Chinese Professionalism: Part 2

On May 30th I received a new recommendation letter. While this recommendation was not as shining as I would have liked I did think it was fair. The most interesting thing about this letter was that I was completely unaware of any investigation. There was no classroom observation and I doubt the students were questioned about the complaint. As far as I know, which may not be the whole story, the new recommendation came about after I had voiced my concerns that someone, I was careful not to name names, made up the complaint and that I questioned the validity of the complaint. Also, appealing to the Chinese side in the way that this issue had been going for three weeks and that I would like this issue to be solved quickly since it had cause both sides a great deal of inconvenience. After I had that discussion with the teaching affairs liaison  in the early afternoon I received an email from  the foreign affairs liaison saying that I could pick up my new and better recommendation letter in two days…I’m still interested as to how this all went down but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth on this one.

Chinese Professionalism

This is from an email that I sent to several people here in China since I will probably have no other course of action.

     “To Whom it May Concern:
I believe you need to know about the recent events between myself and Nanjing University of Finance and Economics. On 08 MAY 2011 I sent Emy Bao, liaison officer of the ICEO, an email offering her a chance to match or come close to another offer that I received from a different university.  The following day, 09 MAY 2011, I received another email from Emy saying that NUFE was not going to be able to match the offer and I replied that I would be by that week with the standard recommendation and release letter. A few hours later I received a complaint letter from one of the campuses I teach at via Han Jing. Below is the translation given to me by Han Jing.

“Dear  Mathrew,

This afternoon I got a report from Qiaotou district. The students you teach English through Video and listening said from the beginning of this semester till now, you always play film to teach them without an explaination and the themes of these films are very dull and vulgar. Secondly, there is less teaching of oral communication to them.

 

I brought this to your attention. Please have a better communication with the students and try to solve this problem.

 

Thanks.

 

2011-05-09

---

hanjing506″

The morning of 11 MAY 2011 I gave Emy Bao the release letter and told her that I would be back the next day to pick it up between 11:55 and 12:20. On the morning of the 12th Emy sent me an email saying “I can give you the form today but it will not be that good coz of the complaint.” This complaint had yet to be investigated but when I went to Emy’s office to pick up the letter at 13:00, since the door was locked at 11:50 and the office was supposedly vacant, she had already filled out the form without a response whether or not I wanted these false complaints on my recommendation.

Later on 12 MAY 2011 I received the scanned copy of the official complaint (see attached). Which I took to class on 16 MAY 2011 and had a student read to the entire class. My students’ reaction ranged from surprise to anger and disgust. They took it upon themselves to write and sign petitions. When these petitions were sent out on 18 MAY 2011 Han Jing’s reaction was:

“Dear Mathew,

I got this email this afternoon sent by one of your students.

It shows that you have had a better communication with your students. Thank you very much.

Regards,

Joanna

祝好！

韩静”

I have found this process to be extremely unprofessional and possibly juvenile, and the timing in which I received the complaint a few hours after I had informed Emy that I I would be leaving to be highly suspicious considering that they had asked me to remain at NUFE for another year.”

After sending this email out I received a few emails from friends who have had more experience in China than I do and their response was that this was common practice when a school doesn’t want to let you go.