New schedule and ambiguous communication

A month turned into two which turned into three. James was a saint and for a month of that time did not make me teach my night classes. But after a month I was back to teachign my crazy schedule and being at Hess for 10-14 hours 5 days a week. To be fair not all of that time was spent working, a good deal of it was spent staring miserably off into space. I wasn't doing any of the extra things I wanted to do- I wasn't surfing- ever. I wasn't writing, I wasn't studying chinese, I wasn't discovering Taiwan. Is that all Hess's fault? of course not. It was mostly a combination of culture shock and exhaustion- Hess wasn't responsible for the culture shock but they were responsible for the exhaustion. I'd often spend my two hour breaks driving 15 minutes home, taking a short nap, then driving back to Hess. Finally I found an empty classroom and would take naps on the floor.

This whole time they kept changing the date of when the new teacher would be arriving. Sucked to work a schedule I didn't want while I waited, but I still think it was really cool of them to be getting a new teacher at all- they easily could have fired me as soon as he came because I'd caused so much trouble but they didn't. That was pretty decent of Hess- though I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that my kindy kids and parents loved me.

Finally the new teacher arrived-he was in Taipei doing his initial training. Meanwhile, I had been asking what my new schedule would be- and was a little frustrated when no one would answer me. James took his usual route which was with-holding information that he thought would dis-please me. There was much speculation about which classes my new co-worker would take over. He would basically be taking a combination of my classes and Melissa's classes. It was frustrating not to be able to get a straight answer- I'm pretty sure that my students and their parents knew, I knew that the Taiwanese staff knew- but I could only ask James, who wouldn't tell me. I had to do my own detective work to find out my new schedule.

Turned out that I would be losing two of my night classes, TreeHouse and Jump- meaning I would work from 2-4 then 6:40 till 8:30 Monday, then 8:30-11:30 am Weds Thurs Fri and 6:30 till 8:40 on Friday. AWESOME!!!! Yes, it was not exactly what I wanted (I would have liked to keep Jump and Tree house and lose my night classes, or take another Kindy class and ditch treehouse and jump), but I was so stoked. I felt like my life in Taiwan was about to begin!!!

If only I could get that Friday night class moved to Tuesday....
Hess night classes are two nights a week for the kids- one of those nights, the foreign teacher teaches, one night, the Taiwanese teacher teaches. On the days that the foreign teacher teaches, the Taiwanese teacher is still in the room. The kids and the Taiwanese teacher were there on Tuesday and Friday nights- so would it matter much if I changed my Friday night to a Tuesday?
I thought about it carefully. I'd already pissed off all of the management at Hess. Should I still ask for this one more thing? I finally decided I'd ask my Taiwanese co-teacher if she would mind changing days. Since we were the two people that the change would effect, I thought this was the best idea. It helped that she was the manager of all of the Taiwanese teachers- She had a little more clout and her word would go further with management.
I asked her and she didn't mind at all. I asked her if she would talk to our boss and she said yes. Later that day she told me I could go ahead and mark the change on my schedule, which was on the wall.
I drew an arrow from Friday to Tuesday. I couldn't have been happier.
the next day I came in and the arrow was crossed out and next to it someone had written the words “Can't be changed”. I asked the Taiwanese manager if she had done it and she looked surprised. She hadn't.
I wrote “Why not?” on my schedule and went to teach a class.
When I came out, my co-worker, Melissa, told me that she had heard James and the branch manager discussing the schedule change.
“He really went to bat for you,” she said, “He told the branch manager that it wasn't you who wanted the change, it was your co-teacher, and he said that it didn't matter what day you taught. I think you're going to get to change that night.”
After my night class, I went to talk to James.
He told me that the schedule couldn't be changed and I would have to teach from 8:30am to 11:30am on Friday, go home then come back to teach from 6:40 till 8:30.

Maybe I should have just let it go, but I thought about how great it would be to get that changed.

“Why?” I asked James.
“Right off the top of my head I can think of at least 7 reasons why it's better if you teach this class on Friday instead of Tuesday. You know, when you work at a company, sometimes it's nice to do a really good job for six months or so, and then, you know, if all of your classes are going well maybe you can request the schedule you want...”

James launched into one of his patented lectures. James is really a nice guy- sometimes he could talk a lot though, always dancing around the answers that you really wanted to know. I had learned that I just needed to sit there and wait for him to finish, then ask a question and pay attention really hard. Sometimes, if I really concentrated, I could see a glimpse of an answer to my question wrapped up in his 10 minute answer. I think if I had just met James on the street I would have thought he was a nicer than average guy and really liked him. In a management capacity, though, we were less than compatible. I just want a freaking answer when I ask a question. James seemed to pad his answers with so much other fluff that I could never tell what he was getting on about. Also he would negate everything he said- for example, once I asked how much help we should give children during an oral test, and whether or not we should dock points if they needed help. I then sat through hemming and hawing for 20 minutes from which I gathered that his answer was,
“You should help them enough but not too much and of course you have to dock points if you have to help them but not really cause learning a second language is really hard and you don't want to be harsh when grading cause it will upset their parents. But of course their scores should reflect what they really know.”
This is a fine answer I suppose but it took forever to get it and all I wanted to hear was, “Deduct half a point for every time you have to help them and every grammar mistake they make.” or something like that.
sigh.
So when James was finished telling me that I really ought to have a little more consideration for the company I worked for by not asking for what I really wanted, I said.
“You said there were like 7 reasons why I couldn't change my Friday class to Tuesday. Can you explain a couple of them just so I understand?”
I really was trying to understand. I really thought maybe there was a compelling reason.

I listened for a long time and here's what I gathered.
“Well. It's not good for a teacher to teach so many classes in one day. It can make them tired.”
(but changing my Friday class wouldn't make me work any more hours in one day than they had wanted me to work 5 days a week.)
“And what if someone needs a substitute on Tuesday? Then where would we be?”
(if someone needed a substitute on Tuesday then I could sub for them and the co-teacher could teach my Tuesday class and I could teach it for her on Friday that week.)
And from what I could gather those were the 7 reasons. Both of them didn't make any sense.
My suspicion now is that they (upper management? James? Taipei main office? I still don't know who they were) were trying to show me that I couldn't get what I wanted just by being obnoxious- I needed to fall in line and work hard to get what I wanted. Between them not telling me directly what my new schedule was and this needless stab at behavioral modification I kind of felt like Hess was treating me like a child. Why couldn't we both just be honest about what we wanted? How much of this lack of clear communication was James and how much of it was just Hess's bizarre corporate culture?

Let me re-iterate that James, though frustrating to me personally, was not a bad guy. As far as I could tell, his failure was simply trying too hard to be a good manager- and by definition he was caught between the higher management and us teachers. He was constantly taking one for the team, telling me bad news about what they wanted and telling them bad news about what I wanted.
To me he pretended to be on the side of upper management. To upper management he pretended to be on my side (or so it seemed from what my co-workers had overheard). I don't know what he really thought (except perhaps that I was a pain in the ass) and I don't know if he even knew what he really thought.

Poor James.
(incidentally he resigned as manager a month after I quit. I feel badly for the trouble I caused him. I was always fond of telling him, “If they paid me a million new taiwan dollars an hour it still wouldn't be enough for me to do your job.” to which I got a rare glimpse of his true emotions when he said, “I'm not making that much more than you are.”)