I take your point Turnoi but I did mention 'job satisfaction' in my last paragraph of the reply to Maria. To be fair, I also picked up on a couple of her questions from my own experience. The new subject here was one way of extending the discussion.

In reading some posts I am struck by the paucity of evidence for some assertions along the lines of "all X are Y" [Insert whatever people feel strongly about]. So let's look at some of the comments tha stuck with me:

All Chinese women are lazy;
All Filipinos are money grabbers;
All Chinese women from Dongbei are X ( but we could easily substitute another area, city, town).

These are just a few I have illustrated but the list goes on. Silverboy deviated from the normal private school bashing to make a comment to Maria that it was a change to see somebody in her position actually concerned about her teachers. You also tried to be helpful. For me, this was most welcome and I agree with the comments you both made.

My purpose in referring to a book and website by Seligman is that I believe that real change comes from within. I've tried to cover this before in other posts. As you know I'm a graduate psychologist and have administered batteries of tests to volunteers. Many people don't understand the statistical analysis that goes with the data on distribution, correlation, and regression. If people do understand these tools then maybe some of the concepts are a little difficult for everyday thinking, or not practical for everyday communication. So what happens? I will make a generalisation here and state that they fall back on essentialist beliefs and generic statements.

It's natural to use our own experiences to make sense of the world and in so doing - to generalise. I wanted to show that there's a bank of empirical evidence from a respected psychologist, probably the most well-known in America, that may help people understand what makes them happy. Clearly Maria wants happy teachers and wants to change her business model to achieve that. Let's hope that the comments so far will do just that.

Deep down, as much as we love mocking the private schools and lower quality universities, I believe that we all hope for positive change within ESL.

We may seem a bit too frustrated and fed up with all the bullshit. But at the end of the day, we actually do really sincerely care about our work and the students that we teach. It is actually painful sometimes to see how things really go on within the industry and it doesn't half demotivate some of us at times.