What I Say, What You Hear, and How They’re Never the Same Thing

I had this post written up a few weeks ago with the full intent of submitting it to publish. Unfortunately, when I had finished getting it all written, it completely slipped my mind to hit submit. It’s been stagnating here on my Windows Live Writer program. My apologies for that. So here it is, weeks late, and over the next few days you’ll see some new posts from me as I have a back log of things I really want to write about.

I need to update the the section detailing myself in the “About” page because though I am still severely underpaid, I am no longer unemployed. Due to company policy, I can’t talk too much about what I’m doing in the first few weeks of this new job. What I can tell you is that I’m in training, and at the end of every week, there is a test on the material being taught to ensure that all is being learned for the moment my classmates and I move into production.

There was a test yesterday, and suffice to say the class as a whole did not perform very well. To be more straightforward, a full third of the class scored below 80% on the assessment. The threshold for a passing score is set at that 80% mark, which means–bell curve distributions be damned—these people failed this particular review.

As you can imagine, a 30%+ failure rate is not a good thing. It reflects poorly on the class; it hinders the company’s ability to put agents in production, and since they pay for training (as an aside, hurrah, a paycheck!), agents who wash out of training are sunk costs, investments that yield zero return.

Such high attrition also reflects poorly on the instructors. It suggests, simply, that these people paid to teach are not actually up to the task of helping students learn. Unlike public schools, there is no union protection for trainer-supervisors. Schools face attrition like mad; I don’t have the exact numbers handy, but something like 25% of teachers are out of the education field within the first five years of entering it. And this leaving is generally voluntary, forcing the educational establishment to keep all teachers employed. There is always a demand in education.

In the private business sector, though, an instructor faces termination if a class underperforms. The company is losing money with each successive washout, and if an instructor cannot retain company money, they can and will be cut. The pressure an instructor feels when they face a 30% failure rate makes it all incredibly personal.

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The great divide of oneself.

Quiet and cautious, she sits behind her computer terminal. Inner turmoil rages inside her, straining her brow. Her hair is pulled back in a lazily fashion. She hides her glasses away in her shirt pocket. Thick black spectacles, a fashion cue from earlier this decade among the more geeky of individuals, perhaps from her teens. Now a young woman, she is torn between her past and the world she was introduced to before college. She wants to discuss Super Mario Bros. and Harry Potter, but she loves the night life. The parties, the spirits that raised her own and made her go from average to drop dead gorgeous. She wants more than her stay at home life, more than the comfort of soulless romance novels. She has absolutely no idea, even now, who she is.

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