I’m a guy in his 40’s that is teaching in a college in China that is about 85% female.
Several months ago another foreigner that is a woman in her 20’s starting teaching at the college. It is her first time in China.
The first weekend that she was here I spent a few hours guiding her around the school and helping her getting acquainted with the city.
She seemed like a nice person and I invited her to visit a few of my classes to help her with her first time teaching in China.
Most of my classes are fun and happy. The students were especially excited that day because it was the first time that most of them had met or talked with a female foreign teacher. The classes went very well, and I thought that by observing my classes it would help the new teacher to be less nervous when she started her own classes.
But, ever since that day the new teacher has not spoken to me and just gives me dirty looks or ignores me whenever I see her in public. Her apartment is next to mine and sometimes I can hear her phone conversations. I have heard her complain that my students were “too happy” and that I am a “middle aged loser”.
I told her the first day that we met that my girlfriend is a woman that teaches at a different school. There has never been anything romantic between me and any of the students at the school. She seems to have an active social life, and I seriously doubt that she has any romantic interest in me.
Immaturity + ageism + culture shock? If she’s in her 20s and it’s her first time abroad, she may have whole sets of assumptions and mistaken notions that you can’t do anything about. She may have job performance anxiety or be seriously competitive or resent the idea that someone might mentor her or anything. You can’t know, but it’s probably not personal; let it go.
I have a coworker who wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t smile at me, wouldn’t even look me in the eye. She was about as cold as a person could be. This normally wouldn’t bother me so much, but she’s supposed to be my closest point of contact here. In theory, she’s the only person I should be talking to professionally. (In practice, it’s not really like that.)
What made it worse is that the only water cooler in close proximity is in her office. I dreaded going in there. It got to the point where I’d go way out of my way just to fill my water bottle.
One day I’d had enough and just outright asked her what was wrong. She said that she’s just really shy and it takes her a long time to open up to people. After that, she was still really cold. But after a while she started to warm up. Now she often stops by my office to chat. She’s really friendly. It’s like a huge weight has come off of my shoulders!
Can you do something like that? Just ask her, in a non-confrontational way, if she has a problem with you? And let her know in no uncertain terms that the air needs to be cleared? I think it’s worth a try.
Thanks for the suggestion. But, I did try speaking to her a few weeks ago and I did ask her if I did anything to make her angry.
Her reply was to just give me an angry look, and she walked away.
Then it’s time to escalate it. Sit her down and ask her what her problem with you is. Let her know that she’s being unprofessional. Include your employer in the conversation if you have to.
From that I believe you are justified in well and truly washing your hands of her. It sucks working around someone like that, but don’t let her ruin your job or your happiness. It would be interesting to see how the students deal with her once they get to know what she’s like.
I have a friend who taught in Japan for about 5 years professionally, but he finally had it with the instutions and started posting on bulletin boards for people who want to improve their conversational english, and they would meet him in bars, buy him drinks, and pay him $60-$100 an hour for it…
Because he said that his bosses and his coworkers literally drove him out with the sort of behavior you are describing, but from all directions, including, after a while, from his students, who had overheard the same vitrol…
But this is second hand to me, third hand now to you… He is now back in the states.
It hits me as a jealousy situation. SHE wants to be the one with a class full of happy foreign kids.
Combine that with immaturity, age intolerance, and the fact that it’s not as easy as she thought, and you get a bitter girl. She might think you’re undermining her if her class is not being so nice to her.
Does she have any friends, or is she friendly towards other peers? That could be telling. If she is friendly with other peers, perhaps they told her something about you, whether true or untrue, that she believes.
It is impossible to know what is in her head, but I have no interest in her and I do not think I ever did anything that would make a person think that I am interested.
One thing that I am now remembering is that on her second day here I was walking past her open apartment door while she was moving furniture.
I started to walk in her door and ask her if she needed any help when she told me not to enter.
I apologized and told her that I made a mistake, that I should have asked her first if it was ok to enter.
That is also one of the things that I overheard her talking about on the phone.
“He should know better than to just walk in without being invited”.
Even something nonverbal, like staring at her pulchritude too long?
What does “not putting up with it” mean in this case? People say that a lot, and I wonder. Does that mean quitting your job if she talks behind your back? A fistfight? Because if you just tell her you’re not putting up with it, and she keeps doing it after that, don’t you have to escalate somehow?