What is you grateful and bitchin orientation?
0 voters
When I was a teacher, I was grateful and I was bitchin’.
I still am bitchin’.
(When you post a poll, you have to have one blank option or it will leave off the last one.)
A lot of the tension occurs because of an essential cultural difference. We in the West were brought up in a squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease complaint culture. Those in Taiwan were brought up in a put-up-and-shut-up-with-a-graceful-smile-on-your-face Confucian culture.
If you happened to read my post in “I Like Teaching in Taiwan”, you’ll get some background on my situation about teaching at a private high school. I just went through a horrendous two weeks oral testing students as an attempt to obtain some meaningful marks for them. The last two weeks of follow-up to this have been tiring and stressful too as about half the students in most of my classes have failed. Without repeating my last post, I’ll go on to say that I asked the school for a second foreign teacher at the school in the hopes that we could divide out the slower students from those who are passing.
Note: Mod Lang - this is for you. I ran into the exact cultural difference you mentioned in your post above. I argued logically and rationally for a second teacher and brought out some pretty good points. Am I going to get a second teacher? Of course not. Put up and shut up. So, I come home exhausted every day with no hope of things getting any better. With 36 to 55 students per class, some inevitably fall through the cracks. They are low level students to begin with, the books ordered for them last year are much too advanced and with a 45 minute per week class, there is little I can inject into my teaching to get these students up to a passing grade.
I don’t know…I got a new classroom added on just for me instead of floating and I didn’t even ask for it. I mentioned that I wished I had time to do more for my students and I got a teaching assistant to help with my prep. I wouldn’t call what I did as bitching or even complaining; I think I just got lucky to work for a great school…I do bitch about all the hours (which for a full-day program is just right, nevermind the fact that I work for fewer than 200 days a regular school year or 260 days if I work the entire summer camp program), but that’s because I need something to gripe about or it just wouldn’t be right. There doesn’t seem to be a “grateful and only pretending to bitch” category in the poll. Okay, okay…I’ll shut up about how nice my school is.
:mrgreen:
i feel like the most important person to include in discussions at school is me, yet i am always the last to find out…