As the ‘Paul’ so mentioned in the comment by ‘Z’, I feel it is both my solemn duty (considering I completely lack a sense of humour), and my great pleasure (considering I’m also essentially cruel and malicious), to reply to the… interestingly framed accusations.

Where to begin… there are so many possibilities, but I think I should start with the obvious: Here we have an individual complaining because we didn’t give him a job in an English school, who writes a letter so dreadfully spelt, with such awful grammar, I might give it to one of our primary school students to edit (or perhaps just throw the thing away and ask them to start from scratch – it seems the more efficient alternative).

In response to the ‘full-time’ position; he first applied to our sister school, and so I can’t comment on why they offered him part time rather than full time. However, he later applied for our school (not informing us he’d already had an… unfortunate experience with our sister school), after responding to an advertisement for a full time teacher. There was indeed a full time opportunity with our school, but perhaps I’m old fashioned, but in my day applying for and turning up doesn’t automatically entitle you to employment.

We gathered in a classroom, Chinese teachers, teaching assistants and me, and watched almost spellbound as he spoke to the ‘children’ (teachers, teaching assistants, etc…), as if they were fluent (the majority of our students are between 4 and 8 with little or no English at all), and when they acted out their standard roles (which he’d been informed they would), not understanding his instructions, he proceeded in becoming annoyed and then using his size to physically intimidate and bully.

I’ve seen some pretty disastrous demos in my ten years here but I must say I’ve never actually seen a teacher (I truly use that word in its loosest sense), try to bully students into a telepathic understanding of a language. I called the demo to an end and went in for an interview.

In the interview I went over his resume, noticing of course he’d not seemed to finish a year’s work for any of the many organisations. As I spoke he continued to respond to text messages and then became aggressive when I reminded him he was in an interview. I then proceeded to offer him a little criticism as to what he’d done wrong in the demonstration at which point he went past aggressive into the realm of belligerent (with any luck he’ll read this and as I doubt his vocabulary can stretch to a word like that I will offer a little help – it has a similar meaning to pugnacious).

He’s a fairly large chap, works out in the gym etc… like to throw around he’s been in the military. However, I have also some experience with such things and found myself quite pleasantly annoyed by this obnoxious cretin… I confronted him directly on his attitude, leaning forward in exactly the same way he was attempting to intimidate, and in an instant he did what most bullies do… he folded and became some fawning example of compliance.

I couldn’t see any capacity at all he might be of service to our school, so informed him we would not be offering him the position and asked him to leave. It wasn’t long after when I, having sent a few queries around the teaching community here (fairly standard practice), began to receive warnings NOT to employ this man for many and varied reasons I shall leave out here (but ones which raise real safety concerns for both female employees and children).

I must say I feel heartfelt sympathy for Canada, being represented by such an individual in a country full of hard working people, who truly believe they are giving their children a better future in spending their hard-earned savings on private educations.

Finally, in response to the ‘arse-kicking’ he so bravely suggests through an international website I would like to make use of two idioms. The first being internationally known ‘put your money where your mouth is’ but I fear the second, which is probably better known and understood in England will be the case ‘all mouth and no trousers’.

Good luck to all those teachers out there honestly trying to earn their money by providing good quality teaching, and to all those nutters escaping from the disaster they have made of their lives in their home country I truly hope they do the entire species a favour and never procreate.