I heard that Mr. D. D wrote about us, English Quest. on a website.
I would like to express my opinion about his posting.
I admit there are some native English teachers I have got in trouble with.
D. was one of them. I have found that there is one characteristic they have in common, which I am very poor at handling or…..probably I was born to have no skills to deal with. I mean, people who don’t keep their words/promises always become a disaster.
When they breach their commitments (though they do so on the basis of their own way of thinking, causes, or views, which they believe right), I usually stand in a situation where I feel I have no other choice than to choose one of the two decisions: To go along with their new requests/rules, or to run away from them. I’m maybe wrong, but such teachers sometimes seem to be thinking that it should be accepted by me as a matter of course or at least they would be able to start a new negotiation with me.
As for me, I just fall in a helpless situation and tend to choose the latter, running away from them and that was exactly the case D. had experienced, which ended up with the cancellation of his employment. It was very expensive decision for me (my company had already spent more than 120,000 yen to rent an apartment for him to live in and to support his moving) but I had no choice… his words were no longer the same as what ‘we’ heard (I always conduct a job interview with my company’s staff to secure a witness) and I became unable to write the contract due to losing the basis of our mutual agreement.
Now I feel sorry that he had to leave Japan because I could not accept him in the way he thought I should. It seemed that he changed what he said just because it was more advantageous to him, giving almost no consideration to me. On the other hand, I always fear too much to get decieved/hurt by such kind of native teachers. You could say I was overreacted…but..it couldn’t be helped…
One thing I’d like to refer to is that we hadn’t given him (and taken his time to have him attend) any kind of training, though he mentioned it on his posting. He only visited English Quest twice. The first visit was made to show him the location of our school and the apartment for him to reside in. I don’t think he stayed more than three minutes in the classroom where the class was being conducted by our teachers. The second visit was to discuss the details about the position. This time he had stayed about an hour. That’s all.
I wish him all the best with his life in Hiroshima.
Kazuko
