A Narrative of One Teacher’s Experience at a SABIS School in Germany
I was hired at the Iowa International Teachers’ Fair during a poor interview, under false pretences. I had been warned by other candidates not to interview with SABIS, but I badly wanted another international school posting, and I could not clarify with the other candidates exactly what were the issues with SABIS; they just told me to “stay away from them.” During the interview, I was led to believe that the school already had authorization to offer the International Baccalaureate and that I would be teaching IB English to 11th and 12th graders, which would be an assignment pertinent to my previous experience and licensure. During the interview, I was asked about my “classroom management skills,” and I replied that I hadn’t had any difficulties managing my classes for the past fifteen years. The fact that I wasn’t asked about my classroom management techniques or style should have sent up a red flag, but I didn’t realize this until later.
I was not asked about my relations with students’ parents, as one usually is in these kinds of interviews, but was told that the school would “manage” all communications and that there’d be “total transparency” regarding student progress, but I was not told at the time that there’d be no direct teacher input into such communications; I had just finished a very fine relicensing program in the state of New Mexico and had been required to furnish much evidence of good communications and relations with students’ parents and simply assumed during this interview that “total transparency” meant that I’d be required to be directly and personally responsive to parental inquiries and concerns.
I at first refused the offer of a position as “IB English instructor” because of the inadequacy of the salary as impacted by German tax rates, but renegotiated with the school’s recruiter after the conference and accepted the position, after making it clear to the recruiter that I’d barely be able to make ends meet, on account of taxation. The recruiter made it clear that he was persisting with the offer on account of my previous IB and international teaching experience.
The first inklings I had of the school’s actual condition came during “new teacher orientation” in Germany. There were problems making up timetables because of last-minute resignations by hires, and I was assigned to teach in subject-areas and at grade levels where it is illegal for me to teach in America. I had never taught below the ninth standard of high school and rarely below the tenth, and I wasn’t heeded when I protested that I wasn’t familiar with the developmental issues of junior high school students. (In retrospect, I realize that I should have stuck to my guns and severed myself immediately over precisely this issue, as a number of their other hires were apparently doing.)
During the “new teacher orientation,” there was far too much discussion of behavioural problems and insufficient attention to how these might be impacted by cross-cultural communication failures. There was no discussion whatsoever of student resistance to use of English as the target-language in classroom group-work, which, as I was later to discover, was an enormous problem in this school. There was also no mention of how the American or other foreign teachers’ educational cultures and values might conflict with German expectations. One evidence of this, in particular, stands out in my memory:
The school head was proposing scenarios and asking how teachers might respond to situations arising from classroom discussions. She asked how teachers would respond if, during a discussion of the Holocaust in Europe, a student said, “They got what they deserved.” A young female American librarian replied that she’d try to respond in such a way as not to discourage future contributions from that student, but would also indicate that such a response “might be inappropriate” in class discussions. The head cut her off and said, “No, you are to FORBID such contributions.” All the young Americans in the room immediately looked at me plaintively, knowing that I had much more international experience than they, and also knowing that I’d understand why they couldn’t respond to a child that way, so I said, “Mrs._____________, you should try to understand that, in our culture, freedom of speech is MORE sacred than honouring the Holocaust, and that, for us, the professionally ethical and responsible behaviour in that situation might be to ask the student if he understood why, considering German history, some might consider what he’d just said to be ‘hate speech.’” The head roughly dismissed my reservation and reiterated that such student remarks were not to be tolerated. It was my first experience of the diktat of “political correctness” in Europe, and the first indication I got that “international awareness” and “cultural sensitivity” in this school would only go in one direction, and never include curiosity or interest in foreign teachers’ backgrounds or experience.
During the first couple of months, all of my time was consumed with responding to the objections of a previous IB authorization team to SABIS methodology, and, in particular, to their reservations about “too much objective testing” going on in the school. Meanwhile there was no IB English class for me to teach, because, as I found out immediately, the school was not yet authorized to offer the IB diploma, and much of my work there during that first year would be to help to re-organize and re-submit the language portions of a second application. My suggestions to the SABIS administrators that what the IB authorization team probably meant by “too much testing” was “too much of the same kind of testing,” and that no IB officials would really have objected to assessments in general, were dismissed, and I was told it had just been “too much testing.” When I became frustrated and replied that, of course, IB curriculum designers would object to a preponderance of “bubble-in-your-guess tests,” and noticed the furious glances shot at me in meetings for such an observation, I began to understand SABIS administrators’ lack of confidence in their teachers’ ability to create and employ the rubrics that are so essential for the variety of assessments that are required for successful delivery of the IB curriculum.
I should add that almost all SABIS tests are, indeed, “bubble-in-your-guess” tests, that they are standardized in Lebanon, where the proprietor boasts that he can “look out all over the world” and know that students in his schools are “filling in the gaps” with objective tests being written by his crew of employees. The problem is that many of these tests are poorly-worded and are, in fact, full of errors in many disciplines. Once, when I was reviewing a class of eighth graders for a test on ancient history, and was using the SABIS “revision” (i.e. review) materials, and verbally correcting the errors in the model questions, a student said to me, “We appreciate that you know more ancient history than the people who write these tests, but we have to pass them, to keep our parents happy, so just teach us the ERRORS!”
During that first semester I regularly had insufficient time to prepare my lessons because of the “coverage” that was constantly being required on account of the high rate of teacher absenteeism, as well as all the additional work to justify IB authorization. We later discovered that the German employment agency would willingly have provided substitute teachers—many of who are quite familiar with English—for a nominal fee, but that SABIS would not accept this service, ostensibly on account of the “language barrier,” but, really, as we all got to know full well, on account of SABIS penny-pinching; they would rather cannibalize the planning time of their professional employees at the expense of good lesson-preparation.
There was a certain irony in this excuse for their refusal to employ good German unemployed graduates for substitution duties, because very little English was ever used by students in this school, even during classes. When I tried to enforce the “English only” rule, I was rudely told by students that other teachers didn’t and that I should remember that I was “in Germany.” One student who had been in this school for four years and who had supposedly qualified to be an IB candidate in the English medium told me, bluntly, that he didn’t like “the sound of any other language but German.” The students were having this attitude constantly reinforced by the refusal on the part of many of the native German teachers to use English in the corridors.
My first major conflict with the director related to the method I had always used in America to control the behaviour of unruly students in classrooms, whenever I encountered it—which, in some schools in America, had been frequently. This was what I should have been asked about, in the context of the interview question about “classroom management”: I would have replied that I devoted a certain weighted percentage of each semester’s mark to “participation grades,” and that I regularly gave daily grades of “100’s” to students who were on task, “70’s” to students who were at least partially on task, and “0’s” to students who weren’t on task at all, and had discovered that the influence of a small proportion of weightage of such marks eventually eliminated all disruptions, when the students and their parents discovered why their semester grades did not align perfectly with their test grades. The director informed me that “in SABIS, behaviour has no relation to academics,” and I asked her if she didn’t believe that remaining on task during instruction was an academic skill that young students needed to acquire, and that it should be assessed. She became furious with me, as was her wont.
My second major conflict with this director occurred when I wished to substitute communicative learning activities for the inadequate language acquisition materials found in SABIS texts. (SABIS mandates the use of their own textbooks in the Middle East and in Germany. The director at one point admitted, however, that these mostly poorly designed and unsound materials were not acceptable for use in SABIS schools in America.) I explained to her that I had had much previous experience with “English as a Second Language” instructional methodology in Asia, and would know how to choose good materials that would compensate for the students’ inadequate instruction in the structures of the English language, and she replied, “You WILL use SABIS material for instruction, and anything you use to supplement it must be shown to me beforehand”—even though she had previously admitted that SABIS language materials “had holes” and were “weak.” She had also told me and others that SABIS curriculum was “a work in progress,” but, obviously, teachers were not to be allowed to be a part of that “progress.”
This replacement of good materials with company-produced substandard texts and tests filled with errors is reflective of SABIS starvation of their educational budgets. SABIS also attempts to conceal this from their clientele and the only individuals who know about it, beyond the immediate SABIS managerial hierarchy, are teachers, who are terrorized in ways that I will recount in my “Memorandum” below into participating in the concealment.
There was almost no audio-visual equipment for instruction and there was great difficulty in scheduling the use of films or computers for research—which was absolutely necessary, considering the paucity of books in their library. There was inadequate space and equipment in teachers’ workroom or classrooms—as compared, for instance, with my present school, which has computer projection in all classrooms, and “smart-boards” in most. Most of the SABIS teachers did not even know what a “smart board” was, let alone how to use one, and I compared this, mentally, during a trip to England, with the dilapidated, ancient structure of the Stonyhurst School, where ancestors of mine attended, and which, nevertheless, had “smart boards” in every classroom I toured.
In my SABIS experience there was absolutely no support for dramatic or forensic activities, but the SABIS administrators would pretend there was, and they would encourage teachers like me and a German colleague to prepare budgets, search for venues for productions (there was no stage), for props, for costumes, etc., rather than telling us, up front, of the dearth of funding for such activities or the unavailability of time, because of “conflict with testing.” This was not solely the problem of my drama-enthusiast colleague and me: the art teacher had difficulties finding exhibition space for her students or support for an environmental project she proposed, even though she was constantly being misled into believing that there’d eventually be money and support for such endeavours. Once she and her students were allowed to paint beautiful murals on the walls of the art room—the only space in the cold, barely-furnished ultra-modern building that then began to resemble a school room—only to hear a group of touring “investors” protest in German, to the “chief executive” of “the firm” that “we’ll never be able to get THAT down”—thinking that the American art teacher would not be able to understand what they’d just said, but she did. (Many eventually came to believe that the building was being kept in a pristine state for its resale value.)
Foreign hires like me had on-going grievances with the school management that had little to do with pedagogy and classroom management. At least 1/3rd of each month’s pay was being taken by the school as rent on a flat, and with no explanation of fluctuating utility bills. I learnt that non-school-employed tenants of the building wherein the school had placed me were paying HALF of what the school was charging foreign teachers as rent for the flats they had leased, and, unlike us, were being regularly shown meter readings for payment, as required by German law. SABIS was obviously pocketing the difference, and actually making a profit on their rentals to foreign employees.
When we walked or rode our bicycles to work we found, almost on a daily basis, that there was no support for our authority with students in the classroom. There were no consequences for misbehaviour (to be discussed in my “Memorandum” below, with regard to “Relations with Students”). There was also no willingness to inform parents of their children’s infractions (also to be discussed below, under “Accountability to Parents”), and there was no toleration of devising by teachers of our own strategies to maintain classroom discipline, beyond “writing down” students for their misbehaviour—which would eventuate in no more than a detention to be held during school time. Upon numerous occasions, at faculty meetings, I offered to hold “Saturday School,” free of charge for them, which seemed to make them even angrier with me, and they denied me even the right to enforce the one measure of discipline that seemed to work with younger students, temporary confiscation of their high-tech devices being used as toys during lessons.
Whenever an incident arose that threatened to attract the attention of parents, there was immediate deflection of responsibility for such mishaps unto teachers. Once a radiator was destroyed by a group of very young boys left unattended in a classroom (“unattended” meaning without teacher supervision; in SABIS, the presence of a “Student Life Organization” student-representative IS considered “supervision,” and there WAS an SLO person there). This was misrepresented as being a consequence of a teacher not writing passes, and therefore a new “rule” was promulgated for teachers that they must stop the lesson and write a “pass” for every student wishing to use the toilet or restroom. No consideration was given to the suggestion of the American method of issuing one standard “permanent pass” per teacher, to be handed off to individuals waiting their turn.
In this school there was persistent undermining of teachers’ positions in the classroom by encouragement of students’ use of the “chain of command” (German are instinctively attentive to hierarchy, and even children pick up on it immediately) to run to middle-level managers (called “Academic Quality Coordinators” in SABIS jargon) to have assignments cancelled or grades changed. Term paper topics, research questions and internally-set IB deadlines were regularly changed at students’ instances, and I in particularly vociferously objected to this, because it is very bad training for learning how to prepare compositions in “stages,” and writing “extended essays” and other longer IB written assignments. The director would interfere with the marking of IGCSE essays by IGCSE-trained teachers (though she had no IGCSE competence herself, and was a former kindergarten administrator) and would insist on non-use of IGCSE rubric standards such as “word limits” whenever such a marking criterion would adversely affect a mark that was electronically transmitted to parents. IB-trained teachers regularly found the reliability of their assessments being challenged in disciplines like chemistry in which this former kindergarten teacher had no expertise or background whatsoever. She refused to consider automated transferal of teachers’ comments to parents via the school’s website. I made this suggestion in order to abide by SABIS restrictions against direct teacher-parent contact, but also to allow parents some insight into classroom-management issues. This was declined, probably just as much because of unwillingness to fund it, as for any other reason.
One of the worst aspects of having to work under this terrible director was her “open door” policy, which actually was a policy of deliberate encouragement of gossip that undermined her teachers and their authority in their classrooms. Teachers were encouraged to gossip to her about their issues with colleagues and students were even encouraged to come into her office, or the offices of her “AQCs” and gossip and complain about their teachers. My favourite example is something that occurred as a result of a phrase in my own “classroom policy” hand-out, in the section relating to prohibition against pejoratives like “spick,” “kike,” “gay,” etc. Because I once taught in New Mexico, where recent immigrants are referred to, even by native Hispanics, as “Mexicans,” that term was left in my policy sheets and I printed that portion without making any change. A German-Mexican girl in the class took umbrage to it, and, rather than raising the issue with me, as she perfectly well could have (I do not mind being corrected by my students), went off to the administrators, and I was hauled into the director’s office and accused of using “racist” terms in my hand-outs, and of being “politically incorrect”(!). At that point, I didn’t want any more conflicts and just wished to finish that second year, and get out of Germany, so I readily agreed to apologize to the student—with whom I had an excellent relationship thenceforth, and would have had anyway, had she broached the issue with me, in the first place. Students were also encouraged to misrepresent my suggestions to improve canned SABIS assignments and SABIS lesson designs as “criticisms of SABIS.”
In fact, all during my employ in this place, my criticism of the poor preparation of students in this school for doing IB work was being misrepresented as “criticism of the SABIS system.” This is not the place to discuss SABIS pedagogy—I will discuss it below, in the “Memorandum”—but I do wish to note here that any and all explanations I offered as to why I was supplementing the canned SABIS “points” or adding instructional activities—and thereby “slowing down” or altering the “testing schedule,” in order to promote fuller comprehension or mastery of skills—were deliberately and purposefully construed by this director as “attacks against SABIS.”
However, the most significant reason for my continuing conflicts with this director was my growing dismay regarding her mismanagement of the IB curriculum in the school. In drawing up the students’ plans of studies (called “the hexagon,” in IB terms), there was encouragement of students to engage in coursework they did not have the reading, writing or speaking skills to handle. The administrators and many of the staff refused to acknowledge that language skills—in particular, writing skills—needed preliminary remediation before embarking on this coursework. The administrators refused to encourage the IB instructional team to develop a consensus on how to apply the IB marking criteria (called “descriptors”) during the first few months of coursework for these inadequately prepared students. And, finally, the most serious malfeasance of these administrators—serious enough to be called “malpractice” in IB language—was a secretive attempt to misrepresent the worth of the students’ work, on transcripts and to parents, by an across-the-board grade inflation of all teachers’ marks by 7-10%, which would affect not only the grade point averages being reported to American universities and colleges, but also the reliability of the “predicted scores” in the IB sequence of coursework, which are so important for university admissions. I warned, openly and publicly, that this would be especially harmful to the students of this particular institution, which has such a poor rate of retention of faculty, and in which new instructors would inevitably be using the previous year’s “predicted scores” to make assessments.
The secret formulas used by SABIS administrators to fraudulently change students’ grades—which teachers were commanded not to share with parents or students:
The secret formula used by SABIS to doctor students' grades
2nd page of evidence of the doctoring of students' grades
The responses of these administrators to my criticisms—almost always made in camera, and openly, for them and others to hear—were, in some cases, so petty and vindictive as to include deliberate refusal, at the beginning of the second year, when IB English instruction actually commenced, to buy my IB English literature texts until October of the 2009-10 school year, although I had made the written request for them the previous March. I was compelled to photocopy and use summer reading material during almost the whole of the first term, whereas most other teachers’ book orders were filled promptly, and, as a result of this delay, my students’ compositions for external assessments were not developed adequately, in a timely fashion.
Finally, never, in my entire career as an education professional, have I heard myself and other professional people hectored, publicly embarrassed, derided and mocked by administrators in the way that SABIS managers apparently feel free to do. Suffice it to say that this is the first time in my life that I’ve ever needed to say to any school director, “Madame, I will not permit you to speak to me in such a manner.” I will now offer my own personal experience of such extraordinary mistreatment, so that you will understand why I felt that I needed to speak to my superior in such a harsh manner.
Incidents Relating to My Termination:
In the last two months of my first year of employ in this institution, my English classes were disrupted and barely attended because of so much “study leave” being given to students on account of IGCSE tests. I broke my toe, and consequently had difficulty climbing staircases. I tried one morning to explain to an “AQC” (assistant director for the upper school) that I’d be meeting the bare quorum of my classes on the 1st floor, but, when I began my explanation by mentioning that so many were being excused from classes on account of the testing that there’d not be many in attendance anyway, I was screamed at and told that that wasn’t so (whereas, in fact, she was the one issuing the excusals), and I walked away in frustration. I shouldn’t have, but I was so worn down by exhaustion and frustration that I forgot to remember that these people would probably be manufacturing a “paper trail” to envelop me in. A sympathetic colleague then told me that she’d start the film that my next period’s underclassmen would be watching that day and the next.
Then I met my upperclassmen downstairs on the patio, where I’d told them previously to meet me, and I attempted to conduct class with their bare quorum, but was sent word by the “AQC” that I must come upstairs. I sent back word that my foot hurt too much to climb the stairs. When that class was finished , I was approached by the school’s “Discipline Management Coordinator,” a SABIS upper management relative who was half my age (and who was, for a brief period, the “Discipline Management Coordinator” in the failed “Hope School” in Atlanta, GA, USA) and ordered to “get upstairs,” that my underclassmen were awaiting me. When I refused and told him that they were not, he informed me that my refusal would be “documented.” It was “documented,” and I was later reprimanded because the colleague showing the film to both our classes agreed with the director that she “couldn’t remember” telling me that she’d begin the film for me, to give me time to climb the staircase. In addition to this fabricated incident, the reprimand accused me of “undermining SABIS” and stated that upon another “breach of conduct” I’d be subject to “extraordinary dismissal” (i.e. termination of contract without notice—a step that is taken under German labour law only when the employee is considered to be a “clear and present danger” to others).
Later, I was indeed dismissed, at the same time that I was successfully gaining employ in a much better international school, on a preposterously contrived charge of “racism,” based on comments I wrote on the third draft of an essay by a student who had, the previous year, been successful in getting this director to change a research paper topic that he’d been working on for months, just before a draft of it was due. There is no need to discuss the particulars of this case in great detail, because I successfully sued the school in German Labour Courts and won a judgment that their manner of severing me was did not conform to legal standards, and I collected some amount of salary from them, but I will mention that the school’s barely substantiated justification for this termination rested on a few remarks on this student’s essay, asserting my right to use IGCSE grading practices to grant him temporary leniency for his extremely delinquent and half-hearted efforts to produce a coherent essay upon the second draft, my upbraiding him for his refusal to use the revision techniques I’d taught his class and for his failure to substantiate his essay’s claim of a lack of racism among his peers when he’d freely referred to such racism, in relation to similar topics in The Crucible, the play we were reading and writing about. The boy is a Turk and when I wrote that it was extremely odd that a Turk living in Germany could fail to make such a connection, I was called “racist” in the school’s brief for referring to the boy in terms of his own nationality. The judge of the first hearing, which I attended, dismissed this allegation of “racism” as being irrelevant to the school’s case against me.
Another example of how preposterous and contrived the school’s case for my dismissal was another allegation that also was dismissed by the Labour Court: the school claimed, in their termination letter, that I’d made no effort to learn German, to support their attempts to curry favour with local officialdom. In fact, I’d taken German language classes in the school during the whole of my first year, but did, in fact, abandon these irregularly scheduled classes after I determined that I no longer wished to continue my employ with SABIS beyond the second year and also wished to leave the country at the end of my contract. What with writing decent lesson plans to supplement their ridiculous “points,” struggling to photocopy literature texts, stay on top of readings, as well as mark essays, I simply didn’t have sufficient time to devote to the German language. Obviously perplexed by their accusation, the judge of the first hearing asked if it were normal to demand of an international school teacher that he should learn the native language when it is not the medium of instruction. When this query was translated for me, I just giggled.
These are, for the most part, recollections of my own mishaps and mistreatment at the hands of SABIS administrators. I can recall countless other examples of the mistreatment of numerous others by these brutal, cruel and deceitful employers. I can recall, for example, two language teachers being chewed out by the director for not having completed within a week’s time a task that was not, properly speaking theirs, but one on which I’d watched them working steadily between classes and after hours and almost finished: the time-tabling of a new instructor in their department. I can remember a dying history teacher being hectored and told that she was “wrecking” the school’s IB program because, at the end of a summer of chemotherapy, she hadn’t finished her “pacing charts.”
The IBO’s response to my report to them of the school’s “malpractice”:
IBO's response to my complaint
It is no wonder that, at the end of every academic year, this school loses 25-35% of its professional staff. During my own job search, I was constantly being asked for leads to help my colleagues find alternate employ. In fact, the Turkish boy’s own mother, an employee of the school, had asked me if I knew of someplace else where she could teach, but when her son’s marks in my class slumped, she told the director that I had approached HER with suggestions for alternate employment, when, actually, she had raised the topic when I informed her that her son was beseeching me to help him to find a scholarship in a boarding school, and that I had told him that I could only speak to his mother about this. The director apparently induced the poor woman to lie about this, and then made it a part of the grounds for terminating me.
Even though I was unemployed for some weeks in Germany before leaving the country, I began to feel better and to recover my health immediately, upon the first day of my separation from SABIS, and I would strongly urge any job-seekers to flee from them.
