Thread: New teacher leaves without warning

Originally Posted by laoshi

I Their spelling is poor hence my major piss take on this board at people who thought complaining about typo's was an illectual Bonus... loosing it... and yours up their with the rest of the garbage. I wouldn't have wrote in this style had you not have blamed me

Oooooch!

Originally Posted by kingwilly

but who ever supplies a bad reference? references are worth very little - agreed that if they supply none, then its a warning, but you cannot reply on those references either!

and the school is NOT to blame for a teacher behaving unproffesionally, and a school is NOT to blame for a teacher stealing from it!

to say otherwise is silly and the begining of all sorts of justifications for poor behaviour!

A school is silly to expect that an unprofessional teacher would behave any other way than unprofessionally. It's like buying an untrained dog and then getting angry because he's not housebroken. It's like hiring a bum to perform heart surgery and then being upset at the results. It's totally silly.

In this day and age, there's too many employers in too many industries that have forgotten that quality begins with the workers. Quality workers produce a higher quality product. If you try to save money by going with workers who do not have the training to produce quality, you will suffer.

In this case, sometimes stuff gets stolen, sometimes kids get fiddled with, sometimes students really don't learn a lesson, sometimes the teacher shows up drunk for class, never mind, it's a cost of doing business. It's the cost of not having any real standards. Thais are perfectly willing to pay that price if it means they can get buy with paying less for teachers and pocketing the extra cash.

^ mate i'm not saying that an unprofessional teacher will be anything but. I am sying that references dont really mean shit!

No idea where you're coming from on this one KW.

Usually people acquire letters from people who occupy certain positions and may have occupied those positions for some time. They have their reputations at stake and there does exist a certain level of responsibility for them to provide fair and honest letters of reference. To not do so, reflects negatively on their own professional integrety and potentially damages the company..

Of course I think you are making the argument that many employers feel "obliged" to furnish a letter when the employee leaves after a period of satisfactory output and behaviour.

But then you basically are provided not only with a ltter of reference but with a contact phone number as well.

Anybody with any real smarts is going to be able read a letter of reference and understand it for what it really is. Many letters constitute what might be called "damning with faint praise" an a knowledgeable employer can recognize these without problem. (very, very common)

Stage 2, the phone call. An intelligent experienced employer has no problems asking questions of the reference provider that are going to give you a damn good idea of what you can expect from that new emplyee.

References mean a great deal. They should be a major component of the hiring process in any professional organization, probably 70 percent.

But then again there are those other companies......(amoung whose members are no doubt numbered numerous Thai educational organizations)

And that's a whole different story.

Caveat Emptor.

IME and after recruiting lots of people, references are not much use.

People normally give a positive reference even if the candidate is bad due to the fact that they can get sued for libel if they say things that are not true. Many employers are very wary and rightly so and even now some companies will refuse to give references.

As KW said; nobody is going to provide the contact details of someone who might give them a negative reference and giving a phone number to call does not help either unless the person you are going to call is going to stay at that job for a long time which just does not happen these days. Add to that the possibility of calling a reference for someone who has not quit a job yet or even given notice to quit could really drop that candidate in the poo and get them fired.

A good interviewer doesn't need to look at references, an interview is all it takes.

No that's not a hint, quite a number of employers in the west do not give references as company policy end of story; whether the reference would be good or bad.

As I said it's a potential weakness. However, let's face it, if you had indeed been the great employee (or ex-employee) that you boasted about in your interview, your former employer would not usually refuse to let your new employer know about it. It speaks badly for the former employer if you are too petty to give references at all, rather than refusing because there were problems with the former employee that you do not wish to disclose to a third party.
Employers can be fooled by performances in interviews alone, thus the fashion for personality tests, etc (which are themselves hardly foolproof).