What follows is an unedited letter from a(nother) disenchanted British Council teacher. Evocative stuff, and well written. The picture shows the conditions described.
Dear Sir,
Please keep up the good work on your blog,
It's difficult to drag enough adjectives out of my vocabulary to describe how utterly reprehensible the British Council is, but I'll try. It is a pompous, greedy, spineless and nasty organisation guilty of truly breath taking callousness and hypocrisy.
Newly recruited teachers are saturated and brainwashed with thousands of memos and documents reminding them of what a holier-than-thou ethical saint the organisation is. How it 'promotes mutual trust and dialogue, respects employees' diversity, treats staff fairly blah blah pass the sick bag please..
I worked for the British Council's Jeddah teaching centre where I failed to feel much charity being passed around.
Teachers were routinely bullied and pressurised into accepting teaching assignments and obligations not stated in their contracts. Our TCM, an autocratic and overbearing man with the tact of a chainsaw attempted to send us out to service ££ generating off-site contracts (not part of our agreements)in remote parts of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia without any consultation or regard for our personal safety.
A senior teacher was victimised and effectively forced to resign when he attempted to stand-up to the TCM and Deputy TCM when they tried to manipulate him into taking on additional teaching hours.
When Jeddah had torrential rain resulting in a flood in 2011, the same dithering, incompetent and irresponsible man delayed closing the centre because of his wretched profit (sorry, surplus as the BC says) priority. He ordered teachers and local staff to stay in the centre as the rainwater reached two feet outside and the local exams staffed were trapped overnight (naturally he had the self preservation and nerve to leave first!).
Oh yes, there was the usual 'investigation' (whitewash) where the usual procession of BC senior managers, line-towing yes men and poster boys for superannuated mediocrity who look after each other like D list masons, found him not guilty.
Placement testing students were duped into paying test fees when courses had already filled, and students who lost 40% of their courses because of the earlier flood closure didnt receive a nickel of a refund.
The organisation treats its teachers like whores and its students like walking ATMs. Teachers have to teach for six hours without breaks.
The British Council is to ethical business what a serial sex offender is to restraint. It has no business calling itself a charity.
So glad the Russians kicked this venal, pretentious and devious charlatan out of its country. They are not stupid and know a wolf in sheeps clothing spouting partnerships when they see one.
John
I left 16 years ago. I could have written the first paragraph word for word.
Posted by: WhitSt | February 29, 2012 at 10:40 PM