Hi Evelyn,
Wow your experience with this employer is terrifying. I recently was requited by this same school and was wondering if you would mind going into a bit more detail of your experience. I also tried to ask for email and or contact information from previous employees and have not even gotten a response. How long did you end up staying in the end, like how early did you leave? Also did you have to pay any extra money to end your contract? If it would be easier to stay in contact via personal email I would be more than happy to give you that info. Thanks for your insight, hope to hear from you soon!

You are doing everybody a huge favor. Greedy Chinese owners will not be going away anytime soon and someone such as this person whom you had the misfortune of encountering will surely be trying to sucker more new teachers in within the foreseeable future. He might even change the "school" 's name. Yangzhou is a nice city, but it has too many pretend "schools" and not enough real ones.

In fairness, I done barely any research. So my bad. Yes, they did pay me for the milk. However, I don't think any payment would have made up for an experience with the Chinese Police.

I did try to google them before I went over and it turned up no information. I took the optimistic view and thought no news, is good news.

I also asked to speak to past/existing foreign teachers there and my employer didn't see the need for this.

Beware this school! This employer took advantage from the start. Here are just a few things I encountered:

- I was asked to bring over Western Baby Milk Powder - I later found out that if I'd gotten caught, I was actually smuggling these products into the country.
- NO language assistants provided in the classrooms - we raised this as an issue and it was overlooked. We later got disciplined about the children not being able to speak English....
- Contracted for 27 hours - this means teaching hours. He didn't take account of any hours needed to lesson plan or correct homework.
- You're hired out to other schools and the employer keeps a large proportion of the money he earns from your work.
- You'll be responsible for almost 1000 students. No support provided.
- You working week will have little structure. There will be little room for relaxing or enjoying the local tourist sites or travelling outwith the locality.
- The school recruits volunteers and asks them to 'make up' their hours in other locations...
- The school is actually based at least 45 minutes from Yangzhou. Jiangdu is the countryside for the Chinese in this region.
- No help in locating Chinese lessons. When I asked about a language exchange, I was informed that this was a breach of my contract. Over the course of my time there only one other teacher spoke any English to me.
- Towards the end of the contract, they introduced a financial penalty system for leaving work early, turning up late, being sick or not turning up to work.
- Finally, I've since seen this schools advertisment for this year. They are offering 2 weeks holidays. We got 4 weeks and we had to continously fight for that. Please note, if you take this position, that the Chinese get holidays at specific times of the year and you are entitled to these.

The liason/individual hiring native English speakers in this school has major communication issues. It's a pity the major shareholder has not more English as the experience would have been much better. Despite living in a western country for a significant period of time this recruiter was disinterested in learning from our working experience. If you want to work in a school which offers no support, no training and is disinteresting in your contributions, this is the place to go. This recruiter/employer basically acts as an agent and you will be treated accordingly.

I would recommend going to China, and even to Yangzhou, to teach English but not to this school. In the end I had to do a midnight run from here.