This is going to be a fairly long post, so please bear with me. I will be addressing many of the issues that are discussed throughout this thread, as well as providing a summary of my own experience working for this school.

For those of you who can't be bothered to read the massive amount of information I am going to write; I'll summarise the whole of the post in a sentence----

THIS IS A GREAT SCHOOL, GIVE IT A CHANCE!

For those of you who are still sceptical, please continue reading.

I started teaching at this school in March 2010. It was my first ESL teaching job in China, and needless to say, the reviews about the school on this forum had me worried. I did not know what to expect from Fred/Xiao Lin (at the time I was under the impression that they were the same person.) But, being a recent university graduate desperate for work, I took the job despite the bad reviews and experiences I read on this site. I flew over from the US and began working. Now it is November 2010 and my contract is coming to an end-I'll be finishing my contract in January.

Misconception: The School
The English name for this school is Huludao Primary School, locally it is known as ShiFanFuXiao. When I went online and read about Huludao Primary, I got the impression that many people perceive this school as being a privately owned training school run by an evil nefarious man named Fred who works his employees to death.

The Reality:

ShiFanFuXiao is a government funded PUBLIC school in Huludao City. The school is over 15 years old and it is not run by Fred. In terms of organizational hierarchy, the city has assigned ShiFanFuXiao a School Principal, a Party Secretary, and two Vice Principals. Fred is the school's Foreign Affairs Officer for the school's English Department.

Please remember that this is NOT a private training center, but a public school legally allowed to hire foreign teachers (so no visa problems, or worrying about working with an illegal L-visa). As opposed to how private training centers are run where English is the only subject taught, Huludao Primary has music teachers, math teachers, P.E. Teachers, art teachers and homeroom teachers, as well as two types of English classes - classes the English-speaking Chinese teachers teach, which are focused more on sentence structure and grammar; and the classes the foreign ESL teachers teach which are focused on teaching conversational English and reinforcing the English speaking skills the students already have.

When compared to many of the other schools I have talked to, this school is great in that we are actually required to teach. Foreign ESL teachers who come to this school are treated with as much respect as they deserve (more on this later). In the past, I have had interviews with schools in which the person has told me, verbatim, you just show up and play a few games with the kids- it's easier than actually having to teach.