Job Discussion Forums

[5h09un]

i can think of a reason why someone might pay for help getting a job here: it was their first one and they didn't know any better until they got here. but as the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you. fool me twice...

anybody here who hasn't been told they're a bad teacher hasn't worked for a bad school before. it's something a dodgy employer will sometimes do to keep you from leaving or quitting and this will usually be followed by threats of blacklisting and deportation. they know that you probably don't know what your rights are and they try to use your ignorance as a club to beat you into submission. this has happened to me before at a private school and at a public university.

and recruiters aren't all bad. there's no other way to find a lot of schools, especially universities. you shouldn't ask them for an honest review of the school from a recruiter because chances are they've never entered it. it's up to you to do your own detective work to find out if it's a decent place or a terrible one. and even then, you might be in for a surprise. schools change hands all the time and just because you haven't found any information about a certain school on the web doesn't mean that it's at least mediocre.

[roadwalker]

One problem in this type of industry is the extrapolation from a couple few experiences to full-blown wisdom regarding how entire country A or entire country B operate. Dave's is a good resource one has at one's disposal and there are many others of varying degrees of usefulness that a new teacher or a teacher considering a new country can research for many questions. If OP had read up a bit, s/he would have probably noticed that many teachers here don't recommend paying for a job since they are plentiful for qualified applicants. Likewise, the pros and cons of arriving on a tourist visa have been discussed ad nauseum, so a new to China teacher could at least judge an offer with some idea.

If you start your forum posting career with an admission that you (twice?) did what many people have expressly and strongly advised against, then offer opinions about the EFL industry and based on limited experience and knowing a guy, you are probably not going to get good reactions. It also doesn't help to opine that Chinese parents teach their children to be naughty also apparently based on that limited experience.

[fat_chris]