time is $$$ (or not)

I'm a pretty laid back person, but sometimes when people (i.e. my school) don't have any respect for my time and think it has no value, it gets a little annoying.

A few days ago my VP was talking on the phone to my school's owner about the schedule, and in the middle of the office with all of us foreign teachers there she said, "We will just put a teacher's name there on the schedule; we don't pay them for classes on the schedule, just for what they teach, so if the student doesn't show up it doesn't matter." That definitely grated at me a bit. Like we have nothing better to do that wait around in the hopes that maybe a student will show up and we might work that day.

The whole value of time issue is also why many of us foreign teachers at my school are aggravated about the Happy Songyuan English Speaking Contest. I've pretty much removed myself from that situation, which is awesome. Earlier this week there was supposed to be a mandatory meeting for all teachers at 6pm regarding the contest. Administration didn't put it on the schedule, didn't verbally tell any of us about it and they just wrote it on the a large white board in the school the morning of. I had conflicting plans, so I didn't go. Nobody said anything to me about it either, which was nice.

I did miss some news apparently though, because when I got to school the next day, there was such a huge crowd out front I thought there was a fire or something. The contest round that day happened at our school, instead of elsewhere. Consequently, most of my classes for the day were cancelled, not that the school figured this out beforehand or anything (because that would make too much sense).

I left when they decided my morning classes were cancelled, but then one of my school admins called me to back school because he changed his mind. When I got back, the student he called me back to teach got into a fight with him because the student didn't want to have class. Meanwhile, I'm sitting around awkwardly watch them fight, getting caught in the middle and not working toward my teaching hours at all (until I did end up tutoring him that day). No bueno.