These are the empty desks of Jason and Danielle, a young, married couple from Utah who only taught for 2 months. Sometime in the night or early hours of December 16, the two of them packed up all of their belongings, presumably in a nap sack, and hit the road, coming just 10 months shy of fulfilling their contract with Kids College. For people teaching English abroad, this is known as "running," because the people literally flee the country from their employer, an act not unheard of, but certainly not common. To combat this, most schools pay on the 15th of every month for the previous months work, thereby forcing you to give up the first two weeks pay from the current month if you wish to run. This deters most people, but not Jason and Danielle, they had recently fought the school over part of their contract and thought they were entitled to more money. They won the fight, but were told they would be replaced come February as a consequence of challenging the school.
To be honest, no one really shed any tears when we found out, they had been weird people and less than adequate teachers (in my professional opinion) since they arrived. Jason was an arrogant fellow who thought his Masters in Computer Science made him more competent than our managers to interpret contracts. Danielle was simply a victim a circumstance, she made the mistake of marrying Jason and has been paying for it ever since. Alone, she was a sweet girl who was my desk neighbor for a few weeks, but when the two of them were together, they were either all over each other or allowing Jason to speak for both of them. Please dont get me wrong, they were nice enough, just some of their habits rubbed people the wrong way. So yes, they ran away, but no one is really sweating it.
3 comments:
Actually, Mrs. Lee told us that usually there is another part to the contract, saying that the first month teaching you don't get base pay. That was not in our contract, and we had no idea that we wouldn't be getting the amount of money stated in our contract our first month. That is why there was a dispute. We didn't exactly win the fight, because we never did get the base pay that was stated in our contract.
Also, the school agreed to find replacement teachers for us ASAP, but told us it may take until February to be able to get someone (because of visa stuff). We found out later that they were not even looking.
Wait... Is that actually a response by the Mormon that ran away?!
This still makes me laugh.
And that the response doesn't comment on your perception of their relationship. Maybe you helped it?
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