The Poetist

In my last post I mentioned a news broadcast wherein a commentator offered her opinion that students who lost money on their Nova lessons are facing greater difficulty than teachers who have not been paid.  That is so, absolutely ridiculous!!   These students chose to spend disposable income on Nova lessons.  Did they lose their source of income?  No.  So she needs to shut up.

In a few of the sources I’ve linked to people have reported on the amount of money students have paid for lessons.  The way Nova worked students paid for hundreds of lessons up front, spending thousands of dollars to do so.  I specifically remember one story of a man who spent $7,000 on a new contract in March.  He’s losing a lot of money.  I feel bad for him and other students (although not as bad as I feel for teachers and staff), but at the same time I’m a little surprised that people would suscribe to a contract that requires so much up front money for services that have yet to be rendered.  If I were to fork over $7,000 it would either be for a down payment on something (like a house or a car) or something I could own immediately (clothing, jewelry, a trip etc).  I just can’t believe people would spend so much money on something that would be intangible so far into the future.  But to be fair, students signed a contract with Nova and had every right to expect that contract would be honored.

The NHK news program that I mentioned earlier reported how Nova is hoping to re-structure so they can offer students their English lessons under a differently named country.  What I find ironic and very telling of the regard held for teachers is that ‘they’ (I’m not sure who, the Nova board?) seem to assume that they’ll have a supply of teachers.  They talk about the inconvenience to students and wanting them to be able to continue to study but they say nothing of thousands of teachers (or staff) who have been severely inconvenienced and wanting to make amends with them.  They are seriously deluded if they think it will be easy to convince any native English speaker to work for them again – under any name or other incarnation.

Unless, of course, they recruit heavily in America.  So far news outlets and/or the governments of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Great Britain have reacted to the situation with Nova.  Only America has been out of the loop.  In fact, I searched the websites of major newspapers across the country and found only 1 story – a bland Reuters dispatch that doesn’t even mention that any Americans are involved.  Of the papers I searched it’s available at the New York Times and Washington Post websites.