by Eric Betend » Fri Sep 06, 2013 10:57 pm
Two additional chapters.
The canteen staff
This is how I have seen canteen staff behaving:
- I have seen a man smoking a cigar in the kitchen hall (ground floor), in front of teachers having their lunch, and not hiding in the least.
- I have seen nursery school kitchen staff feeding stray dogs in the playground area, where children were playing. Stray dogs consequently keep coming to the school during day and night. One security officer got severely bitten one morning but the management did not care. Dog’s pooh is occasionally found on the school playground areas.
Although I formally complained about the dogs being fed in the premises of the school - students play with the dirty dogs, tease them, and one day one will get bitten -, nothing has changed. People just told me that I do not love animals!
- I have seen women serving food serving very tiny portions of food to students, despite students’ complaints. Later on, the same ladies would fill plastic bags with all the remaining food, for their families (and their dogs!).
- I have seen children eating with their hands because there were not enough forks and knives. It happens very often at lunchtime.
- Every lunchtime, many children cannot drink because there are not enough glasses for all of them.
- I have seen children not allowed to sit around the lunch tables outside although there were no seats for them inside.
- The young children of one colleague, attending the nursery section, got severely sick eating at the canteen. She asked the teaching staff to make sure her children would be given a special diet she prepared for them. The nursery staff never did it properly, which caused the mother a lot of stress.
- I have seen teachers not getting food (although teachers from the Prep school are entitled to get lunch in the canteen), because the vice-principal came the same morning and said there might not be enough food for everybody, so that teachers could not get served.
Canteen staff is far from being professional, neither is the management.
Management
This is probably why the situation cannot change at GAU. I think the personality of a classroom teacher really influences the behavior and general attitude of its class. The same goes for a bartender. He will get the customers corresponding to its personality. Likewise, a manager will get employees that somehow look like him, as he is the one who hires them, directly or indirectly.
When I arrived at GAU, there was an expatriate principal in charge of the “family of schools” (all sections except the university). He was trying hard but he had to leave during the school year as he was hit with a lot of personal problems. Needless to write that the coordinator of the “family of schools” was never replaced : that was one less salary to be paid !
The “family of schools” vice-principal became principal and an obscure gentleman took on, or so it seems as things were not clearly defined, the vice-principal position. What was he doing in the school ? He had never been a teacher, nor a manager. In fact, he was just closely-related to the owner. If the new principal seemed to know a bit about education (despite her bullying manners), the new vice-principal knew as much about education as a crocodile.
The vice-principal appointed himself year 12 PE teacher. Other PE teachers told me he was a disaster. He was not qualified. I could somehow feel that at the beginning of the year when I saw him at GAU swimming pool. He was giving private swimming tuitions to a child but he seemed to me he could himself barely swim! He is arrogant (he sometimes parks his car within the premises of the school, just a few meters away from my classroom, even if GAU has a huge parking lot for the staff), he spends his time giving peremptory, most of the time silly orders to be executed as soon as possible, without consulting people in the least. That kind of management (which I call bullying) is typical of GAU top management.
He probably suffers for an inferiority complex: he would probably have loved to make a career in the army, and for some reason could not. As a year 12 PE teacher, he drives them in the mountains, go back to school on his own, and they have to find and walk their way back. He says he prepares them for the army. Is that the goal of PE education?
One recurrent joke at GAU, among teachers from the Prep School, is the Elementary section principal’s utterly incompetence. Comments are made all the time and everybody thinks that manager has nothing to do at this post. Everybody wonders how she got that position. Any personal relation with the boss? Most people do not know but it remains that such a feeling among teachers does not help to create a sound, working atmosphere.
I have never met the GAU owner and I do not really want to. However I have heard that, while teachers pay for their markers, nothing is too beautiful for him in his office. He is the first person responsible for such a poor management, because he is the one who appointed them. That is why I am very pessimistic for GAU which will not be able to offer real education as long as this person is in charge.
