Is anyone awake? Bad work situation :(

[badworksituation]

I work freelance teaching adult learners.

Half way through the course I am currently teaching, I was told I had been doing everything wrong, by a manager. I should have been making students fill in two sets of forms every session. I had no idea.

They are long, complicated forms too one after every session.

Basically one form logs things then the other references this first form and that's what I mark off(I know it sounds stupid to me, too).

I didn't understand so had a meeting with my manager (this was a few weeks ago). She explained, I thought I understood-but I had to put it to the students, as we were now very behind in all of our work.

I wrote them some instructions, ran it by the manager-she okayed them, I put them on the portal. I addressed it in class too and they all seemed okay with it although they did say they thought we should have been doing it from the beginning (I know but I had no idea these forms existed)!

Then she told me a few days later after all students had heeded them that they were wrong.

After more emails/chats back and forth with her and my other manager, I was confident I understood. Students began uploading these forms. I marked them. I was so agitated with the amount of work (I have a lot of learners, It's TONNES) I did not sleep a wink last night worrying about it all-I've always been an organised person, I make sure I understand everything before I do anything, I don't get into situations like this! Nothing like this has ever happened before-I mean seriously I had no sleep at all and I had a class to teach today too (well, yesterday now I suppose) and tomorrow I teach the students in question.

Tonight I spent all night marking these forms off until I finally had done it all. Then I did my normal work prep for tomorrow.

I didn't check my emails until now and I have had an email off my manager saying I have yet again done it all wrong. I've marked forms right that are wrong. I've not updated something I should have updated that I didn't know how to or that I had to update it.

I am about to send my manager an email saying I have had no sleep, it is after midnight, I am clearly not the right man for the job and this is a constant cycle of her telling me what to do, me doing it and then It's wrong. I am clearly not the person to rectify this situation so I recommend they get someone else in to do it.

But I know that's a bad idea.

I have never felt so stupid in my entire life. Ever. I am clearly not the right person to rectify this situation.

Manager's email is all bright and breezy don't get me wrong but I have no clue what she wants me to do or how she expects me to fix this-the course ends in a few weeks!

I am meant to be teaching the concerned students tomorrow.

What on earth do I do

Sleep on it. Use the paragraph with the rudeness tomorrow that a previous poster gave. I would change the email to ask a meeting with your manager to understand why are receiving conflicting information and key parts of the role so late in the day - it's unacceptable it's taken them half way through the course to realise these forms were missing and it's unacceptable to now come up with XYZ other things you should be doing but haven't been told. Your manager has fucked up here and should have had better oversight of it before now. You should be pushing this back on her and asking them to explain how it will be rectified - and that solution isn't you burning yourself out to make up for their short comings

Use the paragraph with the students*

Thank you all. Okay, I'll teach the students tomorrow, and I'll email the manager on lunch or a break. I'll refer to this post. I am really upset about this. Appreciate all the responses a lot, thanks again.

Shitty situation to be in (I’m sorry), but any time I’ve wondered should I just hit send or wait, the answer always should have been wait. Hope you get some sleep a resolution asap. I’d ask the crappy manager for a written example of a good form to help you. Turn it back on her and make her show you, not just tell you what she wants.

Personally I’m with you pr dh on this
This is Your managers mistake.

But if you’re not going to ‘send’ don’t do anything more tonight
Especially if you have to drive tomorrow …..please, please!

Go to bed
Get some sleep

Can confirm adult learning forms are a terrible waste of time for both teachers and learners. I've delivered some free, 2 hour, fun art hobby workshops when the council adult learning service asked me to (I do them elsewhere too, funded by other means). This required learners to fill in an 8 page enrolment form and a 3 page individual learning plan. Mad!

Unsurprisingly the half of learners that were very elderly/had learning disabilities needed me to fill it in for them and didn't know how to answer some of the questions. They also asked for sensitive data (benefits claiming status, immigration status) that I'd seriously question the reasonable need for under GDPR.

I asked about it all when handing over the forms and they said it was because of Ofsted. Like you, apparently there were some bits that weren't filled in correctly, even though they told me they didn't need that particular data. They told me to contact the learners to ask. So... I said sure l, left them waiting a few days, and made it up. No one actually cares or checks.

Don't send it. Sleep on it.

It's quite an emotional email, I think you should double check anything that emotional that you want to send professionally.

It sounds like it needs an iterative way forward. Do a sample, get her to check those, before doing a massive pile of them. Do ask for clarification of the difference between them, maybe ask for a meeting/call with the boss who liked it.

You can't fix this in the middle of the night, it will just get more muddled. You are clearly extremely conscientious. Your job here is not to make the forms 100% perfect but to get them good enough while keeping the students onside. There will be a way through this without stepping away from the job.

@overtaxedoverworked that sounds far too familiar. I too give out real world context and write my own paperwork.

I defintely feel like I am being continually set up to fail

@MeMySonAnd1 yes they definitely keep shoving it back to me. I am a motivated person, I used to love my job-but right now I want to quit it all.

@slipperypenguin I was very annoyed about them only noticing halfway through. I used to be a manager in an office and I constantly checked new staff's work, not in a helicoptering sort of way, to just make sure they were happy and confident in what they were doing so that I could leave them to it more! Sorry, what do you mean use the paragraph with the students?

@madeleine85 I asked her for that immediately this situation came up and she didn't have one!

@Kabanot it is isn't it. I won't send. I'll email it to myself.
Thanks all. I have read everyone's responses apologies if not replied to everyone. I need a new job clearly! But I'll go and try to get some sleep.

OP, I am late to this time difference with Australia but I urge you, DO NOT SEND.

Let us recap. You are an effective teacher, well proved. Your students engage with you. Now you've had a shipload of paperwork dumped on you by crappy boss.
Did boss train you in this paperwork when you began this role?
It is your boss's responsibility to word you up before you started this role and then train you to do this task.
Give me a few minutes and I will go through your email.

Do not press send and do not apologise!!!

Good luck your doing great get some sleep x

One of my favourite bits of feedback I've been given was when I was struggling with being micro-managed. A senior colleague pulled me aside to say well done, it's really difficult working with x. I see what's happening. You might not feel like it but you are handling it so well.

He was spot on, I had completely felt like it was all my fault.

Anyway it's far too late. Goodnight OP!

On that email, keep it in drafts or send it to yourself as you said. That is the sort of email you need to sleep over. I suspect when you read it in the morning you will have a lot of edits.

Personally I would keep emotion out of the email and stick to being factual.

Can you find a way to not take this personally?

it’s clearly a shit show of an organisation if they’re sending emails like that at 11pm. Staff wellbeing is clearly not a priority. Training clearly wasn’t a priority. The handover was lax.

what I would do is tell her to literally mark one with you and point these things out and guide you in doing it, because there’s obviously a disconnect

ultimately I’d see the final few weeks through even if she thinks you’re shit, it’s worth it for the money and for your students, and you’re likely not going to work with her again. Just try and see it as the meme it is.

They sound like a crap company. Why are the students form filling when they should be learning?

You need an "off" time where you don't check email after that time. Then you wouldn't have seen the 11pm email and wouldn't have stayed up dealing with it instead of sleeping. This company aren't paying you for Nightshift only Dayshift.

Hope you've had decent sleep, OP. I've done a rewrite, so have a think on this and discard or alter as you wish. But do not back down. Keep your emotion out of it. Don't take any ego-crushing bullshit on board. And go listen to Tom Petty singing "I Won't Back Down" as you read this.

Dear (boss name),

Thank you for your update on student forms. I do appreciate your feedback.

However, it will be quicker and more practical for you to instruct me in the best way of doing this according to the company's policies and procedures. As a newcomer to the organisation, I would have expected induction into these policies and procedures when I started. No worries; let us take this chance to get this absolutely essential induction up to code.

Please inform me about when and where I should report for best-practice training.

I am available (within these PAID hours). Please bear in mind that I live outside London, so if out of my working hours here you will need to schedule a Teams meeting suitable to me.

Meanwhile, I will continue to teach this course, in which my students are actively engaged and responding well to me as a teacher.

Kind regards,

(A TOTALLY AWESOME TEACHER WHOM ANYONE WOULD BE SO LUCKY TO HAVE!!!!!)

Dear OP, I know you are having a shitful time, and I am sorry to say this is across the secondary and tertiary sector in Australia too. Actually, across any management roles. Management training is poor or non-existent. I've been a (self-taught) manager in the private sector and my aim was to enable my team to do their best work. That included essential training. I'd do some of this myself, then outsource CMS and online forms to our training manager. Your (sad excuse for a) boss should be doing the same. And she should have done it before you started. She should recognise your fine qualities as a teacher and take this chance to retain and train you.

Stand your ground. Be a complete and utter, ahem, Boudicca.

There might come a time when you need to step down, but this is not it. You are well into this course and you need to stand tall for yourself and your students.

Remember: Keep it cool. Pleasant face, calm body language and a tinkly laugh (as we do on MN). And you ... Won't Back Down.

ask for a meeting with your manager to understand why are receiving conflicting information and key parts of the role so late in the day - it's unacceptable it's taken them half way through the course to realise these forms were missing and it's unacceptable to now come up with XYZ other things you should be doing but haven't been told

Absolutely this.

much better than emailing. Keep it factual - you were not given the requisite information.

Ask her to show you what to do. Say please can you model the process to me. I find that works well and they panic if it is an excessive demand. Keep on asking them to show you not tell you.

I think it is a her problem and it does sound as though she doesn't really have a clue what she wants. We have an induction period over a week long with our new hires. They have a colleague who is a "buddy" that can show them how to do things. They have a manager who is ready to help. There are manuals in great detail about how to do specific admin tasks. The manager's job in our organisation is to head off trouble before it starts. This sounds an insane set up and a batshit crazy manager.

Hi OP I hope you got some sleep.

I always used to act defensively in situations like this, thinking I’d done something wrong when I know I’m well organised and good at my job.

Then I suddenly thought ‘why didn’t I know this? because no one bloody told me that’s why!’ You are being badly managed, and your manager sounds as confused as you are so they’re probably being badly managed too.

Soneone said upthread that ultimately no one will even care about these stupid forms but it’s always nice to know what you’re supposed to be doing!

Hope you get it sorted, the whole shebang is probably not worth the good pay to be honest but a job’s a job I guess. You sound like you’re very good at your job (the actual useful bits I mean)

Good luck

I would get both managers together. Ask the one who told you it was right to help you out with the one who is finding fault. The email ping ping isn't helping - a conversation with both of them together might make more progress.

Find a bit of fight too - I know it's hard when you are tired. Clearly you haven't been given some really important information. You are trying to fix this. They should be working with you to do this.

BTW I am currently a Level 7 apprentice and the paper work involved is Byzantine.

You sound like a great teacher.

Hi OP, I hope you got some sleep. You seem like a kind person and a good teacher. I think you’re being a bit harsh on both yourself and your boss.

There’s some very strong advice from PP, but you said you’re a freelancer. Before you take it, consider how much you need the job and how replaceable you are. If the employer really needs you, or if you don’t really care about the job, or if it’s really important to you to stand up for yourself, then have at it. But be aware that in most workplaces, criticising your manager’s conduct over this would mean no further contracts.

At the moment you seem to be locked in a catastrophising cycle where either you are stupid for not getting the forms right, or your manager is stupid for not explaining the forms right. The correct answer seems to be that the forms are stupid for not being self-explanatory, and the organisation is stupid for not allocating training time. Your freelancer boss is presumably not responsible for either of those decisions.

It should be possible for you and your boss to end up on the same side of this, meaning you get support to fill in the forms and the organisation rejigs its procedures. But that will require you to give both yourself and your manager a bit of a pass on this.

Op this sounds rubbish. You must stop staying awake all night worrying about it. Send a non emotional email today copying in both managers and say something like this.

Dear managers, I would like to arrange a call with both of you to get some clarity on the forms and marking as I have received conflicting guidance from you both and it seems I haven't had enough training in this area to be compelting this aspect of my job effectively. I am available at the following times.

It is unacceptable of the manager to be emailing you late at night, she should schedule the send till working hours. You need to be disciplined in not looking at your emails in the middle of the night too. I say this as a teacher who also has to complete lots of marking and prep outside of normal working hours. You cannot let work totally invade your life. Make this their problem, phrase it so that they can recognise their failing....it's not your fault if they haven't trained you properly.

You’ve received really good advice here OP and I hope you feel us all backing you!
I don’t have much to add I just wanted to say I really hope you got some sleep and that you stand firmer in yourself today.