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[sourplumjam]

Hey guys: I apologize, this will be a bit lengthy. I hope that this will help somebody, though, and perhaps save somebody else the absolute train wreck that is working at Language Training Center in Astana, Kazakhstan. I will try and be fair with it; this isn't meant to be a screaming rant.

About Me: 30-year-old English teacher. Well-experienced in Russia/the CIS - prior to working in Astana, I worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kyrgyzstan and I also worked with a private school in Moscow. I speak Russian relatively well and am very familiar with Central Asian culture. I even understand some Kyrgyz/Kazakh (they are similar languages). This wasn't my first time at the rodeo, so to speak.

To Be Fair: Probably the best thing about LTC is that they pay in dollars. That's right - they hand you cold, hard American cash upon request. You can also get your payment in tenge… and they would probably prefer to pay you in tenge, but… you definitely don't want to be holding on to that much tenge. It's not a stable currency.

The pay is also quite good: $2000/month. I do think that LTC is the highest-paying non-international school in Astana - or at least, a few of my coworkers were trying to find work elsewhere and everywhere else paid half as much, tops. Considering that the tenge (Kazakh currency) is in pretty deplorable condition at the moment - they are having similar economic troubles to Russia, being an oil-based economy - you will be rolling in dough. I was able to live off of $400/month easily. They provide housing, and you can live without a roommate if you wish. If you decide to live with a roommate, though, your apartment will be much nicer. I lived alone in one of those here's-a-single-fold-out-couch-and-a-table setups, but it was perfectly suitable and I was comfortable. People who shared had actually fully-furnished apartments with living room furniture and everything. The only thing you have to pay for is utilities, which usually amounted to about $25 a month. Internet can be had for roughly $15, and a comprehensive cell phone plan - data, SMS, the whole nine yards - is $8. The apartments are all within walking distance of the school, which helps ease the occasional split shift and also makes going home for lunch a breeze. (Some people actually lived in the same building as the school.)

They also will pay you for a one-way flight out to Kazakhstan. When I signed on, they actually handed you the reimbursement directly at the airport. Nowadays I believe they bundle the reimbursement in with the monthly salary so they don't have to drop a big wad of cash on you when you arrive. Frankly, I wouldn't have taken the contract without the up-front payment for the flight and the guarantee of payment in US dollars. (I was working in Russia when the rouble bottomed out in 2014 and had to bail because my salary was cut by two-thirds. I was paranoid about returning to an oil economy, but the dollar guarantee talked me into it.) Getting home is on your own dime.

You also don't have to travel to teach (most of the time; some unfortunates end up working at two of the different branches but this never happened to me), there are no "make up" lessons, and the classes do mostly tend to be on the smaller side - though they swear up and down on their recruiting posts that the classes are no more than 10, and this is untrue. However, they typically do not get bigger than 15.

Now For The Good Bit: This is another one of those "the director is a nightmare" postings. While it's nice that the salary is frozen at the $2000 mark at LTC, the director (who I will now refer to as 'Boss') then more or less assumes his role as God Of Your Life and essentially wants you to bend over backward and sideways for him. I had two major arguments with him, as follows:

Moving. There are now three branches of this school in Astana. I was working at one of the branches (the oldest one), and he got a wild hair up his nether regions about me moving to another one of the schools. I didn't want to go - moving house is a pain - but what really irritated me was his reasoning. Two other teachers had just quit at my branch, and the schedules were going to change yet again (more on this later). I pointed out that he was going to need me to fill a particular set of hours that could logically be filled by nobody else, unless he was going to move me to another school and then move somebody from the other school back to the branch I had been working at.

This quite literally became a yelling match. Finally, I agreed to move because he seriously would not drop the subject - he always wanted to talk after the last class of the day, when I'd been teaching for ten hours and was exhausted.

Did I end up moving? No. I ended up staying where I was due to all of the reasons I had pointed out during our yelling matches. So that was irritating. But it was only the beginning.

Documents. When you come to Kazakhstan, you get something called a migration card. This tiny slip of paper is ridiculously important - basically, you can't leave the country without it and if you lose it you'd best be prepared for a massive bureaucratic headache. Every time you leave Kazakhstan and come back in, you get a new migration card. Also, every time a foreigner leaves and comes back into Kazakhstan, the employer has to re-register the passport. No problem.

After the winter holiday break, I handed in my passport to get it re-registered. When I got my passport back, there was no migration card in it.

Problem.

Basically, one of the ex-teachers was a bit of an alcoholic and caused some problems for the company (which is a legitimate grievance for the company to have), and because of this, the company wanted to hold the migration cards as "insurance." I said no way Jose - Let No Man Screw With Your Documents is the creed of the Sane English Teacher. I quite literally had to threaten to quit - and say that if I did not get my migration card back immediately I was going to not teach classes and the school would have to deal with that - before Boss would give it back.

It is illegal for an employer to hold migration cards in Kazakhstan, by the way. One of my coworkers checked with his embassy.

At this point, I was clearly on Boss' bad list (this happened very soon after the whole moving debacle).

After these two arguments, things simmered down a bit, and Boss and I established a relationship based around being so polite to each other it was clear it caused mutual toothaches. But the pay was good and the students aren't bad, so I basically resolved to avoid Boss as much as possible and have that be that.

Then, he opened a third school.

One of the things that Boss liked to go on and on about was how bad the economy was. It's true - the economy in Kazakhstan is not the greatest right now, and one of the first things that people will drop if belt-tightening is a problem is extraneous English classes. Classes had been getting smaller for a while - so they came up with a plan to split the classes. The way the schedule works is each class is divided into two 55-minute sessions. Each session is taught by a different teacher, so the students have two teachers per class. Originally, the classes were three times a week with two native teachers.

However, this was more expensive, so the school came up with a new version of classes which were only twice a week and one of the teachers was Kazakh. This in and of itself wasn't a huge deal, but it completely shattered everybody's schedules.

Regarding the local staff: this place literally goes through them like poo through a goose. The pay is abominable for the locals and Boss treats them VERY VERY BADLY. The turnover of local staff is insane. I started my contact in November, and every single one of the original receptionists had quit by the time Boss ended my contract in May. At the branch I didn't work at, they weren't able to hold on to a local teacher for longer than 3 weeks.

Both of the DoS's (who were local) quit due to being overworked. Then they hired a new DoS. She quit too. As of the time I left there is no DoS and everything's a complete mess.

Even when there were DoS's working, though, forget about any sort of support. There are no written curriculums set up - it's basically up to you and your teaching partner to figure out how you want to run the class. To a certain extent it's nice to have the freedom, but it also gives the school free reign to come down on you like a ton of dropped piano if students complain about something. For instance, when I first started at the school, I was doing tests every unit since those were the materials provided, there was no curriculum, and I did what the materials I had said to do. A student complained that the tests were happening too often. Turns out that the teacher I had replaced NEVER did tests, so they went from zero tests to tests after every chapter. This didn't result in any serious reprimand, but there is no general guidance about classes. This results in classes being wildly based on the whims of individual teachers, and if teachers get switched around (happens often), there's zero continuity. I was never once observed, there was never any feedback (unless students were complaining), and professional development is nonexistent.

Also, the schedules are 100% unpredictable for the most part. I was at the school for roughly six months and my schedule was completely overhauled (as in, different hours, different days, new classes, new "partner teacher," new days off, new everything) three times. Had I not got let go when I did, my schedule would have morphed a fourth time in six months.

The contract is also a very unfunny joke with a terrible punchline. First of all, they keep on altering it, so every teacher ends up with a slightly modified version. Also, it basically is worth the same as toilet paper (though, to be fair, most contracts are - what are you going to do, get Kazakh-lawyered up?), and they only invoke it when it benefits them. They also violate it constantly. For instance, after Boss went on The Great Firing Rampage of 2016, it turned out that there were too many hours and not enough teachers to fill them. Oops. Now there are two teachers who are literally working 50 hours a week. Yes. I am not exaggerating. 50 hours a week of work. TEACHING work. Not office hours. The contract is supposed to be at 27, but they definitely push this - a few times I was working 32. There's also a sneaky little clause in there where they say they can have you work an extra 5 hours a week if they want. They phrase it in the contract to make it sound like it's an occasional thing, but it isn't. It's a whim-based thing.

Oh, also: advertising. Yes. They make you advertise for the school. The process for this is thus: one day your classes get covered (if you are unlucky, they will want you to do this on your days off) and you get trucked out to a local school where you go and interrupt all sorts of classes - English or not - to do a "presentation." This presentation involves an unfortunate local staff member introducing you to the class, and you go through some sort of 3-minute routine (I played a modified version of Simon Says with younger classes, and did board races with older classes) to make it seem like class is going to be an endless game fest. Then the local staff member gets the kids (these are usually young kids) to give her their parents' phone numbers so the school can solicit them.

I am not making this up. I am unsure how this is allowed in the schools at all (if I were a parent, I'd be furious that some random language school was interrupting math class in order to harangue my child into giving out my phone number), but apparently Boss has "connections."

Oh, also. Boss' father is some bigwig in the police force, so he'll occasionally drop that as a threatening overtone. Like, he'll make your life uber difficult if you mess with him. (He never did this with me, but a few of the other teachers reported it.)

So, anyway, to return to the narrative, the number of students had been dwindling for a while. A third branch of the company had been opened. Boss is also trying to get some sort of "college" off the ground as well - if you see any LTC advertisements regarding math and science teachers, it's for this "college" which may or may not be happening in the near future. They were advertising for math/science teachers back when I applied for the job in October of 2015 - it's still not opened.

Then, summer hit. Another thing I found curious about this job when I signed on was that it was a literal year-long contract. Not an academic year - a calendar one. I asked during the interview what the summer was like - I don't like summer camps and didn't want to be contractually roped into doing one. I was assured that there was no summer camp, and that classes continued as per normal.

Guess what the company started this year? That's right: a summer camp. Since student numbers were so low, they were literally trying everything in the book to increase enrollment. The problem with this was that it wasn't planned at all and they literally only started advertising for a June camp session in May. Anybody who knows anything about marketing knows that's not going to work.

And how did I find out about this summer camp? Oh, they put a giant ad for it on the front of the school. They don't tell you anything until it's basically on top of you. And even then, they don't tell you. You figure it out by virtue of a huge poster advertising something that you were assured wouldn't be happening.

I expressed my displeasure.

A week later, I was fired.

Or, rather, I got a notice saying that the company had the right to "change the contract" at any point, and basically they were changing it by ending it. To be honest, at this point I was so sick of the place I was glad to go and did not put up a fuss.

To Boss' credit, he ended up paying me out for my last month of work in full, even though I only worked three hours the last week. So there is that. He also didn't pull any trying-to-wring-every-last-dollar-out-of-you moves that he has on others. For a couple that ended up quitting (due to him holding their migration cards), for instance, Boss withheld the cost of their plane tickets from their final salaries. NOWHERE in anybody's contract does it mention penalties for breaking the contract early (or it may in the new contracts, but the one I had and the one that the couple had did not specify any). He just did that. He also docked another person's pay for the last month (granted, she got fired due to not showing up for work one day and her story's a bit dicey, but it was still not mentioned anywhere in the contract that the boss can do that).

But he paid me out and we left on… more or less cordial terms. In that he clearly thinks I'm ridiculously obstinate and I think more fondly of a donkey's rear end than I think of him, but it was polite.

But that's not all!

In total, over the course of roughly two weeks, he fired a grand total of five foreign staff and two local staff. One of the firings was due to the teacher missing work, as mentioned above, but the rest were clearly because the company is in bad financial straits. It felt like we were living in the white-collar version of Game of Thrones. You know, the whole, "who's going to die THIS episode" feeling.

I also think that Boss is trying to get rid of as much of "the old guard" as possible and re-hire in September to try and start over again. I highly recommend against working for this company. Yes, the money is pretty good, but you can make good money elsewhere while swallowing a more palatable cocktail of excrement alongside your salary.

You're forever walking a very difficult tightrope here - if you don't fight for your boundaries you WILL end up like the saps working 50 hours a week (basically, a full day of summer camp and then evenings of regular classes), or like the guy who was teaching 10 hour days and then doing "presentations" on his days off. If you do fight for your boundaries, you will be first on the list to be canned when the poo hits the fan. I was not fired for any real reason - I did not violate any part of the contract. I was let go because I was "not flexible enough," and was at the mercy of the chronic cash flow problems that plague this place.

It's just not a very nice place to work, basically. Everybody who is there is solely there for the money, not because they like the job or the city. Astana is a bit of a difficult beast to begin with - it's very isolated, out in the middle of the steppe. In terms of day trips, there aren't many. You can check out Karaganda, there's Borovoe nature resort, and… a whole lot of steppe. Basically anything else is going to require a plane ride. The winters are absolutely frigid - Astana's the second-coldest capital city in the world. (The first coldest, for those of you who like trivia, is Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.) There's not too much to do in Astana. The good news is that this definitely helps with saving money. The food also isn't much to write home about. If you're a vegetarian… you're gonna have a bad time. You'd better like potatoes.

I liked the local staff when they stuck around for more than a hot second (the ones that weren't Boss; he's Kazakh), and the other foreign teachers were good companions in the absurdity. The students were overall very lovely (or, you know, typical teenage wastelands, as it were). My last night in Astana a group of them took me out bowling and bought me pizza.

But you can do better. Don't be pulled in by the salary - it really isn't worth it.