Corporate Life

I recently signed up to teach for one of the language schools in Prague. To protect the innocent, I’m not going to mention which one. But I will say that it is very corporate…

Teaching for a language school in Prague is entirely different from what I was doing in Japan. The language schools’ clients are businesses. The businesses say that they need X amount of English classes or private lessons, and the language schools find teachers to teach those classes. I don’t work in a “school”. I go all over the city to teach my lessons. And I don’t get paid a salary. I get paid per lesson. The school gradually fills their new teachers’ schedules. So, since I haven’t even been there a week. I only have 7 hours of classes so far. I’m making no money. Hopefully, in the next couple weeks, they’ll have filled out my schedule to something closer to 20 hours a week.

On Friday, I went into the school for a new teachers workshop. I figured they’d tell us a few things about teaching, a few things about how things worked, and we’d get out of there. Oh boy… So, we started off by breaking into four teams, and in our teams, we had to “draw” the departmental structure of the company – complete with the four major departments, some of their subdivisions, and the names of some of the people who work in those departments… That activity was then followed up by an even better one: a quiz game. Each group takes turns answering questions. The questions go like this: “if you want to take an extended holiday, who do you talk to?” The teams get one point for the person’s name, and another point for their job title. Mind you, when they hire you, they give you a sheet with all this information. As useful as it might be, there’s no need to memorize it. It’s all on the sheet. Have a problem? See the sheet. Talk to the appropriate person. Why are we playing this horrible game?

And the “workshop” didn’t end there. Oh, no, no, no… It went on for another three hours… About all types of things that can be found in the information packet we all got – complete with asinine questions from the peanut gallery. Yes, tell the group every detail of the class that you are having a problem with. This is a good way to spend everyone’s time.

I got so antsy… The window started looking like a reasonable escape route. I can’t wait for next Friday’s workshop…