I have been working in China for a while and I have met a lot of people that weren't satisfied with the school that they had chosen to work at. I have met people that pulled lots of sickies or were always late. They didn't really care about the students. They didn't have the heart of a real teacher.

In many cases, it is the 'school' that causes them to lose heart. Some teachers had dreamed for many years of becoming a teacher, studying for qualifications worth far more than a basic TEFL certificate, only to find that when they arrive, they are not really there to teach or perform the role that a real teacher would expect to.

They are actually expected by the bosses of that training centre to play the role of a dancing white monkey or whatever colour that may be, but I certainly don't feel comfortable using the word 'monkey' to refer to black people, so you will have to find a more suitable kind of reference animal for those guys. Mind you, training centres don't usually recruit monkeys of darker colours unless they are desperate, they don't make for good marketing tools compared to those prized Albino monkeys. It is funny how fake schools often look at a teacher's skin colour and appearance, whereas a real school will look at their qualifications and work experience.

(If that was too long to read: They just want a token foreigner to give them face).

As for a school that 'they chosen to work at'... Many turn out not to be as originally advertised when that teacher initially applied for the job. Some are placed there by scumbag agencies. As I just mentioned, some teachers go over to China thinking that there are going to be doing something worthwhile in a great place, but those dreams can quickly be destroyed.

Yes, we know that some teacher/deechers are just there for young, easy pretty pussy, cheap beer, jiaozi and chuanr, but a lot of those younger naive guys out there, were just honest people who wanted to experience life abroad and save a little money after college. I have come to learn that there are actually agencies and training centres out there, that will only recruit young inexperienced guys or the older, down and out no hopers, because they are easy to scam, easy to control and have less resources to fight any potential battles with!

Some schools are filled with shit students... I'm sorry to say this, but all teachers, whether they be good or bad are just human beings, not superheroes. If they have to deal with rich spoilt brats (who are usually the sort to attend training centres or those fake universities for gaokao failures) or uncivilised, rural farmer shit, they probably aren't going to enjoy teaching them quite as much. Teaching requires passion and if that passion dies... What do you expect?

I know from my management experience, that it is also a business/school's responsibility to keep an employee motivated to achieve the best results from them. Sorry, but a 'birthday party for foreigner teacher' won't cut it either.

As for sickies... We've seen the accommodation that TCs and crap unis provide to their teachers. Also, if you've got a crap job, you'd be tempted to go out on the piss a bit later than you should on a work night, let's face it.

Some of those crappy TCs can drive a grown man to drink, in the form of ridiculously cheap beer or baijiu. Hell, I know a guy that once taught some part-time TCs classes tripping on mushrooms, lol.

Usually the people that complain about the schools they worked at, weren't the ideal employees either. I think before people post on this website complaining about a school, they should also explain the situation of how they left the school and how long they had been working at the school.

Giving schools a bad name just because you didn't have a good experience isn't good for the teachers and students that are still working there.

I think that the correct way of writing that would have been "Usually the employers that were the subject of complaints, weren't model employers either." Ask yourself this: "Should the school have even recruited them in the first place?" You can't just buy a new white monkey from the pet shop, you've got to make sure they are the right person to teach, it is like the difference between finding a decent whore and a decent wife.

Semi-intelligent human beings are perfectly capable of working out which teachers failed for a perfectly good reason, which teachers were actually treated badly, which reviews positive or negative are just bullshit that is written in Chinglish!

Hell, whether a post be positive or negative, I believe we give every person/school a fair chance (unless that poster/school f**ks up instantly by being semi-illiterate or being one of the more infamous companies such as EF, Web, New Oriental/XDF etc) and we will not usually dismiss their complaints, nor believe everything positive straight away. We usually ask them to tell us more about what happened.

The vast majority of posters on this board are teachers. Some of us have to mark written assessments every day!

However, you can not expect a teacher to tell you everything, some even need to protect their identity for safety or legal reasons! Some bosses are just vindictive twats as well. When one bad school even tried posting up the passport of a teacher to get them on the unofficial blacklist of several schools, the board instantly censored it.

Anyway, if a school gets a crap name on a ESL board for teachers rather than a Chinese website aimed at customers/students/parents, it does not really cause any damage to shit training centres/crap unis apart from that they may struggle to recruit native-speakers in the future. Even native speaking deechers are ten-a-penny though!