Company craze....

First 2 days of teaching: Saturday and Sunday. The lessons came out of nowhere. I didn’t see them coming but they had my name on them! It wasn’t the amount of LESSONS that startled me, but more the amount of TIME I was given to prepare and plan what I was going to do in class. The time was minimal. I heard on Friday afternoon that Saturday morning I’d have my first class. Okay… get on top of it Niamh…

But before that happened, this happened: Friday evening after saying ‘yes’ to these lessons and saying it wasn’t too much and I’d have no problems preparing, I heard from one of the other teachers how unfair it was that I was thrown in the deep end like that. I was warned to start standing up for myself, whenever the office staff would be putting the teaching schedule together. I was told that by constantly saying ‘yes’ to whatever they were to throw at me, would start to take its toll on myself and the company AND I’d become known for being… easy…!!!! I was told that it would also start to look bad on the teachers who do say ‘no’… What was all of this ‘stuff’ and that was being thrown at me????????!!!!

Man… I didn’t need to hear this! It was the night before my first day of teaching. I needed to be feeling positive, upbeat and excited, level-headed and at peace! Instead, hearing of how the company treats the teachers was making me feel quite the opposite! My head was suddenly overloaded with what I can only class as ‘unwanted shit’ that I wasn’t easily able to put into perspective. It didn’t help that ‘China’ was happening all around me! Was the culture suddenly becoming a shock to the system, at that one moment when I was feeling a little weaker, a little more vulnerable and slightly less stable for the uncertainty that this company may not be right for me…???? Could very well have been the case…

I needed my little place of peace again. I needed to step away from China, away from the company and the deeper issues that OTHER staff-members have at work. I needed distance. And yes yes yes! I have that place of peace ALWAYS! It’s my apartment, where I temporarily leave the world behind… Fantastic!

It was still Friday evening; still the day before my first lessons. It was probably the hardest day so far. I felt swamped, I felt like some of the other teachers were WAITING and WANTING for me to crumble under the pressure of the full-schedule that was on the horizon for me. I felt they wanted me to already hate this company and to be negative towards the way it works. This could have happened. Because I was feeling so… temporarily lost in a corrupt school that didn’t have the teachers’ best interest at heart. I could have let those warnings and advice (that really were well-intended) bring me down. I could have let this ‘shit’ influence my first lessons and it could have let the start of my Chinese-English-teaching-experience not be a good one…