ESL Teachers Board: ESL Job Offers, ESL Resumes, Free ESL materials

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ReadMe First - A bit of warning

Plus our terms and conditions and the usual disclaimer

 

Scams  Identity Theft  Search Engine Caches  Posts Against Schools  Chinese Recruiters  Spam  Your privacy  Helping Others  Sources of Info  Report Problems  Contact Us

This open site is a free and growing resource for the English as a Second Language (ESL) community worldwide. Its value comes from the fact that information - free of charge - is posted and can be viewed by thousands of ESL schools (large and tiny, rich and poor), teachers, students, related service providers and others (yep, others... keep reading), all over the world. But please be aware that we don't know them - we really don't - and that we don't endorse any post or guarantee their validity.

We live in a beautiful world, but there is the occasional voyeur (e.g. the throat psycho "Dr S. Peterson" aka "Dr Stevens" and recently "Dr Don Ford"). For example, if you are a young and beautiful female teacher and you add your picture to your resume, don't add your telephone number because you will receive unwanted calls. Just provide a "throw-away" email address. And of course don't provide your street address! Nobody should provide their street address on the Internet.

Scams

And there is the occasional crook! If you don't already know about it, google the two words "Nigerian Letter", or read Advance Fee Fraud on Wikipedia. Also see our Scam Alert board where you will find examples of scam emails and where you can post info and questions about scams.

When you have doubts about an email, you can at least check if it was actually sent from the country/city where the sender pretends to be located. You can find at aruljohn.com useful advice on how to find an IP address from an email header and how to track the IP address (also at ip2location.com).

NEVER send money to schools, recruiters or anybody else. A frequent scam: The scammer, disguised as a school or recruiter, will ask you to send money, for example to have your visa processed. There is no such thing. Repeat: Don't send money to anybody. Read for example how scammers, disguised as the immigration department of a host country, ask US$350 for processing a teacher's visa, or the story of an advance-fee fraud perpetrated on a homestay host via Western Union. Repeat: Don't send money to anybody!

If a job sounds too good to be true, it is not true. Here is a cute, unedited, example, of a "job offer" in London: "The company of the school will provide accomodation ,health and feeding allowances , flight ticket and other necessary basic commodities . They will be paying 3500 pounds salary which will arise in accordance to the United kingdom employment regulations". When you see something this good, run!

Identity Theft

Before you post personal and contact info, like on any web site, be aware that it will be viewed all over the Internet and might be copied (your photo also might be copied) and used for unwanted purposes, starting with identity theft. Omit credit file info like date and place of birth, full name, full address, passport number, etc.  

Here is some advice about identity theft provided by Ron, one of our site's visitors (Ron's site: http://geocities.com/victoryolife):

Only send schools/recruiters/others a copy of your passport/other sensitive documents or info when you are sure who you are dealing with, because this sensitive info might be used for unwanted purposes.

 

Advice from "Turnoi", an experienced teacher:

Advice from "San Migs", another experienced teacher in China (July 2012):

Search Engine Caches

Did you know that even after you delete your post from a site, it remains in the cache of the search engines and can still be viewed in their search results as a 2-line snippet and/or as a full cached document?

Post Against a School

When you read a bad post against a school, it may be true. There are also reasons why it may not be true. For example, it might be written by a competitor. It might also be written by a disgruntled teacher who has good reasons to be disgruntled. Or not really good reasons (went overseas with the wrong expectations, for example). Ask yourself how credible the writer sounds; and if you are interested in this school, do some further research including speaking to present and past teachers.

Chinese Recruiters

You will find that, often, Chinese recruiters receive very critical reviews. You will find many posts written by experienced teachers that keep repeating, "Don't use Chinese recruiters, contact the schools directly". You will find the good, the bad and the ugly about Chinese recruiters on our School and Recruiter Reviews board. But like in any group, there are exceptions, and there are good recruiters in China.

Spam

We STRONGLY suggest that you provide a "throw away" email address (like a gmail, yahoo, hotmail account opened just for your job search) on your posts, knowing that you can get rid of it when you start receiving too much spam. If you include the email address of your references on your resume, they will receive a lot of spam - it's not a nice thing to do to them. If you add your email address only in the Email Address box on the posting forms of our boards, your email address will be protected by a 6-character code against email extracting robots that create mass e-mailing lists (but not against manual extraction).

Your Privacy

The ESL Teachers Board does not send spam in any way, directly or indirectly, and does not maintain emailing lists. Spammers sometimes use our name as an introduction ("I got your email address from your profile on the ESL Teachers Board"). This is a scam. We do not maintain profiles of our posters; there are only individual posts on our site, that their poster can delete any time. And we don't provide anybody with the contact info of our posters - the scammers/spammers find them on the posts. Also, some scammers will contact our posters pretending to be from the ESL Teachers Board, asking personal info in order to update your profile: No such thing! If you have a doubt, check with us at this email address.

Helping Others

Reporting problems on discussion forums, ours and others, helps other people to avoid the same traps. It really helps a lot!

Reporting Problems

If you see something wrong on our site (scam, dishonest recruiter or school, etc.), please send us an email because we don't want them.

Sources of Info

Experienced teachers routinely post interesting information on various ESL sites about their experience in various countries. You will find on this site thousands of posts about teaching overseas. You are welcome to ask questions on our boards and most likely you will get replies within a few days. Try our School and Recruiter Reviews board and our Teacher Discussion Forum. There is country info on our "Travel, Teach and Live in ..." China, Asia, Philippines, ThailandKoreaJapan, India, Australasia, Latin America, North America and Europe & Middle East.  Whatever you read, always use your own judgment and verify, research, ask more, read more. Google is one of your best tools.

Contact Us

We welcome your emails. We carefully review each email we receive.

Note: Because between 300 and 500 spam messages arrive each day in the Spam folder of our GMail account, we don't review our Spam folder (reading 500 dirty and scam titles every day is a serious energy vampire - we prefer to use that energy to keep improving this site). Please add a subject line to your email because otherwise GMail could send your message to our Spam folder. And please make sure your email address is not flagged as spam by GMail.

Conclusion: Whether you use, post or send info, and before accepting any contractual relationship, please be vigilant, conduct your own full research, check references, speak to teachers or ex-teachers of the school, and look for advice when needed. And again: Never send money!

By using this site, you agree that we bear no responsibility regarding any info on this site.

Et voilà!

We hope that you will enjoy the 50+ boards on this site, and we sincerely wish you all the best.

The team of the ESL Teachers Board

We welcome your feedback - Click here to send us an email

"Just living is not enough, said the Butterfly.

One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower."

- Hans Christian Anderson (1805-1875)

 

"Now, bring me that horizon!"

- Captain Jack Sparrow

 

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