LaoLao
- 2017-02-27
Btw, nobody could pronounce this name properly - even the owner nor his manager who can both speak English well enough!:)
BeenThere
- 2017-02-25
Ha ha ha ha
FTinPRC
- 2017-02-25
I nominate Realign Realizing as candidate for most bizarre name for an English language mill in China.
Former winner New Oriental (sister schools: Chink Chinese, Wetback Spanish and Nip Japanese) will present the prize at this year's award ceremony in Peking.
My friend was a foreign ESL teacher at REALIGN REALIZING INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION in Karamay, Xinjiang, China, in 2016.
He found a job through a mutual friend and the job seemed to be OK in the beginning. Both employers and my friend were quite happy with each other for the first couple of months. They made a Z visa for him, so he could even bring his family into China. After that things started to change...
His two bosses were introducing a very strange system of employee training, which can hardly be described briefly. One of these things was their everyday LONG meetings (at least 1 hour every morning but often even 2 hours and more!) where he was required to be sitting with almost never any interpretation for him and also ban on using mobile phone. The only thing he could do is writing in his notebook. The organization was a mess: for instance, he got to know about the new semester beginning only 20 minutes before the first class was about to start!...It meant that he would have 6 lessons on that day (which he had not prepared, of course!) and the same situation tomorrow... They kept surprising and confusing him almost every day, so I can write dozens of other examples. But there was a good news for him: the contract he had signed with them gave him a chance to change the job early with the condition of 2 month notice. Being fed up with all that mess, he began looking for another job and found a very good one (at another end of China) very quickly. So he gave them the notice and even kept his word - finished the 2 months. After that there were a couple of "nice" surprises:
Surprise #1
They abused his lack of experience in China (honestly speaking, gullibility) by asking him to give them contacts of his to-be (or not-to-be) employer for smoother paper transition (as they put it) and then they called that other school in China and told them something that made them change their mind about hiring him after 2 months of waiting... Dirty but the worse was yet to come...
Surprise #2
They refused to give him release papers, which blocked his opportunity to find another job legally. He went to the education bureau and the city administration (Mr. Sun) but nobody helped. He spent 2 more weeks but there was nothing he could do but just leave... While he was seeking justice with the city officials, they were trying to drive him out of the apartment they provided him for FREE (which was clearly stated in the contract) and, after his refusal, they wanted to make him pay huge money for rent and also compensate the money they had spent on their poor decoration - who cares for the contract?.. They also refused to pay his last salary either (of course). It's unbelievable but this was still not the worst thing they did...
Surprise #3 (the "nicest")
After he had left for Beijing to find another job, they were not lazy to go and report the police and found the way to cancel his residence permit (bypassing the legal procedures of terminating the employment). Anyway, the police were surprisingly helpful to my foreign friend granting him a new visa afterwards and thus gave him another chance to find the way out of this tough situation.
Even though he was employed legally (at least with all the right procedures and papers), these people kicked him out like a dog and, as he said, it was the first time in his 20-year-long career that he left the job with the scandal... Nice welcome to China (his dream country, by the way).
If you do not want to experience anything like this, please stay away from these people:
Owners' names: Li Zelong (39-year-old man) who likes long motivational speeches but can hardly speak English being a license owner for hiring foreigners to teach English.
Li Tao (35-year-old man) with the English name STONE and speaking pretty decent English (as for the one having mastered it within 3 years or so but hardly sufficient for the main English teacher at the one of the most expensive training centers in the city licensed to hire foreign teachers).
Li Tao's phone: 13999309957
Li Tao's email: 179717483@qq.com
Name of the company indicated in the working permit and invitation letter (official papers required for the working visa): KARAMAY NEW TIMES TRAINING CENTER
Physically located in the Swimming Pool (2nd Floor) - at least at that time