Thursday, March 29, 2007

Under Investigation

Ok, I'm a good liberal, certainly no supporter of Bush and his cronies, but I must confess to a certain sympathy for him and his buddies during the various scandals that have been going on. Scooter Libby, Alberto Gonzales, Harriet Myers, et al, are currently or recently under investigation/on trial for assorted misdeeds. I won't rehash it all, either you know about it or not, the important thing here is the investigation itself. How it makes you feel, the effect it has on your life.
I'm a good teacher. I know this, I feel this viscerally and I can measure it in the rapport and relationship I have with my students. Teaching English as a foreign language is a bit different from teaching math, say, or history: many aspects are the same, but the goal is different. My primary job is to get people to speak, to help them gain confidence, and learn how to communicate in their own way. The tests don't really matter, and honestly, it's almost entirely irrelevant whether they can identify the past perfect continuous in a non-defining relative clause. So I don't worry about that. Can they communicate, can they use whatever English they have to express themselves, and how confident are they when they do it? Those are the questions I ask, and by that measure, I know I've made progress.
But and so. Someone complained. I don't know who, though I've got a pretty good idea, I don't know the specific nature of the complaint, though the general sense I've been told was "boring", and I don't know if it was me specifically or my co-teacher or the course in general, which I refuse to take responsibility for since I don't choose the books, nor am I the one pressuring the teachers to adhere to the material, finish the material, and make terminally boring lessons entertaining. But the complaint was made and we are under investigation.
In typically underhanded fashion, Profi and my manager have yet to contact me about this. I learned about it first when the secretary said I had to give a questionnaire to my students. It's in Polish, so I asked what it was about. They told me it was about Profi's service in general. Having learned long ago not to trust them, I had it translated. 11 questions, all about me specifically.
Now, responses have been overwhelmingly positive. Not a single one has come back with more than one negative response of any kind, and 14 out of 15 are entirely positive. But for several days I felt really shitty. I questioned everything I'd done in the last year or so, wondering what had happened, doubting my own judgment and abilities, trying to think of what I could've/should've done differently. And ultimately, I realized, nothing. This whole thing is an overreaction on my manager's part, especially considering that Profi apparently has been hemorrhaging students for the last couple years, largely due to mismanagement. Yet, having done nothing wrong, I felt guilty and insecure. It's a distressing feeling and I'm sure it's magnified a great deal when you have to go before a hostile congressional committee, that, regardless of the truth, wants to shed some blood. So, Al, Harriet, Scooter, I'm sorry about all this, I do sympathize, can't do much from here for you, but, wait a minute, there's some fellas in Guantanamo who might understand, why don't you give them a call?

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