They promise a high salary, but force you to work much more than what is stated in the contract.

Overtime might not get paid, because there are always mistakes in the counting of the hours worked and you have absolutely no way to check that.

Very few people in the staff speak English, so if you have to ask anything, even the most basic questions, you’ll have a hard time. Russian lessons won’t help you much, because they try to put off the start of the course as much as possible and cancel them every chance they get, in order to get you to work more hours.

The contract states that your weekly schedule has to be agreed upon, but that never happens and you never have 30 hours as per the contract, but always more. According to the contract, you could turn the extra hours down, but it’s basically a diktat. And if you don’t comply, you may be summoned in the central office multiple times to explain your “very strange behaviour”.

They strongly believe that they are allowed to call you at any time, in order to force you to carry more lessons, even if you’re actually in the middle of a lesson and very frequently with just a 2-hour notice (sometimes with around 24-hour notice).

They also believe that they can come to your place without any notice and force their way in, using their key and without your consent.

Any agreement with them, even if written down, has no value at all. They very often go back on their word.

Most of the staff and teachers they hire is underqualified, resulting in poor quality delivered to students, despite the crazy high prices.

Whenever you have any kind of problem you can’t talk to them, because they either ignore you or resort to threats and very serious ones.

Payments are often late.

The equipment is terrible. DVD players in classrooms often don’t work, or remotes don’t, or TVs don’t.

Printers aren’t working half the time and when they do, they still do it very poorly.

They claim they have a wonderful teaching method, which is very rigid, mostly based on very old theories and almost not communicative at all, despite what they say. The results of this are evident when you find yourself teaching students who are supposed to have a very high level but can hardly speak.

There is a library where you can get books if the librarian is in a good mood and is actually there.

The discs you get from the library (with audio and video) are very often broken or not burned correctly, so you always end up missing some audio tracks or entire parts of the video.

They’ll never give you any document stating how much you have been paid.

The school has various offices around the city and in the suburbs, quite far away from one another. They don’t feel embarrassed at all when they ask you to spend 3 or 4 hours a day on public transport in order to carry 2 or 3 lessons (which could last 45 or 60 minutes, usually).

You don’t get any refund for transportation.

The length of each lesson can change according to the number of paying students that come to the lesson, therefore your weekly amount of hours could change very often with only a 5-minute notice.

The contract says that you have to tell them a month in advance if you want to leave, but according to Russian law it’s 2 weeks.