Job Discussion Forums

[Kirkpatrick]

I looked into working with them... They provide substansard housing and you must commute half way across the city at your exspense.. Foreign staff is very unfriendly and openly hostile.... I heard many comlaints from current staff.... Like full contract does mean full time pay... Hours can change like the wind..... One of the lowest of the low in Turkey..... lots of bad stories...

[teacherdude]

Btw, not answering you means they are not interested.

No Diploma means most schools won't bother with you.

Up to a year ago ET was hiring people with on line diplomas.
Get a decent Diploma and you'll get a job. Some of the better schools won't hire you unless your Dip. is CELTA or equivalent.

TD

[misterkodak]

If English Time doesn't get back to you, consider yourself spared a bad experience. I disagree with Teacher Dude. When I worked for the 'crime I knew of a number of teachers (and 2 headteachers) who didn't have diplomas. I also remember them hiring non-native speakers who had English nobody could understand and no, i'm not talking about Turkish staff either!

[teacherdude]

[misterkodak]

We had a guy from Nigeria who made his own university diploma. They even put it on the wall in the branch office. I wonder if it's still there. The English in it was so bad!

[doner]

You have to hand it to the Nigerians they do not give a toss and they are right. As for the crime they get the dross they deserve.

[bulgogiboy]

[doner]

Same as a crappy language school called Newline I worked at in the nineties. They would have fun days out for the students which the students paid for as part of their 120 hour course-of course the Turkish teachers and a few natives had to go along to the fun days out unpaid and then they would take photos of the fun day out and make posters with catchy fun slogans to put on the wall like:

Newline students like to make funny,
Newline students are too success.

[eclectic]

make funny.......maybe faces.

[misterkodak]

I remember the wold map that the crime passed out. It had Israel down as a member of NATO. Then again, what can you expect from a firm that had a yellow pimpmobile van with space aliens drawn on the sides and "Do you speak english" written on it?

[doner]

And the pimps who try to sell you courses. No matter how much you protest that you are english they still try and sell you lessons

[teacherdude]

Another problem Inoticed at ET, was the unprofessionalism of some of the Head Teachers.

In the old days ET would deliberately bring a Head Teacher from another branch perhaps to mitigate favouratism.

However these days with the logman (ET's shared housing), most teachers know each other already. I was shocked at how shameless some of them were when it came to dealing with problems regarding their friends.

One HT was unable to handle the fact that his friend was unwanted by a class due to their inability to understand her. Despite a lot of shouting and screaming by the class with the partner teacher to get rid of her, he refuseed to do anything about it. He then asked the partner teacher to talk to her and resolve the problem.

In my own case, the HT showed my partner teacher the marks I had recorded in the Register and aske him if he agreed with it. He had her change it without any conference with me. This guy was too lazy to actualy correct homework given so he would give an automatic 100 if you simply did it, no matter how wrong it is.

She asked me if the class had any problems. I responded that they often didn't understand the other teacher, so every week we would have to start over. She turned it around on me as if it were my fault and asked me why was I still at ET if I couldn't solve the problem. I asked her if she would go and speak to her friend the same way, seeing that the students aditted that 'he talked a lot' but they didn't understand him. Naturally, I got no answer. Two of the four HTs fell into that category.

Perhapss the Dude is naive but I actually expected HTs to act like it. Nothing worse than having an icompetent as your superior.

My last three months at ET was a jading experience asI sacrificed my standards for some amazing money. I sincerely hope that I never have to experience such unprofessionalism and incompetence again. Sadly ET has become a haven for naive, incompetent, lazy teachers. I can think of three teachers last year at ET who were never in the class during an exam. They played on the computer while their class cheated.

TD

[misterkodak]

Well, when you consider their revolving door teacher policy, their failure to listen to teachers about the book, their bad pay rates, and the general situation of the head teachers.. itn's not surprising its not a good place to work. These are just the basic workplace complaints. I havne't even touched on the other things like their accomodation or the meetings with the fat woman in the mumu who liked to tell all staff they were "***ing idiots".
The head teacher at the branch i was at got moved up to "management" only to be fired later on. I hated working there bcause when he was a head teacher he'd come to work every morning with a hangover and insult everyone. Turkish management/staff was treated peaches and cream - nothing like "professionalism" while the rest of us underlings were subjected to his hungover rants and abuse.

[Kilij-Arslan]

You guys really saved my ass here. I remember being in Ankara for New Year's and every time I went out on the balcony for a smoke, I could see one of English Time's schools- I remember thinking that I might look into contacting them. Now I won't waste my time.