Poorwa's blog

The month following my graduation, I joined as a teacher at a private school in my hometown, and thus begins the tale of my first job experience.

Technically, it’s been longer than four months, considering I joined on the 1st of July, but I was on leave for 21 days in August (for reasons I’ll probably talk about some other day if I’m ready), and there were also only 15 working days in October so that makes it less than four months… Okay, I don’t know what I’m talking about here, let me just talk about my experience…

Having Acquaintances in Your Workplace —Good or Bad for a newbie?

So I’d known most of the staff already for years, one of the teachers and the principal even taught me while I was a student there so I was already very familiar with the place and the people.

For me, having acquaintances in your workplace… it’s somewhere between good and bad, but more on the good side. It also depends on the people, to be honest. One person alone has the power to change everything.

There was another teacher who joined with me, though she left last month because she got a better opportunity somewhere else. The few months we worked together, I couldn’t help but notice that we both were having a different experience.

The first month was a bit hard for both of us but because of that we were also becoming good friends. And the more time we spent together and interacted with other teachers, I noticed that they didn’t treat her the same way as me. For example, if I had trouble with something they were happy to teach me how to do it but when I was on leave in August, she told me that she’d been asking for help with something for a week but the others would just ignore her or give confusing answers. I was thankful for the support I had but their attitude towards to other teacher cannot be justified. I hope she has more friendly colleagues in her new workplace.

Knowing the staff well from before also resulted in me being comfortable to share my work-related problems with them and getting useful feedback. But it’s not summer and sunflowers all the time.

Just because I know and respect someone doesn’t mean that I have to agree with them all the time. Sometimes, they’ll be doing things that just don’t sit right with me and if I call it out, I’ll be accused of being rude because they’re older than me and I was just a kid a few years ago. Can you believe it?

And there’s this male teacher who’s been getting on my nerves since the beginning. First of all, he thinks he’s better and more important than the whole lot of the female staff, on top of it — he keeps trying to get others to do HIS work. And his new target is me because I’m a junior and since I’m nice to everybody else, I’m supposed to be nice to him too. Which I’m not anymore, but yeah, I wish I didn’t have to deal with such an annoying presence at my workplace.

Everything else is fine, I guess. I also get to hear stories from my old teachers about the time I used to study there. They also stop by my home often and tell my parents about my work and it makes me feel proud, haha.

Even though sometimes I feel like they don’t understand me, I believe that’s on me because I never open up to people in real life. It feels good to know that I’ve been able to make my own place among them.

I think this post will be needing a part 2 because there’s a lot more I want to share with y’all. See you next time!