are scared when I turn on all the lights in the classroom or make copies without signing all the proper documentation that they have in place near the copy machine.
Figure the worse they can do is fire me, and in this country it is easy enough to find a new school. And on pay raises, same idea goes. They dont want to pay more after a year or more, then look for another school, give a one month notice at your current school. They will either pay more or not care and you go to another school.
When I first arrived the standard pay was 600nt an hour, this was five years ago. They standard is still the same, however cost of living has increased over the last five years, so I am a firm believer that our pay (even the ‘overpaid’ English teacher) should increase as well. In the last year I left one of my two school for better pay (800nt now) and my other school has played ball and are paying me the same now, so playing hard ball can work out for you, even with the stingy boss at play.
For me, whimsicality acts as a screening or jamming mechanism that prevents me from determining clearly what sorts of ordinary traits are at work in a situation. Then there’s the secondary or “sympathetic” (in the sense of a sympathetic explosion) whimsicality that occurs on my side of things, in response to the primary whimsicality.
In other words, I can’t clearly detect stinginess because there’s so much other stuff going on, and much of the time the other stuff gets me to a point where I’m pretty wigged out myself.
I mean, if Salvador Dali or Groucho Marx were trying to snooker you, how could you tell?
To add to the confusion: with a fair frequency, management has done things that have simultaneously benefited me and gone against its own interests, including its financial interests.
Well, heck, you’ve made me think in writing, so to speak: I guess, at least as to me, no, I can’t say my boss is stingy.
Dammit, they buy toilet tissue and manually CUT THE TISSUES IN HALF! Before, the kids would take one tissue with them to the toilet. Now they take two. Are these people utterly thick?
If I take my kids out of the classroom for a minute, the CT drone is instructed to switch off the air conditioner and the neon lights. Despite me telling them that it uses considerably more electricity to keep turning the lights and AC on and off than just leaving the damn things on, my logic falls on deaf ears.
These morons spend something like 200k on their “graduation” performances. When I request NT$300 for dry ice to use in my show, I’m told it’s “too expensive”.
None of the CD players function at my school. I’m told that I don’t teach the songs enough. I can’t play the fecking songs because the CD players don’t work. I’ve been at this school for nine years, and they have not once replaced the NT$1000 CD players. Kinda counter-productive, eh?
They spend a fortune every year printing promotional pamphlets for the school and then dump them in the mail-boxes of OLD PEOPLE AND NEWLY-WEDS! Have they no sense of marketing?
The absolute stupidity overwhelms me.
We won’t even speak about the cheap soap that doesn’t lather.
[quote]We won’t even speak about the cheap soap that doesn’t lather.[/quote]We have this at my school. What I do is rub it on the back of my hand where the hair can get it to lather up, but that only works if it still has 50% of it’s volume.
My current school isn’t cheap. I have worked for schools that were though. :fume:
It’s my choice to do cooking, so I pay for all the food. I even pay more for some organically grown leafy vegetables. To their credit, the class understood the “no bad things” [used to grow them] meaning of organic.
We have a good yap about eating vegetables raw, not needing to heat up a kitchen, etc.
Then it’s time to get cooking: I ask 2 students to go to the kitchen and get some pots and clean water to rinse the vegetables in. Organically grown or not, we still have to give them a rinse.
The kids come back with empty pots - they tell me we can’t use the drinking water to rinse the vegetables.
[quote=“TheGingerMan”]Why wouldn’t one’s boss be stingy? These are not the heady days of yesteryear! It’s far more of a competitive marketplace. Dog eat dog; eat cat, too.
Get back to work![/quote]That right! Get back to work, slackers!
