Star Q
iii. Complete Lesson Plan
Getting a promotion can represent a high note in an individual's career, especially when the promotion comes with a certain amount of salary increment and other perks like a beautiful and comfortable office of your own plus less subordinates to contend with.
However, with promotion comes great responsibilities, like a senior teacher and a good friend once told me. She said that the most difficult thing that comes with a promotion is the responsibility to be fair to everybody. She said that the difficulty of doing all the paperwork and the long hours were nothing compared to being fair to a person's subordinates which means it is difficult to avoid taking advantage of your position and making everything work for you alone.
She reminded me that once a person gets promoted, he should be careful not to be tempted to bend the rules to fit his own agenda. She gave the school situation as examples. She did not deny the fact that once a person is promoted, he will try to change the time allocated for certain activities in the school to the advantage of his spouse or offspring, like changing what are supposed to be in the afternoon to be in the morning instead; or perhaps doing so out of spite perhaps because now he has to stay late into the evening while the other teachers go back a bit earlier.
A newly promoted person is also tempted to gain all the perks allocated for eligible students for his own offspring; things like the computers provided by the government for students from low to middle income families and also scholarships. She cited an example where an officer used his prerogative to acquire computers for his offspring and those of his closest friends, even when both the husbands and wives are working and are well above the low and middle income bracket!
She also reminded me that a newly promoted person also has the tendency of getting his subordinate to do his work for him and also work as long as he does. This person will get his subordinates to do his work for him by disguising the work and demanding that the work is supposed to be done by the subordinates who are naturally not allowed any kind of objections. Subordinates are also asked to work late hours just because the newly promoted person's work schedule requires him to work more hours than others.
Mind you, what is written here are all based on her experience as a teacher for more than thirty years. She has seen everything there is to see when a person gets promoted and sadly, very few of them have been able to avoid the temptations as mentioned above.
These are not my words (at least not one hundred percent!) She mentioned these to me before she retired thinking then I will one day be promoted. Well, I have three more years to go and a chance of that seems highly unlikely, which in a way is alright, considering the examples she highlighted.
In 'Spiderman The Movie' the tagline was 'With Great Power Comes Great Responsibilities' but in the life of a newly promoted person, the tagline is 'With Promotion Comes Great Responsibilities'. It not only takes the power of Spiderman to carry these reponsibilities, but perhaps the might and will of Superman as well!
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