English 1 reviews

It's a giant multinational corporation who puts profits first. The educational materials and style are extremely corporate. EF is the largest private educational company in the world. Coming from the United States, where corporations have destroyed the economy and the middle class, I went to China to get away from this but instead was immersed in a cold, business first culture that doesn't care about students or teachers. EF is preposterously proud of itself, and designs thousands of products that have the EF logo on it (many of which are sold to students). What is called teaching is really corporate regurgitation- lessons are preplanned by layers of educational bureaucracy and "teachers" are merely expounding upon this prepackaged material. I have a lot of experience teaching, and many students praised me as a teacher. However, I received poor performance reviews from management, whom I had more experience teaching than. They are strict enforcers of the EF teaching method, which has some positive merits but anyone who has ever taught knows there are more than one way to teach. Management was wretched- negative, non-supportive, unfriendly, sticklers to thousands of rules. It's an unfriendly company that doesn't care about teachers- I was told flat out they would rather hire new teachers than assist or care for the ones that are currently there. Most of the adult teachers, especially the older ones at the school I worked at, were extremely unhappy and stressed. EF spends most of it's energy recruiting new students, and is extremely expensive- the students are being ripped off. Mostly this is to pay for the huge layers of management and the army of salespeople and recruiters it employs. Another thing I dislike about the company is that it does nothing to teach it's teachers about Chinese culture- we are living in China, yet EF is a bubble of English teaching without telling teachers anything about the ancient culture (and language) of the country we live in. I was forced to resign after being threatened with being fired. When I told my students I received a tremendous outpouring of support from them. I was totally committed to working for one year, but had to leave early because of the wretched conditions of this company. A huge disappointment- I'm glad I got to live in China, but would not recommend this company to anyone (I will say they prefer young people with very little experience).