Job Discussion Forums

[KarenB]

Actually, as I recall, there's another site "Nate's School Review" that does something like this anyway. As I recall, he merged with another site, so don't remember what it's called now, and I also can't remember if it's just for schools in Hainan or for all of China.

[tw]

[mep3]

I like the idea of a closed sticky for keeping the list fairly authentic. I think people who are interested enough to participate in the list to begin with won't mind going to the trouble of sending a pm. As for making categories to keep it more objective, that wouldn't necessarily do so, because a category rating can be just as subjective as an overall rating -- e.g., some people like the FAO and others don't. But categories are useful nonetheless. One thing I've found to work well, as you've probably seen from other threads, is when people explain what happened. Then the readers can evaluate it for themselves. Sometimes the readers side with the FT, and other times they side with the school, which is fine. The description gives them more to go on. Sure, you're still getting a biased account of what happened. But I don't think we need to aim for an absolutely perfect method here -- just something decent. More information is more useful than less, most of the time, especially for discriminating minds.

Anyway, someone got a response from a moderator asking them to submit the sticky request directly to Dave, and I got a response from a moderator asking me to wait and see how much interest the thread generated. I thought that was reasonable. Again, I liked the suggestion to make it a closed sticky to keep it fairly real. And I think having one thread to go to where we could get people's evaluations of schools -- even if they aren't perfectly objective and whatnot -- would make navigating the rough waters of China immeasurably easier, especially for Newbies, but also for people who have been here awhile and are just contemplating a move to a dif. school. I hate unpleasant surprises.

M

[Craig!]

thanks for keeping this up! This could be even more useful when you reference this in the newbies forum.
i hope you'll have enough ''interest'' for the moderator to make this a closed sticky.

anyway, i will PM you with an evaluation of my school
in categories, as in Nate's Review and as KarenB said '...such as housing, admin + FAO (relationship and competence), fellow teachers (Chinese), salary and benefits, work expectations, location (shopping, Western food, entertainment, beaches, and other environmental issues).'

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"Share your knowledge; it's one way to achieve immortality" -- Dalai Llama

[mep3]

Categories sound fine to me. I think it would be best if the ratings could be organized into an alphabetized list of schools (or schools by region like on Nate's would be okay). Is it possible to organize a closed sticky that way?

I went to Nate's school review. It's exactly what I'm looking for, but there are very few schools reviewed, percentage-wise. Probably an average of two schools per province. That's just not enough to make for an adequate resource. That's not meant as a knock on his site. Obviously I think he had a great idea. I just think this site gets Soo much more traffic, that a forum for reviews here would become much more complete. If this were my site, I would make it a separate feature on the main menu page I think it would be another significant draw for the site. But for our purposes, a closed sticky is just as good. M