Job Discussion Forums

[michalski]

Heya all,

I'm looking for schools in Suzhou that might be considered "good". I've taught in Suzhou before and found the city to be really nice - but am not keen on going back to my previous job (not that it was really bad, just the long hours that wore me out).

I'm not very picky - just need an employer that can help out with the visa, flight and accomodation (which is the norm anyway). If anyone could point me to an ESL job website where you can specify which Chinese city you want to work in, or just provide me with some school names/contacts they know in the area - I would deeply appreciate it.

Cheers,

Michael

[ColinA]

[jaytex]

Hey Micheal, I'm looking into jobs in Suzhou as well and wanted to know the school that worked your tail off. Just so I can be aware.
Thanks Jason

[michalski]

Jay - it's a bit of a story actually. It was EF - but there's a bit more to it. I made the fundamental mistake of actually giving this school my best - they saw that I was serious and that my students liked me a lot...so what did they do? They gave me more work, more responsibility, more "extra" assignments, etc...

At the time this was all happening the school had no DoS. It did when I started working there, but he was fired due to serious incompetence (nice guy, but hated teaching). The manager was toying around with a new set of concepts in dealing with the teachers, and to add to everything we found ourselves lacking teachers as contracts started to expire (after being fired, the DoS trashed our branch on the web so badly that nobody new dared apply for a job).

I received as much support from the staff as possible - even the school's accountant would get up in the wee hours just to pick me up from my appartment and dropp me off at work on really cold/rainy days (yeah, wow!) At this point I couldn't just push the work onto somebody else, I was too involved in creating many of the contracts and represented the school too heavily. However, I always came to work with a smile because it was a good bunch of people that I was working with (even if times got a bit hard)

Was it all worth it? Well, the experience was fantastic - so much variety, so many different types of students. The workload exhausted me terribly (lost a fair bit of weight). Upon my departure I was tempted with the offer of being promoted to a senior teaching position if I stayed - However, at that point I was too tired to be interested and just needed a looong break....and that's how my days at EF Suzhou came to an end.