RCEF的麻烦事

| Posted on September 26th, 2008 in RCEF. Print This Post Print This Post

From the start of the academic year, RCEF has been seemingly surrounded by various kinds of hassles. They were nothing serious, but enough to give us constant headaches.

In fact what we call trouble is people continuously asking RCEF staff (those of us with good English–not me!) to tutor

their children in English or open an English Corner for a certain school etc. It’s not that we are the sort of people who don’t like to help people or do not understand the Chinese way of treating people. However, because of these requests, we have sometimes wasted too much time and effort and it strains our kindness. After too many clueless favors asked for here and there, it is hard not to feel repelled. Here I would like to express some grievances on behalf of our staff. We are not in this business! Here are some simple examples:

One day this month, 2 among us received a ‘hospitable’ invitation. Without knowing who invited them

and what they were invited to do other than to “talk and chat”, they left work behind them and stepped into a car with their heads full of question marks. After a while one of them received a text message: “I am helping XXX’s son practice his English! Ah, it really was a case of not knowing whether to laugh or cry.”

A few days later this kind of thing occurred again. One of the best middle schools in the city invited one among us to go and ‘sit’ and then proposed that we organize an English Corner for their students. Even though at that time our staff clearly explained to them our already heavy work load and reiterated that we could not do it, they somehow still saw “hope”. Thereupon, one day when we were taking care of some business in the city, a teacher from this school insisted that a

ll of their teachers were waiting for us and dragged us all off to their school. Just as she said, all their English teachers were present and outrageously they brought up their plan of us going to their school twice a week to put on English corners. The unspoken line was even if we bargained down, we would have to accept at least one English Corner a week. Fortunately, we gracefully and firmly rejected the offer and finally put the issue to rest.

Similar kinds of events are common. We are quite distracted by the hustle and bustle. In reality our work task is not light. Our members are not volunteer foreign teachers who work for free. Let me borrow

Zhou Jielun’s words and say: “We are very busy. Please forgive us.”

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One reply

  1. Wei Ji Ma (blog author) says:

    Added on October 2nd, 2008 at %I:%M %p

    Thanks for explaining this, Jiang Peng. I can understand this is very frustrating. I completely agree that RCEF should focus on its mission and not on relatively useless things like English tutoring or English corners. The fact that some people still ask for those probably means they don’t really understand what we’re trying to do. If they are important to us, I hope it can be explained to them. If they are not, we should probably just ignore them.

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