Contract Week Part 2 (Duties)

Hello,

Wintermute here, and today we will continue our ongoing conversation detailing every part of a teacher contract with “Duties”.

Every contract I have looked at list in detail your duties. This is a must have for all contracts as it needs to be clearly defined what the teacher will be involved in. This can range anywhere from assisting in other classes not yours, feeding students, progress reports, making test, talking with parents, etc etc.

You’d be surprised how many duties you can actually be assigned, and you may look at some and say to yourself that it doesn’t sound like a “teacher duty”. Such things as picking up students, feeding students lunch, checking in on students by phone at night to make sure they did their homework, along with making and passing out fliers. There really are schools out there that will require these and more. If your contract has something listed that you believe you should not be doing, than say so before signing.

True story, I was given a contract from a private school that had I think 6 foreign teachers already. After reading the contract I could not believe anyone in their right mind would sign it, I thought they were joking. Among the many things wrong with it the one that stood out the most was the duties portion. It had listed 8 duties, 1 through 7 were fine, no problem. But number 8 read and I quote: “Perform other duties given by the employer”. Well what the hell does that mean? That could literally mean anything, I am signing my life away to this school, they could ask me to do anything and I’d have to agree. I figured they don’t know English well, surely it’s not intentional, I’ll just ask them to change it to “perform teacher duties”, because then at least I would have something to fall back on. If the school would ask me to do something I could say “No, that’s not a teacher duty”. The school declined my request.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to be over critical of your contract, they are a year long, and require you to be in a different country, not too many can protect you there. Thank you all very much for reading this and I will see you tomorrow!

Your friend,

Wintermute