"ABC Foreign Language Training School is a national chain school. It has accumulated plentiful teaching experience for more than ten years, fostering almost ten thousand excellent students. ABC School has branches in three cities: Shanghai, Beijing and Harbin."
Another tale of woe follows. Any comments good or bad? .........................
Where to begin? Awful organization: the Chinese staff and foreign staff essentially work in different worlds with little or no communication, scheduling is completely random, they ask you to cover shifts at the last second all the time, and mandatory meetings on your off-days, OFF THE CLOCK.
The text books are so Chinglish it is painful. They are so ridiculous and boring that the students dread just the sight of you picking up. The school managers encourage teachers to bring a lot of cultural activites and games into the classroom, but provide absolutely NO suggestions or materials at all. This is a company that will basically hire a warm body. The foreigners and Chinese staff are essentially that.
You will be given no supplies such as paper, markers, erasers, and the printers/copiers never work. Most of the teachers would buy their own paper, print their own material, and bring their own markers (this gets very very expensive).
This school will also promise you a "clean Western" apartment, but will try to get you the cheapest and dirtiest apartment possible. They also try to throw other random teachers in your house, even temporarily to sleep on your couch!
The school will not pay for any of the administrative legal costs of working in China. Visas, health exams, etc., all at your own expense, endless hidden fees are always the burden of the teacher.
They claim that they give paid vacations, but this is rarely the case. Many times we had to come in and have "office hours" on national holidays.
When I quit they threw a fit and tried to have me kicked out of China. I'm now suing them for the money they owe me, and at our first court date at the arbitration department, ABC sent a representative that said that I "never worked for them, nor did I sign a contract with them." They basically denied my ever working there. Unbelievable.
All the teachers were miserable there. Don't do it!
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Inspector McHammered of the Lard in Pamplona, Spain
