Job Discussion Forums

[Keyboard Kommando]

I'm bailing! 12 hour work days, material that doesn't make sense. NO textbooks at all. This place is definitely shady. So I'm doing a midnight run. Anyone who thinks about working for this place, beware!

[Keyboard Kommando]

This was one of the worst experiences I have ever had in ESL. I basically rolled the dice and crapped out. First of all, the office in Amman is a financial company that someone decided should also become an ESL school. They are doing a bunch of other things from the premises as well, like export-import, etc... They are trying a bunch of different schemes to see if it can make money. There are no real classrooms, just a meeting room. No offices or desks for teachers, you just sit in a crowded room and try to get things done.

No organization, absolutely NO books when I got there. I was thrown into 2-3 hour classes with nothing to teach. Their "signature TESOL course" was a bunch of crap with MANY mistakes that was plagiarized from many sources. It was badly done on a Moodle platform, that looked like a high school kid did pretty quickly. I've designed learning programs on Moodle, and this one was bad!

Again, we had no real material to teach from. Basically, the students were supposed to do the lessons in advance, and of course none did. There were 50 modules, of which, they only had time to do less than half. What they wanted us to do was to mainly scour the internet for articles and use them to teach from. And of course, anything that went wrong was the teacher's fault.

After I left, I got an email from them demanding I wire them $1800. They sent me an airline ticket from Chicago to Amman, it took me $300 to fly there out of my pocket. They told me the airport (of a major city in Ohio) was not an international airport. So they couldn't get me a connecting flight from there. I was not reimbursed and in the time I was there, did not sign a contract.

Also, although the teaching hours were from 3-9 pm, I was called at 10-11 in the morning to come in for "office hours." It mainly consisted of sitting on a rickety round table in a crowded room trying to use an old computer to get articles to teach from. Even then, most of the time, we couldn't print because they were too cheap to get the cartridges or paper.

Their Chicago office is shaky, I doubt it is an office. Probably just a room with a phone. Everything about their website and what they do sounds like someone who decided to try to run a recruiting service and only does it half assed or just plain doesn't know what they're doing. This is a warning for anyone else stupid enough to answer one of their adds.............DON'T!!!!!

[nomad soul]

Paying for part of your airfare should have been the first warning flag. Anyway, it's good you got out of that ridiculous situation. Thanks for giving others a clear picture of your experience.

[das31]

J*sus Chr*st Keyboard Kommando, your experience sounds absolutely awful. I'm glad I started this thread, so others can beware of these people.

[plumpy nut]