Holy
January 27, 2003
Holy Smoked Salmon Batman! Has it been almost a week already?
Today, well, technically, last night at work a dilemna popped up. I taught this one man earlier in the day and he told me he was taking six lessons, mine being the third. After my break, I was curious about his other three classes so I opened up his file to see what the teachers after me had written about him. Instead of seeing three comments following my own, I only saw one. Fair enough, perhaps he had decided to not be crazy and stuff an extra two hours of English into his somewhat deranged brain (he was kinda weird). The strange thing was the first line of the comments started with, “Dear Superman”. Teachers at the company are not your normal bunch but to write something like this into the comments which are read by teachers and other staff is just not very smart.
Ok, I thought, MAYBE the student used this line in the lesson and the teacher thought it would be informative to write this out for other teachers. I know I write what students say just to show some examples of their abilities or to highlight some errors that the next teacher may want to work on or be aware of. I read the rest of the comments and they were even weirder than that.
One line I remember went something like, “I know you fuck dogs and drink whiskey in the morning”. Then some other crap about not knowing where Superman is. Then it ended with something like I will mess up the newspaper editor. It was signed, “Louis”. If we keep to the Superman theme, it should’ve been Lois, like Lois Lane. Who knows. Maybe this person wanted to frame a teacher called Louis? Anyway my dilemna was should I just ignore it or should I tell someone? If I ignore it, the next person who read it would probably have to do something. Conveniently enough, my trainer was sitting very close to my booth so I motioned him to come over and take a look. He wasn’t very impressed by it and he took down the name and the student’s number and he went “upstairs” to what I believe is some sort of torture room for misbehaving teachers. Near the end of my shift, curiosity got the better of me so I opened up the same file. Not to my surprise, the comments had been replaced with, “.”
I guess it wasn’t really a big dilemna. I think I did the right thing because what the person wrote was unprofessional, unconstructive, and just plain fucking stupid. I know that particular student was somewhat of a pain in the ass to teach but he tried very hard and he was quite friendly. My hypothesis is that this teacher probably was leaving Japan soon, was rather bitter about the job, hated this student, and just decided to write some stupid comments to pass the time and vent. I hope the poor student didn’t end up taking the rest of his lessons because this teacher was being a dickface.
I don’t feel very happy about getting someone in shit but no matter how bad the environment can be, it doesn’t help anything to be more destructive.
I hope he doesn’t hunt me down and write stupid comments on my webpage.
