This is everything you need to know about Bai Da Wei Foreign Language School. My intent is to be as representative as I can possibly be of the dramatically varying viewpoints from the school and its staff.

For short, here are the basics: It's a relatively small school (compared to English First, for example) composed of eight branches and many subcontracts to kindergartens, as well as to special locations like the German auto parts factory Brose. The school is located in the city of Changchun, capital and largest city of Jilin Province in the northeast. Teachers are typically hired on for year-long contracts. These contracts were formerly divided between branch workers and kindergarten workers, with corresponding differences in pay ratios and hours; now they are merged.

The Good

When you interview for this school over Skype, you will be speaking to a native English speaker. They are knowledgeable, helpful, and will answer all of your questions and get everything sorted out before you arrive; as far as schools in China go, they generally prefer having proper Z visas sorted out for their teachers and most teachers I have met from this school had them. The headmaster, David Puckett, genuinely does like children and does very well as a teacher, particularly for the youngest. He is a very personable person, and though you may find things to disagree with him on in various aspects, you will find it difficult to not enjoy his company during work parties and the Thanksgiving dinner he hosts. (His house also has an oven, which you will be hard pressed to find in the overwhelming majority of Chinese places, so take advantage of this.)

Besides the headmaster, I can only think of two important Chinese staff who DON'T speak English (or won't); everybody else speaks highly functional English. When you have issues with health, your flat, transportation etc. you will almost never have issues communicating your problems in vocabulary that they can understand. This is a good thing.

The school provides an apartment for you (at some cost to yourself), and provides transportation for you, reimbursing you for taxi receipts when they cannot dispatch drivers (primarily during "summer" and "winter camp"). The drivers are friendly, though some take more time to get to know; that said, this is China, so be careful what you say to them as boundaries in friendship in the West may differ from acceptable boundaries among friends in China.

The teachers at Bai Da Wei have a close circle, especially among the branch teachers; a shared day off will mean a lot of fun for you for a day or especially a night out. Some of the teachers who have been there longest are among the best you will ever meet, not only caring deeply about their children but having become a part of the social fabric of the city itself. They are there for the long-run and you can tell.

The school occasionally organises outings (sometimes they are a shambles, but they are definitely very well-meant), does Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas and organises other get-togethers revolving around food and lots of cheap alcohol.

I have the sense that the school generally considers the well-being of its teachers.

The Bad

The rate of pay is very low compared to what you can get out of China as an ESL teacher. When I started, the pay was approximately 6000 RMB for 22 hours and 7000 for 25. The contracts have changed to start at 22 and offer between 7000 and 8000. Compare this to a school such as Joy (which also has branches in Changchun) in Chengdu, offering 12000 minimum. Also consider that in Changchun, you will be living in a city where pollution at the height of winter 2013-2014 passed 800 ppm^2 of pm 2.5 particulate; 500 is the end of the scale and 150 is the beginning of unhealthy for all persons. You might consider Hainan or Fujian provinces if China is a must for you.

You will be split-shifted and very few teachers at Bai Da Wei aren't, if there are any left. If you are lucky, you will have a short commute between your workplaces and home for lunch; if you aren't, you will occasionally find yourself stuck in traffic for an hour. That said, however, if you are late beyond your control (say your driver -- or taxi -- breaks down or is stuck in traffic) you will not be penalised in any way for missing classes or meetings.

Some teachers have rather big egos, especially the ones that get quit in the middle of their day -- twice -- and come back because they have families in the city and would have no other way to make money and stay legally without the school. You'll butt heads with these people. But even worse are the people who constantly complain about their jobs. They can have a toxic influence on you. Their concerns are almost always genuine, but it may whittle you down.

Bai Da Wei hires both non-native English speakers and people who are not from the approved list of English-speaking nations for purposes of legal compliance.

The school now charges teachers for their apartments to the tune of around 1000 RMB. If you're only making 7000, there goes 14% of your paycheque.

The school provides partial health coverage, but they push you to the people they know, and in this case it happens to be a man who smokes in his clinic.

The city is very, very far from anywhere you will want to be for the holidays with the single exception of Harbin during the winter ice festival. You are a four-five hour flight from Hong Kong (12 hour train), a three hour train from Beijing, and Beijing itself is already far from the places you will want to go - Nanjing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan...

The Ugly

If something is wrong with your apartment and it is non-vital, regardless of how many times you report it, during your entire stay there you may find that the problem is never addressed or fixed or repaired. You won't be fined for it because it's not your fault, but the fact that the school can't provide you what it guarantees you are to have ranges from annoying to aggravating.

The school can be heavy-handed about sickness. For some who claim chronic illness, they will not need to go to the clinic (or hospital out of pocket); for everyone else, you are required to go and you will be brought there by one of the Chinese staff. As it happened to one former colleague, the person was so ill that they had to be physically removed from their flat and taken to the clinic despite having preferred to overcome it in private. If you are sickly and the idea of being pulled into a taxi isn't for you, you may seek to avoid this school.

To make matters worse, there is absolutely no compensation for sick days. If you earn 8000 RMB a month, and work 25 hours, in the month of May with 23 workdays, then you earn about 70 RMB an hour. If you are branch, then the bulk of your hours are on the weekend, suppose you work 8 hours each of those days. If you call in sick, you will automatically lose 100 RMB for every hour you miss and cannot make up. Suppose you are suddenly very ill, and cannot give your school 3 hour notice or whatever it is, you will be fined 150 RMB, well over double your actual salary. So say it is Saturday, and you contract the flu which hits you an hour before your classes are to begin. You must call in sick. You miss all of your classes. You have now lost 1200 RMB. You must miss the next day again, but now you know ahead of time. You work 8 hours Sunday, so you've lost 800 RMB for that day. In total, being absent 10% of your contracted work hours for the month has cost you 25% of your entire pay. And you wouldn't be the first person to whom this has happened.

BDW makes a very large deal about people absconding on their contracts, and so they have a peculiar policy about pay: If your payday comes during a holiday, and you don't request an advance (up to some amount), you will NOT be paid at all until you have returned. Suppose your payday comes on the first day of Chinese New Year, you cannot be paid bare minimum for the next two weeks. But suppose you take this time to fly to the United States, and you have taken an extra day or two off, they will hold your pay over half a month beyond when you would have expected to receive it. They say they do this to protect themselves from you running away. But if you collect your paycheque and run the next day, you will have already forfeited two weeks of pay because payday is in the middle of the month and the pay period starts on the 1st.

The Verdict

If you're just starting out, and especially if you really have nowhere else to go, BDW isn't a bad school to start out with. In fact, it's actually not terrible compared to the horror stories that come out of too many schools in China even now with the new regulations and crackdowns. You won't get scammed. You won't get fucked over starting out. I would even go as far as to say that this school has been good to me. But you could do so much better than this school; in fact, even if you did worse you'd still likely be getting paid substantialy more -- though you should make sure the school is good about paying at all.

I give it a C.