(A Personal Essay)

I have been a teacher since Seoul hosted the Summer Olympics. It has been a long journey filled with ups and downs, joys and sorrows. I don’t regret anything I have undergone as a teacher, and I could say that I triumphed over all the difficulties and pains because I wouldn’t have lasted this long in the academe if not.

I worked in 8 schools in the Philippines, 6 as a full-timer and 2 as a part-timer. Here in South Korea, where I teach now, is my second university. I stayed a year in the first one, and now I’m on my way to completing my tenth year, where I transferred.

Return to the previous paragraph and count the academic institutions I worked in.

How many?

That’s two short of a dozen.

In those schools, I met different kinds of students, administrators, and – teachers… the best and the worst.

This essay deals with teachers I call “jokers in the academe.” But just to be clear – the majority of those I worked with are professionals who love and respect the profession of teaching. It was a pleasure working with them. The jokers I am referring to are the few rotten ones in a crate of apples.

My experience with the “jokers” taught me to have a great deal of patience. There were times when I lost that patience and locked horns with them. During my first few years here in South Korea, I tried to keep quiet for a couple of years, just watching these recipients of the fallacy that “if you’re good at English, you can be a teacher of English.” Yes, you need to be patient when encountering jokers among your colleagues. They aren’t funny at all. They are annoying. But in one meeting, my thread of patience snapped. I said enough is enough. I started telling colleagues who were unnecessarily noisy to shut up.

I am not saying I am a perfect teacher; far from it. I still have lots to improve. At least I have been trying my best to conform to the evolving professional standards for teachers.

Most importantly, I am not a joker. I would never be. As an expat teacher, I feel like being appraised not only as a teacher but as a citizen of my country. I don’t like to be the reason people ask – “Is this the kind of teacher Teacher Education Institutions in the Philippines produce?”

In this personal essay, I would play BATMAN and let me unmask the “JOKER.”

Who might these jokers be?

One of those that I classify as jokers is the “super dependents.”The “super dependents” are teachers who will not solve their problems. They expect their colleagues to do that for them. They are the ones who hate exerting extra effort to find a solution to whatever bugs them. Their sense of entitlement is so strong that they think it is the duty of people around them to help them escape a difficult situation.

What these jokers consider as problems are not problems to begin with.

For example – the school requires teachers to apply new technology in the classroom. That, for them, is a contentious issue. They would try to dip their hands deep into their bag of reasons to justify their non-compliance.

You would hear the lamest excuses like “My training as an educator did not include applying those technologies.”

Really!?

Another excuse, lame also, is “It’s labor-intensive.”

They want things to be given to them on a silver platter. They would never go the extra mile.

They are like square pegs in round holes. No explanation would make them buy the idea that being a 21st-century teacher teaching 21st-century learners would require learning 21st-century skills.

These jokers don’t understand that part of their responsibility as educators – if they really consider themselves educators – is to retool and retrain, if necessary, to cope with the demands of what has become a technology-driven pedagogy used by 21st-century teachers.

They should not subscribe to the idea that “old dogs can’t learn new tricks” because they are not dogs. They’re human beings who are supposed to be rational.

Are they?

Anyway, let’s talk about dogs.

They bark, right?

Some of the jokers in the academe are like dogs. They bark a lot.

I call them the “barkers.”

These jokers bark about their disagreement with school policies and what they perceive as incompetence among the “people upstairs.” They are the eternal fault-finders who see nothing but negative in the organization. They live to seek the “tiny black in an ocean of white.” For them, nothing is right. Everything is wrong.

They complain day and night, but not when they go to the ATM during payday.

Do they deserve their pay? Are they doing their job? Only they and their students could tell.

Yes, there are times when they have valid reasons to disagree. But what is frustrating is that they bark up the wrong tree. They don’t address their concerns to the right people at the right place and time. They grandstand during meetings wasting their colleagues’ precious time. They force them to listen to their misguided eloquence. Sometimes they also write long unsolicited e-mails where they express their grievances. They don’t understand that not everybody in the organization shares their opinion about the policies and their school administrators.

The funny thing is these jokers bark, but they don’t bite.

They do nothing about their complaints except bark about them. But when the administrators responsible for implementing the policies they disagree with are present in meetings, they are very quiet, silent in one corner of the room, wagging their tails.

These jokers curse the school and their administrators at every opportunity they have. They tell everybody that the school where they are is the worst place to be. Yet at the end of the school year, they (let me use these words again) wag their tails as they sign their names on the dotted lines for a contract extension.

See… they whine and whing at every opportunity about policies, imperfections of the organization, and what have you. Still, the following school year, I saw them again, and as usual, whining and whinging.

They say in broad daylight, “This organization sucks.” But they remain. Why? Is it because they have no other place to go? That’s just a guess. Another guess… they won’t be able to find another university that pays as much as where we are working now.

I may be wrong.

I call the next category of jokers “Don Quixotes.”

Don Quixote, in case you’ve forgotten (or have not heard or read about him), is a fictional character introduced to the world by the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes through his epic novel, “The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.”

The “Don Quixotes” are the ones who do not understand that when changes are implemented and policies get tweaked by employers, the employees should not take it personally. Changes in the workplace happen when they are due. It is something inevitable. It is frustrating when the jokers cannot or refuse to understand if the management wants to exercise their prerogatives; whether the people downstairs want it or not, they could and would.

When in one meeting, a colleague stood and gave a long speech against a policy our university was about to implement, I felt obliged to cordially beg him to stop his litany because whatever he was saying then would all be in vain. Additionally, I told him that he was just unnecessarily prolonging the meeting and wasting my time and that of those uninterested in what he was saying. I also advised him that if he wanted, he should set an appointment with the university officials and tell them about his protestations… or sue the university. That Don Quixote did not realize they could not force anybody to join their cause, especially those who consider changes necessary and inevitable. What they were trying to do at that time was force everybody in the room (and sometimes in group chats) to listen to (and read) their whinges and whines.

Expat teachers who think they could dissuade their employers who hired them from making the changes the former wants to implement are as delusional as Don Quixote. We could possibly do it in our own countries. But in a country where we are foreigners and work on a contractual basis, it’s a QUIXOTIC endeavor. It’s like “fighting the windmills.”

These “Don Quixotes” thought that their braggadocio was admirable. It is not. It’s irritating. What makes it more irritating is, just like the jokers called “barkers,” they kept accepting the extension of contracts the university offered them. They keep serving the institution whose policies they don’t find acceptable. Why? Can you guess? Why can’t they just keep quiet, do their work, and enjoy the “dough.”

The last category of jokers in my list are those who applied (and luckily got hired) as teachers, even if they are not “really” qualified and trained for the profession.

They are the ones I call the “pretenders.”

Yeah, they pretend to be teachers.

These jokers applied as teachers because there were no other jobs available, especially in the countries where they come from. Given their qualifications and capabilities, I doubt it very much if they will get hired as teachers in their own countries. They are very fortunate (and the students are unfortunate) that they hurdled interviews in Asian countries and were recommended for hiring. That’s why I do not like the “no teaching demo” approach to hiring teacher applicants.

Among these jokers are English teachers who thought they could be English teachers because they can speak the language. In one of my essays, I emphasized that it doesn’t mean that when you know something, you can already teach it. “If you know it, you can teach it” is a fallacy.

Knowing a subject matter is different from knowing how to teach it. The former is only one of the many requirements for the latter.

“Real teachers,” those not pretending to be one, know what it takes to be a teacher. Teaching is not parroting the contents of the book. It’s not delivering a monologue in front of the students.

Teachers must choose the best strategy to use in the class from various available strategies. They have to set objectives and test if those objectives are met. They need to differentiate the levels of their students and identify the corresponding techniques and activities suitable for those levels.

“Real teachers” know what philosophy would inform whatever they do and say in the class. They know which sociological, psychological, historical, and legal foundations they would base all their decisions on as teachers.

It means that a teacher’s job is so complicated that “not just anybody” should be allowed to teach. And when a school commits the mistake of hiring applicants who are not trained to be teachers, expect them to become the jokers in the academe.

In the academe, most of those who complain a lot – those who create a lot of trouble – are the ones who are not really trained to become teachers. These jokers are the ones who seemed to be lost in the wilderness, not knowing what to do and how to do things in the academe. They are the ones who would blame others when they encounter difficulties and can’t figure out how to deal with them.

The common trait among these jokers is that they want everything given to them on a silver platter. You need to explain to them in detail (and repetitively) how to perform tasks that teachers are supposedly trained to do. Sometimes they would even require their colleagues to do things for them. They would not bother learning how to do it.

Beware of the jokers in the academe. They’re not funny.

These jokers could be many or but a few in schools everywhere.

A voice within kept telling me not to mind the jokers in the academe. I did so, but not for long. It became too difficult for me to hold my horses when I heard the “non-performing” barkers whine and whing so persistently. It’s so difficult to just turn a blind eye (and a deaf ear) to what they are doing (and saying) all the time. I had to say my piece – through this personal essay.

What’s dangerous is that they are contagious. They contaminate the working environment. They have the ability to flip the organizational climate from positive to negative.

So, beware of the jokers. Avoid them like a plague.

These crying babies are not cute. Don’t babysit them.