Pros
Small class sizes Easy to meet other teachers Accommodation arranged
Cons
Everything else. The management treat the company as a business and their only interest is making money. They completely disregard the needs and opinions of the teachers. I'll start at the beginning. First off, I was told that I would be teaching students aged between 3-18, which was not the case. The company does offer classes to students up to the age of 18 but the reality is that the majority of the students are aged 3-10 more or less. It is the company's duty to inform future teachers of this because it makes quite a huge difference. I took this job thinking I'd have students of a wide variety of ages but the reality was that about 75% of my students were aged 3-5 - this is incredibly different from what I was told before signing the contract. Secondly, another thing which the management failed to tell me in advance was that I would be placed at one of the busiest centres. Some of the other centres who had less classes were required to make lesson plans in their free time; in my interview I spoke about lesson plans that I had made in the past and my interviewer seemed really keen and told me that I would get the chance to use these lesson plans at English Excel. However because I was placed in a very busy centre I had no time at all to plan any of my own lessons and to contribute anything at all to the company, which is a shame considering I have 5 months experience in lesson planning. Working for this company made me forget what it was like to be creative as a teacher - I felt like I was simply a tool whose job was solely to follow the strict schedule of English Excel and hand out worksheets. Their schedule consists of 10 minutes of talk time, 20 minutes of reading time (which often takes a lot longer than 20 minutes and involves a lot of faff with all the flashcards, could be improved if it were only done once every 2 weeks or so because it becomes very monotonous). This is then followed by phonics for the little kids or some other worksheets. The lesson plans leave little time for anything else, oftentimes I didn't even have time for a game at the end. The hours are ridiculous - I was teaching for about 35 hours a week which is absolutely draining, especially when you are teaching little children. You work 6 days a week and finish at 7pm and I was shattered almost every day. The afternoon classes were back to back, so I would sometimes be teaching 3-5 year old kids for 4.5 hours straight without so much as a five minute break. Also, as if 35 hours of teaching a week was not enough to make the management happy, they also decided to open up our 3 lesson planning times to extra lessons at times like Christmas or CNY, without us having any say in it. Management would turn up at the centre every now and then and just put kids into wrong classes as well and we would also have no say in this. Certain managers would also turn up in your planning time and spend 2 hours giving you training on something which took about 5 minutes to understand. My training sessions often went into my lunch time and these training sessions were incredibly patronising - the manager would spend about 15 minutes explaining a sheet to me which was completely self explanatory (eg, "Name: this is where you write your name", "Date: this is where you write the date", "Age of students: this is where you write the age of the students", etc.). Next, the centres offer cooking lessons. These cooking lessons could be great, if: - we had a kitchen (or just anything more than a half broken microwave) - our centre wasn't infested with cockroaches who liked to live in the cupboard where the food was kept - if we had a sink where we could wash the things we'd used rather than having to take everything to the public toilets in the shopping centre and have the cleaners there get annoyed with us every time. Other things: -Management recently installed CCTV in 2 centres to spy on the staff and call up their centres consistently throughout the day to complain about stupid things like a staff member not wearing a Christmas hat at their Christmas parties. -The managers are told not to befriend teachers and they do a pretty great job at that. My final point is regarding wages. Firstly, the wages are terribly low for Hong Kong and to save any money at all you have to give up having any kind of life outside of work (for me this wasn't so hard because I was always too exhausted to do anything outside of work anyway). The company also withhold your first months paycheck and do not give it to you until you finish the 12 month contract. They also withhold your wages if they have just the slightest inkling that you may be thinking of leaving before your contract is finished. I was one of the teachers who did a 'runner'. I was there for 3 months and realised after about one month that there was no way I was going to stay there for a year. The job is soul sucking and I feel that I gained absolutely nothing from my time there and never felt valued as an employee. Unfortunately I had to keep it a secret that I was leaving - I wish I could have spoken to management about it beforehand and discussed it professionally but if you tell the management you are leaving, they will not pay you, and I wasn't prepared to lose any more wages.
