English School horror stories

11 comments

1. What did you do for them not to recontract???

2. ABC English

   You’re literally there 45 to 50 hours but are only paid for 40.

   The boss is a moron

3. Contact the union, they will help you get your documents.

4. What kind of documents do you need from them? I never needed anything from any of my schools after I left, except one time my new company wanted my pension number.

   One international school in Tokyo didn’t give us an alternative day off during the week, after working both Saturday and Sunday. We essentially worked 12 days straight with no extra pay. At all my other schools, if worked on the weekend, we usually got Monday off. We also had to work on Japanese national holidays. I finished my first year and found another job.

   Another school I worked at had too much drama among the staff. I don’t have time write about all the things that happened there.

5. [removed]

6. Drunk and constantly hungover ex-navy jackass entrusted with watching over 2-year-olds. I had left a few days after, so I didn’t see the eminent disaster at the location, but the company also alienated their competent staff that year as well, leaving them with very little.

7. I worked alongside a dispatch worker from a competitor company (provides teachers to private schools). “Sally” had specifically moved to the area in Tokyo where the client school was located because the dispatch company had told her she would continue to work there from one year to the next (the dispatch company along with mine had continually renewed contracts for several years with the client school).

   Sally was an excellent teacher and was popular amongst both the students and teaching staff, but towards the end of the school year, the dispatch company told her they would be placing her in a private elementary school, with a terrible commute, from the start of the next school year. When she was hired she specifically said she did not want to teach at elementary school. If I recall correctly, the dispatch company told Sally that the school she was currently at couldn’t offer her as many lessons the next year, so the dispatch had decided to move her to the elementary school position because it provided more job security.

   Sally was distraught about the change of schools. She had no interest in teaching elementary school whatsoever and was dreading the commute. My co-worker from my dispatch company and I suggested Sally apply for a position at our company and that we would put in a good word for her (more on that later).

   One day Sally was talking with one of the direct-hire Japanese English teachers who said something about looking forward to working with her next year. Sally was confused and said that she wouldn’t be back because her dispatch company had said the school couldn’t offer the same schedule. The JTE was now confused and shocked because Sally was so well liked and none of the direct-hire English teachers had heard about this change.

   The JTE approached the head of the English department since the story the dispatch company had given Sally seemed rather suspicious. The department head confirmed her suspicions. The school had not been planning to change/reduce Sally’s schedule and had fully expected her to return the following school year. However, in the meantime. Sally had been offered a job with my dispatch company which she had decided to accept.

   Sally informed her company that she was quitting, but didn’t tell them she would be working for a new dispatch company. When she quit, the owner of the company was incensed. He claimed to know “high-up” people in the private school circuit and would have her blacklisted. He also threatened to inform immigration and, if I recall correctly, hinted he could have her deported. My company reassured Sally that all of these were just empty threats and that there was no way he would or could follow through with them.

   The real irony is despite the school being aware of all the shenanigans Sally’s dispatch company tried to pull with both Sally and the school, the school continued to recontract with the same company for several years after.

8. Worked in a franchise school; corporate recruited based on their contract, benefits etc., but my franchise company kept a few contract differences quiet until they could spring them on teachers beholden due to their visas, apartments, etc.

   For example, many companies tend to count weekends/days off as “holidays”, and will enumerate national holidays along with weekends etc into a single figure like 120 holidays per year.

   Anyway, my company had a much smaller number than the corporate office sold new teachers on, meaning we were expected to work quite a few weekends, even though the school was closed.

   I was also promoted to a division supervisor because they had multiple schools in the area. Got a new title, but zero extra pay. In fact they just fudged the numbers, my hourly rate down and reduced other allowances to show on paper that I was now getting paid for 30 hours OT per month. So they expected me to work those extra hours for literally less than before, and less than my subordinates.

   Speaking of money, because they were opening a preset number of franchise schools, which cost a staggering amount of money and each location was expected to run at a deficit for a couple years before becoming profitable, they factored our bonuses on the health of the entire division, which would perpetually in the red. “Oh, your school is now profitable? What a shame that we opened two new schools this year at a million dollars each, so we’re not profitable as a whole, sorry.” We never got bonuses, raises, and basically never would.

   Finally, as an extra twist and thrust of the dagger, the regional manager sat down with me and the company’s policy book one day to discuss future prospects. Basically, because I was a foreigner, I could only ever hope to achieve one grade level higher than my current, and that if I worked really hard, continued working the unpaid OT and weekends, after 5-10 years I could expect a 10k (100$) per month raise! Gee, how exciting!

9. Worked for a Eikaiwa.
   Was micromanaged and bullied by the managers.
   The only time I was ever late in the time I worked there I told the manager 30mins in advance that I’d be 5mins late to clock in and I got told off as soon as I arrived. That was so random.
   Another manager would micromanage me. She’d watch through the windows of the classrooms or the doorways. It made me so uncomfortable. One time, she was making faces at me because she was angry with how I sat and proceeded to ask my student repeatedly after ‘did you have fun’ like 10 times. It made me so uncomfortable. And after told me off about how I’m a terrible lazy teacher.
   It was such a slap in the face because I worked really hard and felt really appreciated from my students.
   There were so many other instances, but it was stressful, to say the least.
   Also, some of the staff that come are pretty unusual. A lot of the time, the foreign teachers were pretty ‘different’ and made me super uncomfortable.

10. One of my previous visa sponsors, probably my longest continuous sponsor, provided incorrect or incomplete documentation for my visa renewal *every time* for over ten years.

    On top of that, I was always expected to go to immigration *alone*.

    One year they gave me the company tax forms from the wrong year, photocopied. The immigration office promptly informed me that they require original documents from the previous year with authentic stamps, and that photocopied, outdated documents are unlikely to be accepted upstream. I explained that I had already said that to my employer and they did not care. That was the year I got *downgraded* from a three year term to one (caveat, the three year visa had been from a different sponsor).

    Different years they would refuse to provide an updated copy of my contract, or the document that describes my employment status, or they would be *weeks* late on my tax withholding form (that’s actually a common problem with a lot of small Eikaiwa I worked for; luckily, a few years ago the immigration office started to pretend they never asked for gensenchoshu).

    The owners of this business are also foreigners on visas in Japan. They *know* how it’s supposed to be done, but they never admitted to doing anything wrong. They always acted like they were helping me out and that I should be grateful they even bother.

    Some others:

    One guy fired me because I missed his email for five minutes. We were meeting at a McDondalds; I was on the second floor and I saw him park his car, but never get out of it. I did check my phone a couple of times. This was an iPhone 3G: it had no means of getting a notification if you did not pick it up and turn it on (no LED, vibrate was sketchy, Eikaiwa requires your phone to be in silent mode *always*, etc). Apparently I missed him entering the restaurant and he was waiting for me on the first floor for five minutes before he decided to come up to the second to look. I had already sent him a message when I arrived to tell him I was waiting for him in the restaurant, ten or fifteen minutes before. Fired me on the spot.

    My first Eikaiwa was a nightmare, mostly because of the owner. She was openly hostile to Americans; I don’t know why she hired me. I would say she was racist, but that would require consenting to her opinion that “American” is a singular, unified *race*. She was the first, but not the last, employer to crush all hope I ever had of making use of my BA in English Literature, license to teach ESL, or the significant amount of time I spent learning about language acquisition and early childhood development. Japan is not interested in ESL teachers who can actually teach: we are here to entertain, we are clowns, eikaiwa is a scam.

    The place I work now is awful too. There’s really too much to even get into. It’s a small but growing chain of preschools. One of my co-workers is a Japanese English teacher; she has seniority in the company, she is in charge of the “English Department” as it were (four people: myself, her, a korean guy, another a japanese lady). She harassed me incessantly the first year I worked there: accused *me* of teaching incorrect pronunciation *after* telling me the kids don’t need to learn English so much as they need to learn to *enjoy English* (it turns out, they are expected to do well on placement tests when they graduate and that these tests expect them to sound a certain way when they speak English–decided by Japanese people, judged by Japanese people, and apparently *not* how my midwestern accent sounds). After I had already experienced *fourteen years* of people telling me to make it “more genki” she had the nerve to say my half-hour song/dance/game routines weren’t fun enough because *one boy* would always fall asleep in my class. The boy fell asleep in everything after lunch. It had nothing to do with me. She convinced management that it did; I had to sit through a lot of ~~racist takedowns~~ special meetings with her and other bosses as a result (very similar to my first employer here, there was a stereotype they expected me to fulfill but apparently I am a human being and that is not compatible with their expectations of my performance). It’s gotten easier as I have moved out to the other locations more and don’t work directly under that lady most of the time.

11. I went to work for a small-ish Eikawa owned by two people (Japanese and Australian) who hated and distrusted each other, but were in denial about it. What followed was six months of sheer hell with them constantly giving me conflicting instructions and then getting annoyed with me for not being able to follow.

    I was so young and naive that I couldn’t see what was coming: eventually they turned on me and decided that I was the source of all the school’s problems (blaming me for losing the school 70 students who had never actually met me before!).

    One Sunday evening I got called at home and told not to bother coming in the next day.

    They had secretly hired and trained a new teacher in Australia, and flown her in at their own expense.

    Apparently she lasted one week!