An Owner's View

Guest post by Kevin Burns

Recently, one of our teachers, I'll call him Dick to preserve his anonymity, gave us one week notice that he was quitting. To add insult to injury, he didn't even work his last Thursday,("I have to move that day,"he said) nor did he say goodbye to his Thursday students. For some reason moving couldn't be postponed to the weekend. He had told us that he would work for us for another year, so I didn't do much in the way of advertising for new teachers. We were caught flat-footed and in fact ended up closing one of our schools. One reason was we just didn't want to go through the hassle of finding a teacher on such short notice. It was impossible to cover all the classes too.

Why would someone treat their employer soshoddily? Are we a bad place to work? Dowe mistreat our employees? I don't thinkso. Our other teacher has re-signed anothercontract and many of our previous teachershave. Our turnover of teachers and studentsis very low and in fact well below the Japaneseaverage.

The simple answer is that he changed schoolsbecause he wanted to make more money. Which,ironically, I don't think will happen ashis new school pays only a bit more and his rent is much higher. I think he simply wanted to be in Tokyo. All of this is fine if we had been given enough notice窶俳ur contract states one month notice,so he broke the contract.

Sue him you say. Well I guess we could but it really is pointless. We would have to pay a lawyer just to be vindictive. So here I rant instead.

We took Dick to the hospital as he didn't want to go by himself. We held his hand as he struggled with culture shock the first 4 months. We had him and Bill over for dinner many times sometimes buying steak (an expensive delicacy in Nippon!) We listened to Dick's problems and tried to help whether they were work related or not.

In short we went the extra mile for him and were rewarded with one week's notice, his failure to return a student's video machine that he was loaned, gas bills that are unpaid since December and other bills that we will have to cover if we can't force him to pay.

I have a sour taste in my mouth. At the same time, I am very thankful that Bill is such a great guy. He really cares about his students and us too, and we do the same for him. We had done the same for Dick and we felt we had a good relationship with him. We thought he felt the same way but at this point we aren't sure.

I will never hire over the internet and do phone interviews again. Dick has taught me that it is a mistake. It will be face to face interviews from now on. As a manager or owner you do your best to choose good people and then you do your best to keep them happy! I feel that our job is really to keep students and teachers happy. Unfortunately, you still get treated shoddily at times. My point is, teachers are not the only ones given a rough ride by English schools in Japan. The managers and owners also get kicked in the head too.

Perhaps one of the problems is this prejudice against the whole English school or Eikaiwa "industry." Which is rather silly as there are many good schools out there. You just don't hear about them because people don't rant about great things, they only rant when they are angry about something in this case a lousy school. A great idea for your site, Shawn and Chris, is a Let's Japan Approved School List. A listing of the good schools to work for. Not only would this be valuable for teachers, it would help to clean up the English schools.

If you get a job at an English school in Japan. It's an honour. I mean that! We get over 500 applicants a year for one or two positions and sometimes no positions. It is a lottery. If you are hired by us you are one out of 500!

We get applicants from all over the world and with some amazing degrees at times. You are entrusted with teaching our students who are very intelligent people for the most part. Our students are involved in many kinds of research including cures for cancer. Is teaching them something to be equated with working at McDonald's? You will be paid a very good salary, at our schools we provide you with a furnished apartment in a riverside cottage. You also teach in a Canadian Victorian house. You will be well respected in the community and called Sensei even by people much older than you. Surely that cannot be likened to a fast food chain.

If you want to work for a school that really cares about its teachers, and you are a serious teacher that really is serious about teaching English-have previous experience and training, then check us out at: http://www.kevins-english-schools.blogspot.com/

I suppose this has turned into an ad for our schools at the end here. That wasn't my intention when I started, but why not give people a chance to learn more about us while I post?

Don't contact us though if you're a Dick!