Working as a shelf stacker/filler in the West is a good job compared to working at garbage training centres in China. Being a night filler in Australia for instance is good money, beats working as a teacher in China.

I looked at a picture posted earlier on of a nice stream with maybe a few bits of paper in it, and the poster was claiming it had sewage in it! I understand that all decent and refined teachers would baulk at getting human feces anywhere about their person but why exagerate litter into sewage. I am glad to say that all foreign teachers working in training centres seem to be of a higher calibre.

What rot, I tried to refrain from posting but it sounds like you could be atsf or mancunian. There are such sewers, you better get used to that fact.

Don't be too sure about that. I know of a young British girl working on a tourist visa at a local language mill in the town I work at. We will celebrate her 24th birthday next Friday. She has never taught one day in her life, is here illegally, has no educational training of any kind, and works 36 hours a week for 7.5 k a month all while her employer changes her working hours all the time. I work at a public school near her and earn 5.8k a month for working 13 hours a week. I dare to say that she is not better off than I am. Granted she is a very nice girl and maybe a better person than me.
I am certainly glad you are doing well at your present location, but on the whole language mills are abusive and deceitful. I am not taking anyone else's opinions here but from my own observations and experience. From what I have read on this site, the most awful cases of abuse are private schools with a fair mix of public ones, but in lesser numbers. It is a choice between eating an old apple and a bad apple. I prefer to eat old apples than bad ones.

But is she happy, because you didn't actually say? She could be happy enough with her hours always changing-It could be that you are saying she shouldn't be? One can be happy working 36 hours a week and miserable working only thirteen; or the other way around. I gather 'language mill' is a smart-alec dysphemistic dismissive term for an English Training Centre? I assure you I am not calling you a smart-alec, because you sound quite measured and reasonable to me.

Thirteen hours could be ideal for you, as long as you have plenty to do in your free time.

I think you mean you prefer to eat old good apples to old bad ones, owing to the fact that it's the old apples which are usually rotten-I assume you meant to say rotten?

I hope that it's a smashing birthday party.

Don't be too sure about that. I know of a young British girl working on a tourist visa at a local language mill in the town I work at. We will celebrate her 24th birthday next Friday. She has never taught one day in her life, is here illegally, has no educational training of any kind, and works 36 hours a week for 7.5 k a month all while her employer changes her working hours all the time. I work at a public school near her and earn 5.8k a month for working 13 hours a week. I dare to say that she is not better off than I am. Granted she is a very nice girl and maybe a better person than me.
I am certainly glad you are doing well at your present location, but on the whole language mills are abusive and deceitful. I am not taking anyone else's opinions here but from my own observations and experience. From what I have read on this site, the most awful cases of abuse are private schools with a fair mix of public ones, but in lesser numbers. It is a choice between eating an old apple and a bad apple. I prefer to eat old apples than bad ones.

The more recent posts have been attacking a few public gigs because the horn tooters for the private places have gone away for the most part. I'm sure if I worked in a coal mine for many years, stacked shelves at supermarkets for what seemed like an eternity, or got put in a military prison for years on out I would surely appreciate working at a training center. Working with cadavers certainly would put you in that category of "special" jobs that nobody wants to do. On the other hand the general average of society would put these professions (including yours) as that of things most people have not done before and would therefore still see private training centers as a place not worth sacrificing their dignity in.

My job could be very rewarding actually. The deceased need to look their best when friends and relatives visit. Financially though I am far better off, thanks to the training centres. It seems to me that you are all so busy doing a hatchet job on private schools, that you convieniently don't bother to tell us much about the alternatives, Middle Schools and universities, which nine times out of ten are disgusting stinking filthy places, lots of concrete stairs, windy corridors, lessons cancelled and they don't bother to inform you, sometimes hours of travelling each day, often standing on the bus for three hours a day- only to be told that the classes won't happen, come back this evening. You should liken your military prisons and coal pits to those establishments and not to the comfy cosy clean and reliable English Training Centres.

You could be right to call them money-grabbing but that is all right by me because unlike my previous Western Employers who used to squeeze every penny out of the loved ones of the Dearly Departed, these current money-grabbers actually pass on to me a decent wedge of their ill-gotten gains by way of 12000 RMB plus a flat; so, what do I care?

So, you were earning more in China for a dead end job than in the U.K? That means that you are probably not one of life's winners.

Sure, money can stretch out further in China, but even minimum wage people in the west tend to earn more than most teachers in China.
Teachers don't really come to China for money, but for the lifestyle. If you want money, go to the Middle-East, lol.

Money-grabbing language mills like those awful training centres, full of deceit, cheat and lies as their principal business model, are waste of time for every decent teacher.

Wnat is a decent teacher? - A fully qualified and mature person, with a degree in a relevant language-related subject matter + recognized teacher training (not one of those 4-week crash TEFL/CELTA courses).

Those "teachers" who do not meet the requirements normally end up at those funny training centres operated by Chinese clowns as owners.

Not to mention the poor "students" who are deprived of decent education with a lot of money taken from them or their parents. Any idiot operates can operate one of these shitty businesses these days.

What may be "good" (escaping from lifeless corpses, as you say) for you does not necessarily mean it would be good for others. Get a life and accept that defending these crap places is determined by your self-serving attitude - if these shitty places did not exist in the first place, you still would be there where you had been before and could not call yourself a "teacher"...hahaha.

Nothing personal, just a general observation.

You could be right to call them money-grabbing but that is all right by me because unlike my previous Western Employers who used to squeeze every penny out of the loved ones of the Dearly Departed, these current money-grabbers actually pass on to me a decent wedge of their ill-gotten gains by way of 12000 RMB plus a flat; so, what do I care?

Looking through the posts it seems to me that those that work for state schools and university like to complain. I looked at a picture posted earlier on of a nice stream with maybe a few bits of paper in it, and the poster was claiming it had sewage in it! I understand that all decent and refined teachers would baulk at getting human feces anywhere about their person but why exagerate litter into sewage. I am glad to say that all foreign teachers working in training centres seem to be of a higher calibre.