very hit or miss. avoid - International Teacher English 1 Employee Review

where do i start - prepare for a long list... -working hours. they are not the best, especially at the weekend. you will be expected to be at work at 8:45 for a start of 9, and will not be allowed to leave until 18:30. during the week your hours are 3 - 8:30 (2 during probation), add in lesson planning time and commute, making dinner etc. and this leaves barely any time before you have to be in early the next morning. it may not sound like a lot but trust me, if you have 3 two hour classes with no break it can get exhausting. i have heard from friends still working there that these hours are now even longer... admin time - this is the period when you don't have lessons that you are expected to still come in and plan. why? there is absolutely no point in coming in at 3pm when you only have one class at 7:30pm, or even none at all. planning can easily be done at home. classes - don't get me wrong, you can have great classes that you love and the kids are adorable, but you will have classes and kids that you will dread. kids will antagonise you, insult you to your face, refuse to participate in the lesson or speak english, hurt other kids and you etc. and you are just expected to deal with it. if the kids are older than a certain age you will be completely alone in the classroom too. some kids will have genuine issues like adhd or autism that parents will refuse to get checked or ignore it and teachers must deal with their outbursts and disruption in class. that is not our job, it takes away from other kids' learning and we are not trained for this. - work life balance: there is absolutely none. colleagues will text you about work and you will be required to attend things like training or sitting exams on your day off. in my opinion this isn't fair. pa's (progress advisor) - these are colleagues who act as the bridge between the teachers and the parents. can be very hit or miss: either they are so ditzy and don't know what's happening with the class and don't deal with any behaviour issues with the kids because 'that's just how they are', or they will micromanage you and breathe down your neck for parent facing events because they want everything done their way, even though you are the teacher. parent facing events - these are achievement ceremonies (ac), open lessons (ol) and parent teacher conferences (ptc). ptcs are absolutely useless if you are an international teacher: you will prepare a piece of paper for each student that you will then read off of for 2 minutes and the pa will translate to the parent, after which you will just sit there for 10-15 mins in silence because the parent and pa just talk to each other and mostly just ignore you. you don't know if the pa is translating what you said, because they have their own agenda and are trying to sell the company. if there are issues with the child they most likely will not get passed on. ac and ol - international teachers act as a 'white monkey', where they will exploit you for more parent facing events than the local teachers. you will have more acs and ols because parents like to see that a foreign teacher is teaching their kid's class. i was even called specifically to cover a class i had never taken before because i'm white. summer/winter course - ultimately this company cares more about money than the quality of teaching or its employees so teachers must endure several weeks of teaching pointless long courses during the summer and winter break so they can maximise profit. i heard teachers say 'get out while you still can' (before summer course starts) and the overall sentiment was that everyone dreads it. why must a class be 90 minutes long just to teach phonics? the bonus received at the end is way too low for the amount of hours of teaching. english skills - the english skills of some of the local teachers are poor and they are then passing on their mistakes to to the kids. there have been several cases of a teacher making a mistake and the students correcting them. ta's - these are university students (usually aged 18-21) that help out in your class and translate up until kids are old enough to understand your instructions. some of them are angels and can be absolutely invaluable in class, making your life easier. however, you can also have ta's that will stand there in the corner on their phone the whole time and not help at all. they should be properly trained on how to help the teacher before entering a class, as their chinese skills are really needed in lower level classes especially. teacher's notes - these are the basic lesson plans that you will follow and adapt for your class. some of them are really bad, and they get worse the higher the level. the higher ones are very outdated and give you absolutely no guidance so you must make up everything yourself and figure out how to fill 2 hours of lesson time with 15 year olds that don't want to speak. some teacher's notes also have mistakes or don't match up with the activities. hypocrisy - teachers will tell you not to use these teacher's notes and to make your own lesson plan but i have seen teachers who will print out the whole page and read off of it in the lesson, putting in absolutely 0 effort when we must make up everything ourselves. why is it one rule for them and one for us? resources - in my centre they were very disorganised or missing and nobody seemed to care, which made it very hard to teach classes. there was also one printer for the whole school, including the sales team which was really inconvenient, especially when you have to print 10-page tests for a class of 15. budget - the company always cuts corners, like using crappy wps programs and linux on the computers because they 'can't afford' microsoft, yet they will tell us during meetings that our centre is performing top in sales. where is all the money going? - salary. shockingly low, don't believe them when they say it's 'competitive'. i started on 13,000 rmb montly which is equivalent to about £1400 at the time of writing. this is far below the average in china which is around 20,000 rmb. if you think that's bad, the local teachers get paid around 3 or 4 times less, despite having more responsibility (due to speaking chinese) and ta's even less. shady - the pay check is always split into bonuses and allowances instead of one lump sum. also the contract states that talking about pay with your coworkers is grounds for immediate termination - that's how you know there's some bs going on. they also keep your work permit card - you are not allowed to see it. breaking your contract - this is possible within one year but not recommended. you must pay back everything the company paid for, including the flight, the 2 week hotel stay, any reimbursement you claimed plus the costs incurred from your visa and work permit . i would recommend to research this online as i have heard stories about some centres refusing to give people their papers back or letting them transfer to a new job. annual leave - you get 10 days a year plus national holidays (and they will give you the least amount of time they possibly can for them). this makes me laugh as they advertise you being able to 'travel around asia' ?? when?? there are simply not enough days unless you book over a national holiday and you will have to compete for this with your coworkers. you get 2 days off a week and only 1 during summer/winter course (when it's most needed) and you are also not allowed to book annual leave during this time which i find very unfair. you may also be required to work on christmas day. sick leave - you will not be able to take sick off work unless you are literally dying. i was treated in hospital and had to take time off work, i should have taken 6 weeks but my centre would not let me and i came back after 4 which really f*cked me over healthwise. if you take any sick leave off work, other teachers will be forced to pick up the slack which is not fair on them and makes them resent you for giving them more work and making them more stressed than they already are. cover teachers apparently do not exist at ef. toxic work environment - this may not be the case in all centres but my work environment was very toxic. some of the teachers were quite fake, they would be nice to your face and then say nasty things behind your back. there is a lot of gossip about you between local teachers and bullying is ignored, i felt uncomfortable coming to work because of it. everyone is miserable and takes this out on other teachers with their bad attitude. it feels very much us vs them. micromanagement - constant breathing down your neck from senior teachers and the dos. your lessons will be observed and they will give you pages of feedback on everything you did wrong (i am all for constructive criticism but it was not constructive) and will keep observing you until you do it their way. there is no room for creativity. they will even do this when you have passed probation with little warning. useless meetings - self explanatory. waste of time inconsistency - mine and my foreign coworkers salaries were different even though we arrived around the same time. some of us received freebies upon arrival that others didn't. there is also inconsistency at work with the rewards system - you might give the students 20 dollars each after a good lesson but your co teacher might give 50. this is also the same with the stamps. high turnover - most people use ef as a stepping stone to get into china as they provide a legal visa and good teaching experience and the big, established company looks good on your resume. they leave after a year when the contract ends once they realise how poorly they are treated and that they can get better pay and less hours elsewhere parents - they have the ultimate power and can request whatever they want and will get it. they will have their young children come in hours early to have us babysit them while they are at work - it is a training centre not a creche. their student's performance in the class ultimately does not matter as they will participate in the achievement ceremony and move up a level regardless if they should or not. parents don't want to pay to have a student repeat a level, so they can go through the whole system without learning anything and parents do not care as long as their children are occupied. they can fail to understand the most basic concepts of a level and nothing gets done about it since we can't focus on one child if we have 9 others. stressful - you will be extremely stressed and overwhelmed in the first month or so. myself and some of my friends in other centres were so exhausted and stressed to the point of crying, and depending on your dos they might just throw you in the deep end. they say that you shouldn't take you work home with you but you will have to when you start as it will take you hours and hours just to do lesson plans for one day as you have to do everything perfectly and make sure you cover everything. racism - personally i didn't experience this but i have been told by friends that they were called racial slurs and treated negatively in the workplace. something to consider if you are a poc i think that about covers my experience... again this is obviously just mine and it is largely dependent on where you are placed and your colleagues, but i would think twice about applying through this company and read all the reviews thoroughly, you should really think about whether this is for you. thank you for reading.