Job Discussion Forums

[scottie1113]

I did a search and found very little on this. I know someone in Warsaw who has a contract to teach for them and recommends them but I wanted to ask you Poland veterans about your feel for the school. He claims to make a decent salary and in fact sent me a spreadsheet showing his income from the school over the last 12 months and it's obvious that he's able to live comfortably off that.

Anything you have to say will be greatly appreciated. Dziekuje bardzo.

[Alex Shulgin]

Empik? Biggest chain of schools in Poland.

Warsaw Empik: Pay reasonably well, how well I don't know; Generally favourable comments about working there from former teachers; Never heard any horror stories; never heard of any teachers being ripped off; never heard of anybody not getting paid; never heard of the school passing off non-native speakers as native speakers.

Would I work for them myself? Probably. But I'd need to see the pay rate before being sure.

[joshsweigart]

In Lodz they were paying 45 zl for 45 minutes. Usually 90 min classes, so 90 zl per class minus taxes. I don't know about now. I know someone who worked there and had a split schedule, but he liked it. The director may make some difference but I think that the schools are all pretty good.

[scottie1113]

Thanks for the replies. They help a lot. I appreciate it.

[cezarek]

Only heard good about them. But very few of their teachers are native speakers.

[jacquelinekerouac]

I worked for Empik for two of the longest months of my life this past spring. I'm not saying absolutely don't work for them, but my experience with them was extremely negative. First and foremost, as was mentioned earlier, few of their teachers are native speakers. In fact, at the site that employed me (Sosnowiec), there was only one other native speaker, and he was part-time. The result is that many students come to expect having a Polish teacher in class and actually resent having a native speaker--I had one group even refuse to have me as a teacher before I ever even taught the class. The other groups were entirely too used to speaking Polish in class, not only to each other but to the teacher as well, which made me wonder if the teachers really did stick to the target language as much as they said they did. Lastly, students were much less willing to try "unusual" ways of learning English, including such radical ideas as groupwork, kinesthetic activities and tactile devices to learn new points. (I've taught English in the classroom and through private tutoring for about 3 years, and never until Empik did I have students who looked at me like I was offering them anthrax when I asked them to take a marker or play a game.)
To add insult to injury, at least at the site where I worked, they treated me like I was incompetent as a teacher simply because I was a native speaker. The center manager told me that all native speakers at Empik had to team teach every class (not just lower levels). When I challenged the logic of this, she said that was the way it was company-wide. This was not true. I knew of other native speakers who taught more advanced levels all by themselves. They don't require all of their Polish teachers to team-teach every class. In fact, they don't require them to team-teach at all. I'm not particularly averse to team-teaching, but because at this site native speakers were second class citizens, two of the Polish teachers I taught with thought that team-teaching meant that they told me which page numbers to teach from and I'd better have that done by the next time they taught the class. I incurred the wrath of one such teacher because I insisted on staying on a point the students did not understand longer than she thought was necessary. We seemed to disagree that getting through the book is not quite the same thing as teaching. The other teacher I team-taught with told me just to do conversation with my students and stay away from the book entirely. While I do like to do conversation and I think students can learn from it, to be relegated to "just conversation" was difficult because I could teach them more substantial stuff spanning the areas of language learning. It's kind of disappointing to be so limited in teaching simply because the Polish teacher (who, at that site, had the final say) thought the native speaker was either an appendage or superfluous.
I was also hired on to teach at Empik summer camps. I was illegally working at that point, and they said that because of that, I could not work at the camps (after it was already offered to me and I was already working illegally for the site!). However, two colleagues of mine who were also working illegally were able to work for the camps. Why the dichotomy? Other than this company is dishonest, it remains an unsolved mystery.
Finally, and this might be the most important point for some people, after taxes I got only 28zl per 45 min class, which, compared to other schools, is a pittance. I agreed to that salary, but remarkably enough, the complete salary never actually showed up in my check. For the last paycheck, because I was abroad and couldn't really do anything about it, the site shorted me 15% of my final wage. For this check and for several others, I got a myriad of excuses but never any money.
So, the moral of the story is, you may work at a different site and have a completely different experience. In fact, if you do decide to work at Empik, I sincerely hope you do. They are an established school and aren't likely to shut down, but that does not mean working for them will be a pleasant experience.

[cezarek]

[cezarek]

[gregoryfromcali]

I know that I wouldn't want to work for Empik in Cracow.

Basically I've heard that the school just doesn't care.

[MarkStevens]

"I know that I wouldn't want to work for Empik in Cracow.

Basically I've heard that the school just doesn't care."



Hmmm. I work for them in Krakow, and they're all nice people, but they seem maybe a little disorganised and don't take a huge interest in their teachers - they never really explained exactly how and what they wanted me to teach. That said, I really like the classes I got from them. Also, I hear that the new DoS has her sh*t together and is going to shape the place up. It's a mixed bag there, really - not perfect, but not as bad as the stories I have heard about some schools.[/quote]

[patrykt]

I currently teach at Empik in Poznan and must give it a positive review. The director, secretaries and other teachers have been really great so far.