HESS International Educational Group Reviews

-- Chinese Teachers (your co-teachers) will be terribly underpaid. Full-time CTs only earn about 30,000 NTD ($1,000) per month, but they're generally expected to work 40-50 hours per week. -- Part-time CTs only earn 300-400 NT per hour, while other chains like Kojen pay starting pay of 600+ per hour. This results in a high turnover rate for CTs, which results in inconsistent quality of classes. -- NSTs are paid poorly with big gaps in their schedules. For starting pay of about 500-600 NT per hour, you can expect to do a lot of unpaid work: homework, prep, meetings, etc. If you have a kindy+cram school contract, expect to work a few hours in the morning, get an awkward 4-6 hour gap in the afternoon, then work at night again. -- Hess has poor hiring standards for NSTs and CTs, since it's desperate to fill positions (due to the high turnover rate). As a result, managers generally let all sorts of offenses (disrespect towards other staff, refusal to take classes or grade homework) slide to hold on to teachers for awhile longer. -- Hess will eventually force you to give up your weekends, even Sundays, to participate in mandatory "award ceremonies" (which basically give an award to any sucker who was willing to give up a Sunday), and unpaid hiking trips where you will take kindergarten students and their parents for outdoor adventures! -- When you come to Taiwan, be prepared for completely inconsistent branches. Some Head NSTs (like myself) will spend a lot of time securing your housing and training you. Others won't care, and basically leave you to fend for yourself.

I witnessed staff beat children. On one occasion *redacted* took a four year old child, held him by his neck, forced his head under a running sink and beat him. I reported this to my supervisors and nothing was done. On another occasion a colleague of mine had to wrestle a *redacted* away from beating a boy after *redacted* had quite literally thrown the child across the room. This incident was caught on video. Instead of reporting this to the police, management (who is of an apartheid background) had the parents paid off, and let the employee leave the job with full severance pay so that none of this would be reported to the media. I witnessed and was subjected to systemic abusive treatment. I have many years of experience as a teacher so I am not someone who came to this thinking I would get paid to travel and was pissed off that I had to do actual work. They use their employees like serfs. They worked me 12 hours a day in what are called "split shifts" in which you are given classes all day with weird break times in between so you have no time to have a life and still are getting poor hours. I was told that this was reasonable and was read the riot act for asking for saner hours. The management never did their job, delegated all the work to staff who had no competence nor authority to help us, and we were expected to work while even deathly ill. If I ever called in sick I was severely shamed for it by management, and explained how this wasn't a good excuse because management never gets sick. I was regularly called in to work on my days off with no notice or I would show up to work at 8 am only to find out that they had forgotten to tell me class was canceled. One time we all suddenly were told that we could not teach preschool for three days because we might get raided (teaching preschool is illegal for foreigners in Taiwan). Instead they made my Asian American colleague teach everyone's classes on her own on top of her other classes because she looked Asian so probably would be okay if the police came. One of the branches in the area has an open policy against hiring black people. Very often my schedule changed every week, sometimes multiple times a week, so I never knew what classes I was teaching. Classes sizes are extremely large. I was lucky if I had only 16 students in a class. When I taught preschool I had 24 students and my homeroom teacher was never there to help. Please imagine if you will, 24 three-year-olds (half of whom are sick because parents bring them to school no matter how fevered they are), 24 three year olds running around screaming and you are on your own and some of the children start throwing up, and you are on the third floor and there is no one to help you. And you are still expected to teach all the English that needs to be taught and plan elaborate craft projects for (three year olds) to do. These crafts are not for the kids but are actually to look good for the parents, so you now have to make 24 craft projects on your own. We also had to write multiple paragraph long explanations of the children (each of the 24 children) that had to be done every other week. These were painstakingly hard and time consuming to complete and invariable were not good enough for management. Children do not change much in two weeks. These communication books also served to make the school look good to parents (never let a parent know that their child cries in class every day). NONE of this time outside of class is paid for. You are only paid for teaching. But not even that because they consistently mess up paychecks in very convenient ways. Regularly I had to wait two months to get the money I was owed. Often I never did. (And no pay for any training). When I left the job they refused to give me the termination forms that they are legally obligated to produce so that I could start working at my new job. This was not unique to me. This happened to other colleagues of mine. The worst part about the whole experience was that they always treated me and my colleagues like we should be happy for the way we were treated and that it was wrong to want even slightly better. The reason they do not care about their employees is because they can "always order new teachers." This is how they phrase it. They always talk about "ordering new teachers" like teacher are a mail order product. And at HESS they are.