[ZenGum]

This is a very petty rant but I need to vent:

Pissing me off today is: one crazy school director.
I work at five different schools over the course of my week. Four are fine, but one school is just painful.
It's out in the boondocks so there is less oversight from head office. The school director seems to have no idea what lessons are like or how teaching works, or what company procedures are.
Thursdays usually start with a painfully slow double lesson with a student who the director promoted to a level well above her ability to get her to sign up. She did this by twisting the rules to allow the student to take a test she shouldn't have taken, then when the student dismally failed the test, letting her take a different (irrelevant) test four times in a week until she "passed".
However when I walked in today I saw on the schedule that I was also supposed to teach a trial lesson for a 5 year old kid who wanted to join. They're supposed to tell me in advance, so I had no prep time and didn't know what I was expected to do. Fortunately I managed to get the other teacher to cover for my first lesson (Thanks S!) and threw together a lesson plan, but then I noticed the director had double booked my lesson and the other teacher's kids' lesson in the same (only) kids' room. WTF? We figured that the other teacher could move his class out 15 mins early to play board games and we'd scrape through. We phoned the director (out of the office today) to confirm this was okay ... and she changed the plan ... telling me I was actually supposed to do a special placement test of which I had never heard, let alone been trained for.
I called head office and had a trainer pulled out of a meeting (bad in Japan!) to explain the deal to me. And so I muddled through and fortunately the kid is really sweet and nice, although not great level at English. (Imagine my day if she'd thrown a fruity!)
Meanwhile the director has taken on a different kid (both are "refugees" from NOVA, the biggest language school chain in Japan which recently collapsed with $400 million in debts and 300,000 students) who also won't fit into any existing classes, and so has been told to come whenever she has time and whichever teacher is available will put together a lesson for her!!
This is borderline insane. Kids' classes require semester-long planning and continuity, and considerable daily preparation. This kid will be flitting from teacher to teacher, different standards and techniques and topics all over the place, and it will drive the teachers nuts, turning up to work to learn they have to pull a kid's lesson out of their ear.

Dumb-ass bitch. And to cap it off, like many Japanese staff who deal with foreigners, she has taken an "English" nickname to make it "easy" for us (which actually makes it harder because everyone else uses the Japanese name so we have to learn two names. That I might forgive, but who the hell would deliberately name themselves after a Disney character? Idiot.

Ok I feel better now.