Unfiltered Story #302400

I worked at a school as the English librarian in a new English library (the school already had a library in the main language of the school/country, but wanted to add an English one too, to attract more parents to the private school)

The English library, unlike the main one was in a tiny room, very skinny and quite long. I could realistically only fit half a class at a time, so told teachers to keep half their students with them, send the other half, and switch after kids were able to read and borrow books. I knew it was annoying, but I explained the reasons to the teachers, and complained often to the director about the size of the space.

One teacher was annoyed by this, and after the first month complained by email to the director. The director was a man who was only given the role because he “looked” like a director, ie he was an older white man, and so he would just say yes to whatever the school owner wanted.

He actually sent that email to every teacher except for me, adding just “do you all agree?”, printed out all the responses (without hiding the names or email addresses) and put it in my mailbox with a post it note saying “I thought you should see this”. Thankfully quite a few coworkers defended me at least.

I went to the director and laid into him for a good 5 minutes, telling him that I had already told him several times why I couldn’t take an entire class, that if he wasn’t incompetent he should remember, and that if he ever had a problem again that he should come talk to me directly, and that this was unfair to both me and the teacher who complained.

After another 6 months I finally was able to advocate to share the larger library space and had no more problems. I admit getting angry at him wasn’t very professional on my part, but he went out of his way after that to treat me better.