yjsoon

This is going to be a pretty drastic departure from my usual flippant (and brief) self… but bear with me for a few minutes on this, because it bothers me so very much and I really need to get it off my chest. I’m writing this because I’m genuinely worried about what work is doing to my dad. 

My dad’s an old Chinese teacher who’s near retirement age. He’s been Chinese-educated all his life, and never quite managed to get the hang of English. He’s been teaching for at least 25 years by now – I’m honestly not sure when he started – and I sincerely believe he’s done his job to the best of his ability. 

In the last couple of years, he’s been facing what must be an unbearable amount of pressure at work. From his (naturally one-sided) perspective, he’s been given some of the worst classes, and yet he’s been consistently chewed out when his students graduate with B3s and C4s. He’s been assigned non-teaching duties that he just can’t seem to perform well in – just today, four days into the new academic year, he was yelled at by one of his bosses (so loudly his ears rang, he says) for not writing a good emcee script… in English. For this, his boss threatened him with a D performance grade (i.e. no performance bonus) for the year. Four days into the year. This hasn’t been the first time he’s faced such threats and humiliation, either – it’s been this way since last year, and it’s made him so worried about his performance bonus that he slogs extra hard just to get things right. Which, as today proves, hasn’t turned out very well. 

I’ll be the first to admit he’s not necessarily easy to work with, especially at this age. He can’t hear well, he has trouble adapting to new situations, he can’t really figure out his computer beyond email and photo management, and he can be awfully stubborn about things. I’m sure that, in the eyes of school management, he doesn’t hold a candle to young teachers who can come up with innovative teaching strategies and who can truly click with the students and who can drive their students to do their very best in their academic and sporting competitions. Worse, he’s probably paid nearly twice as much as one of these amazing young teachers.

But… this doesn’t seem right. I know, it’s all meritocratic, so maybe he’s truly under-performing at work – that wouldn’t be too surprising, given some of his traits and maybe the language barrier. But is this how you motivate one of your 60-year old staff – by tearing apart his dignity and heightening his stress levels until he becomes a bundle of nerves? According to my dad (again, one-sided, entirely biased, all that), the same boss drove one of his peers to quit the service after he got D’s two years in a row, before turning her attention to my dad. I’ll stop here and not insinuate anything about his boss’s personnel management strategies with regards to older staff, but his story really disturbed me.

Of course, I’m only hearing his side of the story. Well, not only his side – I’m also hearing my mum’s side of the story, where she tells me how my dad yells at night from recurrent nightmares, and how he talks to himself all the time but doesn’t realise it, and how he’s so constantly wound up about his performance at work and just comes home looking so defeated every single day. She asks him to just leave the job, but he can’t give up his salary, he can’t give up the retention bonus at the end of the year, he’s even worried about how this will impact me as a young MOE employee. We try and tell him it’s okay, it’s just a month’s salary, we don’t need it to get by. But my dad is the way he is, and he won’t just give up and do something badly, and he’s going to push himself even harder and I’m just so afraid that, at his age, he pushes himself too hard and snaps.

My mum’s asked him to speak to another of his bosses, who’s been fairly neutral about this, and we’ll see how that goes and hope for the best. She’s ready to march down there and slap someone, which is what I love about my mum (happy birthday, mum!). As for me, I just really needed to get this out there, and for someone to read it, and if you have any advice to offer to me or my dad, I’d love to hear from you – please email me directly. Thanks for reading. I hope I’m over-reacting, I really do.

Afternote: And people wonder why I don’t want to stay in service. I mean, if I did, I could be a principal one day! Ick.

Posted from Posterous

The old workplace, originally uploaded by yjsoon.

My friends and I are teaching a programming class for Sec 1 and 2 Infocomm Club kids back at the old workplace / alma mater.

I miss teaching. This helps a little.

Earlier this year, I set up a multi-user blog server using WordPress Mu for my workplace, with the very useful WPMU-LDAP plugin to authenticate against our Exchange server (after a lot of guesswork with the LDAP settings). I found the setup tremendously useful to serve my class webpages from, especially since my students were always seated in front of computers.

I tried upgrading from version 1.3.3 to 1.5.1 once, but found that the admin panel was horribly, horribly slow after the upgrade. Besides, this was during the school term and we needed the blogs to be running for some classes, so I reverted back to the old version.

Earlier today, in a fit of productivity, I attempted the upgrade again. This time, I tried going straight from 1.3.3 to the latest* 2.6.5, following instructions on the (surprisingly hard to Google) upgrade page. Copied in the files, logged in as admin, everything at normal speed, hooray! Re-enabled LDAP plugin, logged in with my personal account… and the admin panel was slow as molasses again. Graaargh.

Thankfully, this time I managed to find some information online — it was this topic, and the realisation that new blogs being created had much faster-loading admin panels than the old ones, that finally clued me in to the solution. Here goes.

If you’re upgrading from WordPress Mu 1.3.x and your admin panel is slow:

• First, check if you’ve done the auto-upgrade process (Site Admin, Upgrade).
• As the admin user, go to the backend for any given old blog (Site Admin, Blogs, click on Backend). It should be slow.
• Try creating a new blog, and assign it to any user. This should be fast.
• Go back to Site Admin, Blogs, and copy the link for Backend.
• Paste it into the browser window, and append upgrade.php behind it, and load that page. This is the individual upgrade page for that blog.
• Click “Continue” to let it upgrade, then try going to the backend page again — this blog should be ok now.
• If that works, you’d have to do this manually for all your blogs, and might want to consider writing some kind of script to do so. I did it manually for my relatively small blog network.
• You can save a step by appending upgrade.php?step=1&backto= to the backend URL instead, as this is the link on the “Continue” button.

For some reason, something was broken in the auto-upgrade script, preventing any of the upgrade scripts from actually happening (and failing without errors!). This method calls the upgrade script individually for each blog.

I hope that helps someone (and maybe my successors… who I should apologise to for having set up a self-hosted blog server and then running away, oops).

* “Latest” as in “latest until two minutes after I finished installing, at which point 2.7 was released”. Gah! Seriously, WordPress, what the hell?!

Term ends in a week and a half. This Friday, I meet my classes for the last time for “reflection and review” (comically abbreviated as “R & R” on the timetable), and then I just need to go for some closing dinners, write some reports, supervise a camp, attend some meetings and hand things over to my unlucky successors… and then I’ll be done here.

Holy shit. That’s way too soon. I need to thwack a few more misbehaving students on the head with my large plastic file, or else I’ll leave here with a severe sense of underachievement. 

I’ll probably do some “R & R” of my own on my brief teaching stint here at some point (summary: I don’t think I could have had a better first posting), but for now, I need to find me some students to thwack.

The American Scholar – The Disadvantages of an Elite Education – By William Deresiewicz

So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions — specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. [...] We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

What does it mean to go to school at a place where you’re never alone? Well, one of them said, I do feel uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself. Even when I have to write a paper, I do it at a friend’s. That same day, as it happened, another student gave a presentation on Emerson’s essay on friendship. Emerson says, he reported, that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude. As I was asking my students what they thought that meant, one of them interrupted to say, wait a second, why do you need solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t do with a friend?

Dave Eggers, TED Prize 2008 winner, on making a difference in the classroom. Very inspirational.

You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person. Your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion. Sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time. Some of these kids just don’t plain know how good they are. How smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them one human interaction at a time.

I’m moving on to a new posting in January, and I have strong suspicions these next few months will be my final times as a professional teacher. Even so, I’m not quite sure I’m done teaching yet, so I’m just making a mental note here to revisit this video a year down the road.

Once Upon A School, Mr. Egger’s challenge for adults to support their local schools, is here.

Just got back from an interview at the mothership, and wondered if I should check what nonsense is associated with my name on Google. This one is new to me:

This and last week’s “demo lessons” in Changchun actually make me miss teaching Physics a little… I just had a lot more room for self-expression, instead of struggling to design a coherent lesson package.