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[Mikana51]

I've been cruising the fora here and on other EFl sites for months and notice persistent threads where teachers complain and complain loudly about schools and especially school management. Many make the point that commercial ESL schools are uniquely bad places to teach because of their profit imperatives. But, as a teacher who has taught for about 15 years in four year colleges and universities in the US, Japan, and Australia, and who now teaches high school in an inner city school in Baltimore I'm here to tell you that I've never taught at a place where the bottom line is not at the center of operations. All educational institutions worry about making money and teachers are naturally caught up in that. All students are clients, whether at Johns Hopkins University or English Time, and teachers are charged with servicing those clients in both cost-effective and pedagogically-effective ways. A long time ago I taught English at NOVA in Japan and the dynamic there was not at all dissimilar from the dynamic I encountered as a full professor teaching politics at a swanky and expensive Vermont liberal arts college: where's the money coming from and what are you doing to make sure it comes? Live with it.

Similarly, teachers and management or administrators rarely see eye-to-eye, rarely grok each others' points of view. I've seen senior research scholars spend hours at a faculty meeting bitching about Xerox machine policy when they could have been discussing development of a new Chinese Studies BA programme. Nothing could be less supportive and pleasant to work with than the managers of the Baltimore City Public School System, but if one is a teacher who cares about teaching, one learns to rise above it, slide beneath it, go around it, and most importantly, to build alliances with managers and administrators so one can do one's job well and help students achieve their goals.

So there!