I actually kicked off my ESL career in China with EF, the centralized organization (not the franchise). I was young and stupid and thought that EF's online reputation came from dodgy, Chinese-owned franchise schools, and that I would be fine with the Western-run company. To say that I was wrong would be an understatement...I basically got one glorious marriage of Western and Chinese ways of screwing employees.
In the first place...I did not get my own home from day one. EF had me live in a gross apartment with two men I had never met before for a month, then shipped me off to a 2nd tier city in Southern China to work at one of their minicenters. That center was more of a summer camp than an actual school...they even had me go to bars with my students during my work hours...which is royally unprofessional. I basically just had to watch my students get drunk around me. I finally quit after EF refused to reimburse me for my travel expenses. Which brings me to the best part...thanks to EF's 'indentured servitude' policy, they do not transfer permits to new employers when employees leave. They cancel it, give you an L visa, which would have forced me to go to HK for a new work visa. I flew home instead. All in all, it was an expensive waste of my life.

The one nice thing I can say about that company is that it turned me off of TCs forever. I will only teach in universities now. I get paid on time, I don't have to do a song and dance in lieu of actual teaching, I get great vacations, and I have set up my own online business in the COPIOUS free time I have that nets me far more than I would pissing away my week trying to make my students like me.

One like I really like about this thread and a few other recent ones, is that all the good, decent teachers that lurk on this site seem to be coming out of the woodwork... I wish you guys would post more regularly, maybe spice things up a bit, you know?

By the way Nova, the last paragraph summed things up pretty well. We might not all be the very best teachers in the world, some of us are young, inexperienced and don't have PhD's but... Deep down in our hearts, we actually want to teach, become better teachers and not do dancing monkey shows.

Some people think that this board is all about a few regular posters like me with some kind of agenda against private schools and you get all the G.W types trying to put us down, but really, that is not the case.

In my experience, in many a city in China (bar Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen maybe), you can go into any bar that is popular with foreign teachers and they will tell you that the university jobs are the best... This is not just a common view that magically formed on the internet based ESL forums, but one that gets around on a mouth to mouth basis. I wish I'd interacted socially more with more English teachers before I took that jump into the world of teaching.

As for any teacher that has been screwed, I will not laugh at you, I will sympathise with you. Due to the nature of the ESL industry, it has happened at least once to most of us.

As for any G.W/Wumao, Agent/Recruiter or training centre boss that mistakenly believes that all victims could not make it in China and have been banished from the country, you are very mistaken. Some of us are not only still here, we have bounced back from bad experiences and have become far stronger because of them.