Job Discussion Forums

[kparsons]

(Belatedly) thanks for the info, Yaramaz -- you've returned Turkey to the top of the list!

[Malsol]

Check China forum for McEFL, McJob

EF = Economics First

[englishgibson]

Turkey's a rather interesting connection to the Swiss bank account of this corrupt organization.
It's not only about "Economics First", but also about the prestige of an organization that wishes to dictate the pace of the ESL biz around the world. It wouldn't sound as bad, if they didn't taint those burgers so much and didn't "bend" into such "curves" when asked to.

Peace to the EF's Swiss-cheese Head Office
and
cheers and beers to all ESLers around the world

[Chris_Crossley]

I worked for the first of two schools in the city of Wuhan, China, for two years between October 2001 and October 2003.

The teaching side of it was OK, since I got a thorough grounding in how to teach people ranging from young learners in the 11-14 age group to adults up to their mid-40s, including a stint of corporate in-house training during my second year when I was acting DoS.

I have been able to use this teaching experience in the three years since I left EF, since my next full-time teaching job in the city was at a primary school for a year and, since February 2005, I have been teaching English to graduates who want to go to England for a year to get their master's degrees.

The management side, however, introduced me to the realities of Chinese management politicking. My first school manager was a puppet of the man who had sponsored his appointment and was sycophantic to the core, not to mention incompetent and apt to take as many sick days off as he could whenever he could not stand the pressure.

It did not help matters that the first DoS of the school was one of those failed personalities who was constantly at war with the world and left after just 10 weeks, leaving teaching and administrative staff traumatized in his wake in order to do the same to another set of hapless people at another EF school.

He had even lied to head office, claiming that he had been the victim of racism when he, in fact, had been the racist, labelling all Chinese as "monkeys who can't even speak their own language properly, never mind English". In spite of the complaints we made to the school manager, he never sacked him because he was afraid of being sacked himself by the man with the big money. The nut knew this, so he kept on terrorizing people until he finally decked the manager on his final day; the manager, even now, did nothing because he did not want any further trouble and let him get away with it. Given his incompetence and sycophancy, which even the nut accused him of during a heated argument in front of all the staff, perhaps he deserved to be decked, really.

Finally, his incompetence became so unbearable that, just before the end of my first year at the school, he was eventually fired, albeit by the president of the school, not the big guy - yet the big guy was himself gutted by this, because it meant he lost his influence over how he thought the school should be run. The guy the president then appointed was an absolute control freak - competent at his job undeniably, but one who felt that he could run things his way, even to the extent of making academic decisions behind my back, thus making my position of acting DoS an absolute non-job. I was relieved when my second-year contract expired so I could finally leave.

Hence, there are two sides to my story about my experiences at EF. I can be thankful that my teaching experiences were positive, at least; it would have been a different story had they been the opposite.