Daniel
- 2012-08-29
Not surprising in the least! No sense of honor or "what's right" among these bosses. When my fellow teacher and I gave our thirty days' notice, we always had to straddle that line of all-out commitment to leaving so that Mr Li would pay the last bit of salary (where payday was a couple days before our 30 days were up, instead of "the day after" like he attempted to sneakily swindle). Why is it that these Chinese training center bosses are incapable of any long-term thinking? It's always "how can I grab a little money right this instant instead of potentially getting better business later on by not establishing a reputation as a swindler?"...
It was a common thing there where the Chinese teachers wouldn't get paid for months on end, and often would just be working and working in hopes that they would get their paycheck one day. People like Mr Li, and training centers like Liuzhou New Standard, think they can have everything they want in perpetuity as long as they've got their fat fingers around it. They don't realize that things like giving 30 days notice before leaving is to help a company peacefully transition to new employees -- not to get a free month of work and thus encourage workers to quit with no warning on payday.
I guess as long as there are more foreign teachers available to be roped in, and these training centers have government connections, they'll always be able to stick around...
Dragonized
- 2012-08-28
Not a school but a "school". Hope your case against them turns out all right!
Steve
- 2012-08-28
Daniel, I just made my departure. New Standard has not paid my final salary. The recruiter at the agency is completely on my side. If New Standard doesn't pay my salary soon, I will request that the agent seek the advice of an lawyer. I believe that if you do the work, you get paid...period! But my "replacement" was late in getting there. Since that fat and greedy idiot Mr Li doesn't want to lose money on classes I didn't do, he doesn't want to pay me. He doesn't care if I worked my last month for free. Well I have news for him......
Steve
- 2012-08-28
"Rubbish school" is a compliment. This school is worse than rubbish.
out of control Asian girl
- 2012-08-11
It's ok man, many people read on here. I am in Guangxi and I know bout rubbish school in Guangxi.
Liuzhou is the pits dude, both the people and school there.
Daniel
- 2012-08-10
Sorry to hear that! But it's sadly unsurprising to hear that Liuzhou New Standard hasn't changed. The issue you mention, about the training center obliviously thinking they treat foreigners just fine, is something my friends and I encountered constantly while working there. It seems to be more than just greediness in treating the foreign teachers poorly to make a quick kuai, but also a simple inability to recognize (or even to listen to) the issues the foreign teachers have. They never got it that the common mantra of "but, you know, this is China" is answered by "yes, but we foreign teachers are Westerners" and that we are more than just Chinese employees, accustomed to employer abuse, with a white face and somewhat higher pay. Initially Dessa, Alex, Sarah, and I were all fooled into believing Mr Li's claims of wanting to make New Standard more "American" beyond any face-building veneers. The management style of listening to employee problems was typically "teacher carefully explains to boss what problem is, boss pretends to listen, then explains ad nauseum that his way is right and that nothing will change." I truly think that the brothers Li feel they can convince their foreign teachers that spending all day handing out flyers, orchestrating "outdoor classes" for nothing but marketing, and getting nickel and dimed and having to go to the contract for every little thing... are all reasonable things. Or at least make us pretend that they are. It may work for the Chinese staff who are more used to having spirits broken by arbitrarily foolish bosses, but not for we foreign teachers.
I fear that you'll have to go through a similar song and dance about ending employment as we had, thus fulfilling Liuzhou New Standard's apparent business goal of hiring foreign teachers, working them half to death and showcasing them to build up face about having white-faced teachers, then ending up in the advantage when the teacher inevitably quits early, keeping the departed laowai on all advertising materials for all eternity to give the impression of a slowly-growing "collection" of foreigners at the school.
I sincerely hope that the cycle gets broken by prospective foreign teachers doing some Googling about Liuzhou New Standard and realizing there are no positive reviews and quite a few negative ones.
Good luck on your own departure, and I hope that you don't receive any harassment or veiled threats from New Standard for posting negative reviews. I myself received some for my own blog posts, but considering I'm back in the States with no intention of returning, there's nothing but hot air behind the bluster of the brothers Li.
Steve
- 2012-08-10
I'd like to throw in my view of New Standard, if I may. I've been here, teaching, for five months now. It is August now and New Standard hasn't changed. Apparently they think that they treat foreigners properly and won't change. New Standard plays games with foreigners minds. I go into the classroom and do everything right. But, when my students get home, they tell their parents they learned nothing. Why??? And then the parents complain??? I'm not doing a thing wrong. Their advertisement of being an American based Center is all a big front! They treat me like crap! I am about to leave and go to a public...where I might have about a 50% chance of knowing if what I'm doing is right or wrong. New Standard tells me nothing! I don't know how many people read this site, but I hope this message gets around, to as many people as possible.
FOREIGNERS: DO NOT TEACH AT THIS SCHOOL!!!!!!!!!!! PERIOD!!!!!!
Douglas
- 2012-07-22
Yep, it's said by some foreigners that we should make allowances because some things that affect us directly like cheating us and abusing us are endemic in the culture. After all, this is China - utter tosh! Groveling weasels make that feeble excuse, but it's totally unacceptable to those of us with integrity. And it always will be!
Magister
- 2012-07-22
claiming that all the negative experiences we had gone through (detailed at length in my other posts) were simply because "this is China"
Yes, very frustrating attitude but all too common I'm afraid.
Daniel
- 2012-07-21
I thought I'd pop in to put one little update about Liuzhou New Standard Training Center. I'm back in the States after finishing up the year working at a decent-enough university (Guangxi Normal University in Guilin), and while my experience with New Standard soured me to the concept of ESL in China such that I will never go back to that country as a teacher, I do still like to keep in touch with some friends I made there.
A few days ago, I was surprised to log onto QQ and see one of my friends, a Chinese teacher at New Standard, relaying a message from the boss trying to get me to delete all the negative posts I had made about the school. It seems that they have finally noticed that just about all mentions of Liuzhou New Standard English Training Center on the Internet are unequivocally negative, and instead of working to change the poor conditions for foreign teachers at the school, they'd rather attempt to pressure their former employees into silence with such phrases as:
did you say something bad about New Standar on the internet (your blog) ?
It's not good for you, just delete them all.
Such idle vague threats despite the fact that I reside on the other side of the planet and have no plans to return, and certainly not for anything related to employment in China! In the ensuing conversation (the non-English-speaking boss quite obviously present and speaking through my friend, and then in the end angrily typing in Chinese), I received a rhetorical whirlwind of approaches, jumping schizophrenically from the initial angry outburst to:
- scraping the bottom of the barrel for "kindnesses" the boss had done me, bringing up a time when I had broken my foot and the school had provided crutches for me to continue working (as if that was a sign of the World's Best Boss; even a performing dog gets taken to the vet) -- or when he had so generously roped my fellow teachers and me into paying extra to move from the provided apartment with years of mold growth in the kitchen and no promised Western toilet
- claiming that all the negative experiences we had gone through (detailed at length in my other posts) were simply because "this is China" despite constant accounts from other teachers and the coordinators from our CIEE program (and my own better experiences at GXNU later on!) that this situation was significantly worse than normal
- acting as if all of our complaints were confusing, impossible to understand, and had never been properly raised despite the five months of us all being clear and vocal on the reasons behind our complaints, which were routinely ignored
Considering all of us former teachers are still showcased on Liuzhou New Standard's website, and I personally saw our visages used on newly-created flyers and advertisements five whole months after we all left that school (added to the collection, next to the photos of the foreign teachers who had left before we had arrived), I can't particularly see a reason why I would censor myself so ludicrously. If anything, this little episode would hurt them further by inspiring this post. But after all, the boss was never good at dealing with people.
Daniel Andersen
- 2012-03-05
Thanks for posting about this, Phil.
I'm the fellow who wrote that blog post about Liuzhou New Standard (or "New Standard Training Center" or "New Standard Training School" or "New Standard English School" as its name mutated several times during my time there). I really want to emphasize that this is a particularly bad place to work.
If you work for this school, you will most likely find yourself nothing more than, as one of my Chinese co-workers sadly put it, a white "walking billboard." If you care about educating students, you won't find it here, being nothing more than the icing on top of the classes the Chinese teachers teach (and, respectfully, do their best given their advertising-driven work life and lack of support from management) in order to rope parents in. If you care about pursuing your own interests, you'll be constantly frustrated by long hours of being in the office for no reason and getting calls late at night saying your days off have been moved around suddenly or even waived with nothing but vague promises of ever getting them back. If you care about seeing China, prepare to never be able to travel at all, because your days off are at random times, the schedule changes every week, and you are never made aware of it until the end of the current week. If you care about having a safe working environment, you won't find it at New Standard, whose sole foreign teacher is so paranoid about losing his job to a "bunch of punk kids" that he'll routinely verbally or physically threaten them, with the boss aware of this, literally suggesting that he's setting up a "competition" between the foreign teachers to only keep the hardest-working ones, and only doing anything about it once the local and provincial government got involved. And if all you care about is just making some needed cash (even if you could find time in your life to spend it), keep in mind that this place, by all accounts I've heard from expat friends in the city and region, definitely underpays its foreign teachers and will invent infractions to nickel-and-dime them.
I and three other recent graduates were placed in Liuzhou New Standard by CIEE, an organization that connects ESL teachers with schools in different countries and then provides them with support when needed throughout the semester or year. This was their first year in Guangxi, and this obviously was a freak case of an untested school that turned out to be really bad. Despite all of this nonsense, I do want to give props to CIEE for working very hard, getting the local government and labor dispute offices involved, and helping us find new and better ESL work. Even if they didn't properly do their research when putting us in, they did well at getting us out. I now have stable, productive, and more rewarding work at a university here in Guangxi.
I hope I'm not sounding like a broken record here, but this seems to be strong evidence to stay clear of private training centers when possible, especially when they're untested and unestablished. In short, stay clear of Liuzhou New Standard Training Center!
Magister
- 2012-01-31
Good luck in the future Phil!
A good informative blog on business practices of Chinese schools that should serve as a warning to any new teacher considering coming to China.
You should all be aware that Chinese business people in general struggle to understand concepts like 'long term' or 'sustainability'. They are there to make quick cash and when they get involved in a school this is the result!
Phil
- 2012-01-29
I know it has been 2 years since people have posted here about Liuzhou New Standard, but I feel like it is time for an update on it. I know some people who started working for this school in September. It was bad. Their boss scheduled them for more than 40 hours a week, docked their pay when they were 2 mins late, and never paid overtime hours. On top of all that, they had a coworker who is mentally unstable. He threatened them, tried to get in fights, and would throw stuff for no reason. For some odd reason, the boss is incredibly attached to this guy and will not fire him.
Also, the school itself does not care if any of the students actually learn english. Students rarely came for more than 2 weeks in a row before their parents realized that their children were not learning english. From what I heard from my friends, the student turnover rate is almost as high as the teacher turnover rate.
These are only some of the problems with the school. After my friend got out of his contract and moved to a different city, he wrote a blog about all the things that Liuzhou New Standard does wrong and why nobody should ever teach there.