It never ceases to amaze me that after all this time and all these warnings about scam recruiters and phony schools and training centers in China there is still a large pool of unaware teachers for said recruiters to "feed on." Yes, they are completely amoral; however, their victims apparently are the least sensible people on the planet.

There are multiple sources of information for teachers who wish to teach abroad. But therein lies part of the problem. The vast majority of "teachers" coming here, are not qualified to teach in their own countries anyway. Therefore their best potential source of information, their colleagues, are non-existent. However, having no colleagues to advise them, doesn't mean they need go willy nilly off to a foreign country with their Pollyanna hopes of the ideal teaching environment miraculously materializing. Indeed, you'd think they would do a little research.

I would guess, no I take it back - I can't begin to guess how many warnings about teaching EFL have been posted on the internet. And yet they keep coming and we keep reading about the rip off recruiters and the BS schools.

What's even worse, though, at least in my opinion, is how these '"teachers," once they've been ripped off by recruiters and/or private schools, end up in the public school system - even at the university level. Now they're not the victims anymore. In fact, by disseminating the crap they call teaching, they are now the victimizers. Sadly, the administrators of these schools are well aware of how the majority of their foreign staffs are ill-qualified to be in the positions for which they've been hired; however, the pressure is on them to provide white faces for the students, and so they must each look the other way and privately bemoan the glaringly obvious truth that their foreign staff is composed of a high percentage of bozos.

Sooner or later, though, the students will wise up. But that's another story. Meanwhile, those of us who have worked hard to become qualified teachers must often, embarrassingly, work along side complete idiots who are getting paid the same as we are. What's worse, though, is that we have to observe the garbage they throw out there and call teaching, and there's absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Yes, many people who come to China are victimized by unscrupulous recruiters and school owners that turn out to be cheaters that are totally uninterested in real education. But on the other hand, many of the victimized become the victimizers. In a perfect world they would have the decency to go back to their unskilled labor jobs in America, or wherever, and stop negatively influencing the young people of this country with the crap they call English teaching. But of course this is not a perfect world and we are definitely not perfect beings...............