I’m a decent instructor. I know language teachers who are better than I am.
You are right, though, that I have no sense of company loyalty. I routinely encourage people’s blackmailing buxiban owners, exposing ridiculous or illegal contract clauses, siphoning students from former employers, and ruining former employers’ businesses if they pose a threat or are relevant competition.
But honestly, if any buxiban were serious about keeping someone, it would pay a competitive wage to do so. I find people who are willing to pay more for my services (which for Ermintrude must be a total mystery), so I can slash, burn, and move on. I care about my students, and I would be happy if they would be willing to follow me wherever I may go. However, I’m realistic about the lengths people are willing to travel to learn from me, so I just recommend to them that they leave if the next teacher isn’t good.
I’ve since found the gig (which is not in language instruction, but which is language-oriented) that I wanted, though, and I partly thank my Machiavellian tendencies for landing it.
But getting off Ermintrude’s false conjectures about me, and halfway re-railing the thread…
The alternative is to focus on a student’s knowledge and conduct and to reward students for good work instead of your rewarding yourself for making them feel better at a 1% rate of success. If a student doesn’t care to be good at a productive skill, and if he wants to make it difficult for people who do, he’s a dick, no matter his age or excuses for being a dick. For the ages that I teach, being decent is a choice, and if a student doesn’t want to make that choice, it’ll cost them more in 面子 than he can afford.
I’ve got demons, regrets, traumas, and baggage. The last thing in the world that I want or need on top of them is hired empathy, so the most empathetic thing that I can do in such cases is to leave them to lead their lives while I do my job of helping them retain a lexicon of a few thousand headwords and phrases and arrange them in syntactically acceptable and contextually relevant ways before they hit the nth grade. But if they don’t want my help, I won’t give them a second glance. As long as they’re quiet, I can focus on the ones who care.