Dear Fellow Teacher Ms. Susan,

Firstly, let me say that for a teacher with ten years' experience, your control of English grammar is rather whimsical at best. There is a plethora of run-on sentences, misconjugated verbs, improper use of parallel structure and so forth and so on. I can only wonder if you were truly a teacher of the English language. Perhaps, on the other hand, you might have been an art teacher.

In any case, I feel terrible for you. The corporation that runs Eaton House also runs a series of many other schools throughout eastern China. Among these schools are such entities as the Suzhou Foreign Language School, the Nanjing Foreign Language School, the Anhui Foreign Language School, the Changshu Foreign Language School, the entirety of the Eaton House brand and another brand the name of which escapes me at the moment.

The senior administration is disgusting, truly disgusting. I was initially employed by them at Suzhou Foreign Language School under the auspices of the now infamous Kevin H., a 400 pound gorilla from Kansas City, a former Pizza Hut night shift manager, who had morphed into a Ph.D, while in China, and who chewed up and spat out foreign teachers on a regular basis, lest they see through him to his forgery. When my turn came, I was downgraded to Eton House Suzhou. I must say that I enjoyed my three years at the school. It was well run, it was extremely, extremely expensive even by Chinese private school standards, and the camaraderie among the foreign teachers was excellent. Almost all of the foreign teachers at Eton House Suzhou were refugees from Kevin the Pizza Hut Man at the Suzhou Foreign Language School. Given that we all had lived through hell at the Suzhou Foreign Language School, Eaton House was a downright paradise. Kevin H. used to enjoy throwing books at us, cursing at us in public, barging into our classrooms to berate us, writing the senior management midnight emails about us, ad infinitum. The turnover rate at Suzhou Foreign Language School was 300% every year. The turnover rate at Eton House was about 5-to-10% a year. The ambiance was just truly positive.

That being said, given the corporation that runs all of these schools, positive and successful employment at any given school run by this corporation is just a roll-of-the-dice. Some of its schools are managed to perfection. Others are mismanaged to death. The FAO at Eton House Suzhou was warm, caring and tremendously efficient. We did not have to look for apartments -- we were shown apartments and given a choice. The school fronted the key money without any acrimony. Visa paperwork, payroll and about any other issues of concern to the foreign teachers were handled with alacrity and transparency.

The children at Eton House Suzhou were brats, spelled B R A T S. They were all the sons and daughters of the new Chinese or Korean or even Japanese elites living in China. Many were delivered and picked up by chauffeurs with nannies at hand. The foreign teachers were often invited to have dinner with the parents at home and the houses were wealthy beyond anything that most of us might have ever seen in the West. Many of the little ones would fly to Hong Kong, or to Seoul, or to Jakarta or to Tokyo for the weekend and nearly all of them went on lengthy overseas holidays during National Day and Chinese New Year holidays. A goodly number of them had been born abroad and carried two passports. Their nannies were usually young white females who were otherwise ineligible for work and residency visas for China. That being said, the papas and the mamas took care of any visa issues of their nannies with one telephone call.

I enjoyed the curriculum and I truly enjoyed the camaraderie. Suzhou is not a bad city when things go well. Nevertheless, I had been so scarred by my five months with Kevin the Pizza Boy at Suzhou Foreign Language that any joie de vivre I might have felt for Suzhou had long dissipated. In the end, I did stay 3.5 years, enjoying all of it, but constantly watching over my shoulder, knowing that the vengeance of Kevin had no limits.

I cannot speak to Eton House Jinan. I can, and I have, spoken to Eton House Suzhou and honestly I can quite recommend it, particularly in light of the other positions in Suzhou.

All of my best wishes to you,

Mark Royer