This place is going downhill fast. The current and former teachers are keeping in touch as we watch the place collapse. The ones who have left are the lucky ones. The ones still there are fearful, and for good reason.

It all started with the fact that the teachers were (and still are) highly dissatisfied with the cirriculum, which seems to involve rushing through as many expensive books as quickly as possible in order to sell the parents the next set of books. When one of our teachers pointed out that the supplemental books were too difficult for the kids to understand, she was told flat out that the point wasn't that the kids understand the books. The point was that the parents would see the kids reading them.

Teachers are ordered to inflate the kids' test scores on report cards so that the parents won't realize the kids aren't learning anything. Even if a kid is so totally lost that he didn't even write any answers on the test, the teacher has to give him a score of 60. And they just advance him to the next class.

Things are so bad that the school had three runners in just ten days in January. Then in February they refused to pay one teacher, saying they were afraid she'd run if she had her pay. She had to refuse to come to work until they paid her, and then they insulted her and belittled her. So though she'd originally planned to stay until the end of the semester, she walked. This went down during orientation week for a new teacher to replace the first "runner". He saw this and said he didn't want to work for them. They tried to hold his diploma to keep him from leaving! Only after they found out that all the remaining foreign teachers were up in arms did they give the man his diploma so he could leave.

When a school has lost four of its ten foreign teachers in just one month, and resorts to trying to strong-arm the remaining teachers into staying the last three weeks of the semester, you know it's bad.