Your friend is thinking to apply for them.

I see. So, how many people is your friend thinking to apply to them (Best Learning, Beijing) for ?

Fake newrs from a fake teacher, methinks!

Could you possibly email me? I have three days to accept an offer to work through Best Learning and I would love to pick your brain!

I recently finished my 1 year contract with them. The company is treats their employees horribly. Also they will not always uphold their contract. Being in another you need support. You might not think you will. But you will get sick once. You will need to talk to the police about sometimes (visa, housing registration). The company does not support you in any of this. Other English teaching companies help their teachers. They will send someone with you to the hospital. Also if you ask for a specific city you might not get it. Also the centers are poorly ran. They just care about money so they skimp on supplies. Essential things like toilet paper and internet are not always available. When considering this company look for others that pay better. There are many out there. Also this job has horrible office hours. It's possible that you can have no classes and just sit in the office all day. The boredom kills.

Best Learning is not all terrible. In fact, I love my center, my Chinese teacher friends, the vice principal in charge of the academics staff, and the people I've met and the experiences I've had. Also, God help me, I'm making good money.

That being said, fuck HQ. They are the most unhelpful and inefficient people I know. If you want to get anything done, good fucking luck. They are vague, make up dates and reasons for what needs to be done with no rhyme or reason. They try to blame foreign teacher incompetence and the government for the reason things don't get done- but it is their own laziness. I've had so many visa problems because they just let things sit in the office.

I don't discourage you from working for them, but I do encourage you to keep your eyes and ears open and use common sense. It's amazing how complacent you can become while living in Beijing about their business practices. Lazy, lazy people. There was ONE foreigner in the the HQ office (Spencer), super helpful guy but definitely drinking the BL koolaid. Now it's nothing but Chinese nationals. And holy shit, Valery takes the cake. I have never seen her wearing anything professional- (the broad walks around in short shorts and knee high tights) and she is as unhelpful as they come. She'll give you the runaround if you let her, and if you question her she will give bullshit sass. Can you tell I don't like this woman? Don't let her screw you and keep your passport longer than she needs to or give you BS answers with no follow up.

Bring at least $3000 USD (assuming you're American) also. There are so many hidden expenses no one tells you about.

Rise, MaxEn, Disney English- all similar training schools but I'm sure you'll find the same kinds of problems there. Sadly, this is how Chinese business is run.

Do you want to make money, have some fun, enjoy teaching adorable children, and be able to visit places you thought you'd never see? Then teach abroad in China. The day I made it to the Great Wall finally, or had a little preschool girl say "teacher I love you!" makes it all worth it.

Do you NOT want to bang your head against concrete walls trying to get a straight answer from a Chinese person? Then don't bother. Some days I want to blow my brains out here.

If you want any more information on BL then I am a fountain of information.

Ha ha ha this is so great! My first job in China was at BL and they screwed us every which way!!!

I am pretty sure I knew who wrote the last one (Cough* Spencer* Cough). At first I thought he was a nice, reasonable guy...but then I realized he has been brainwasshe and turned into a slimy businessman just like the rest of them.

It's not uncommon to have to pay 6 months up front FYI...

Stay away from Best Learning! It is a real nightmare and a freaking joke!

To future English teachers,

During the course of September 2014-September 2015 I was an English teacher at a training school called Best Learning. I had originally had two years of experience and was excited to teach again in the big city of Beijing.

That excitement quickly changed within the first week of training. An abundant amount of things promised to be paid by the school was not. This put me and like many others in a bad position from the beginning. I looked past these white lies and tried to concentrate on starting out my teaching year positive.

My year of teaching was extremely frustration and just plain ridiculous! Not only was I forced into doing way too many hours but I was thrown into a clown position every chance they got. The school made it perfectly clear that it was not a school at all. Our job was not to ensure the children were learning English but to get as many children we could to sign up and hand in their money as quick as possible.

Throughout the year teaching we were promised bonus' and a raise if their performance was good enough. I quickly recognized that this was unrealistic due to the standards and requirements they presented. Due to lies and deceit from management and other higher end positions it made it almost impossible for our teaching staff to receive our quotas.

Being a creative individual who came to china to make a difference in children's education I was disgusted in the company as a whole and would encourage others to find another companies who would treat you with respect.

I was forced to leave my school after my contract because of the lack of organization, unprofessionalism and the schools lack of interest in education as a whole.

I hope this will help in your overall choice of teaching English in Beijing China.

Sincerely,
A former English teacher.

Can you recommend some good school to look at?

I would like to clarify some serious misunderstandings about holding onto the passport and apartment situation.

1. Firstly, the passport is not held until you pay the loan off. It is held for one month since you took the loan. As you said there is a lag in your pay. You get paid on the 15th for the previous month. So if I started working on April 4th, I will not get my April pay until May 15th. Because of this lag in pay, after one month of work, if you were to run off, there is still enough money to take back the amount in the loan. There are a lot of foreigners that come to China because you can make a lot of money with a very low skill level. Best Learning has had many teachers come take the loan and run off. How else can the company reduce the loss of 1,300 USD for every new employee? Suggestions would be appreciated as no one wants to give up there passport.

2. If you do not want your passport to be held, but need the loan, you have an option to take your flight reimbursement out early. You are only eligible for 7,000RMB instead of the full 10,000RMB at the end of the year, but this is an option where the company will not hold onto your passport. You can apply for it after you have passed your one month probation period.

2. The real estate agents that best learning work with do not charge such a high agency fee. The agents have two options. You can look at apartments where you pay the agency fee, or where the land lord pays the agency fee. All you need to do is simply tell the agent that you only want to see apartments where the landlord pays the agency fee. IF you rent an apartment where you pay the agency fee, it is only one month rent. You can also talk them down a bit. There is no reason you should pay 4,000 to 5,000RMB on an agency fee, unless you are looking at apartments in that price range. I know the agents personally and that is not how they operate.

3. You should never pay 6-7 months up front for rent in Beijing. The standard process is 3 months rent upfront, with a one month security deposit. Therefore you will pay 4 months up front. If you are renting a place for 3,000RMB a month, that should total to 12,000RMB. Therefore the 8,000RMB loan is not enough. YOU NEED TO COME TO CHINA WITH SOME MONEY! I love adventurous and carefree people, but you can not come across the world with a few hundred US dollars and think that is enough to survive on. KEEP IN MIND, your first paycheck is the 15th of the following month. So if you were to come on April 4th, you will have to run off of your savings until May 15th!

4. Best Learning respects the loan application that you fill out. After you have filled out the application, it can not be changed. You have three months to pay back the loan starting from YOUR FIRST FULL PAYCHECK. When you arrive to China, you most likely arrive in the middle of the month. Therefore you get paid prorated from the day you started working. If you take the loan, it is not fair to start paying back from an already not full paycheck. Therefore the first payment is from your first full month of work, which you get paid for the following month on the 15th. So if I started on April 4th, and took the loan, my first deduction would be from my first full month of work (May), which I get paid for on June 15th. I hope that makes sense as it is a little confusing if you have not been in China.

I hope this could clarify some of your points. You are very incorrect about some of the comments you have made. Makes me wonder if you have rented an apartment in China before?

A few words of advice to everyone! Do your Research! Do not come across the world without savings! EVERYTHING in China is a negotiation, almost never take the first price on anything you buy (unless you are in a proper store with price tags). Because you are foreign, you will automatically be charged more. DO YOUR RESEARCH, ASK QUESTIONS, BE SMART!

I can confirm all of these except for number 5, which is ...not exactly wrong, but not strictly true. They do hire teachers who aren't like 100% European-descent. But I've never encountered a black or asian or high % native american or anyone like that. Something else along these lines, though, is that they also only want American accents. It isn't the management so much as some of the parents. They flipped out over this one English teacher's accent. He got screwed, as they cut all his hours, and he was under a variable-rate contract with pay per class. If you don't have an American-enough accent they may not want you, and they may dump you.

I worked there for a year. The entire time they said they would get me a Z visa, but only ever did Fs. Their teachers started encountering trouble getting even F visas MONTHS before the April immigration crackdown, and they did nothing about it. They had at least 4 months warning that the F visa thing wasn't going to be tolerated anymore. They got fucking RAIDED BY THE POLICE at least twice, and had a token sacrificial deportation. During the crackdown, rumor had it there was another guy deported; but rumor also had it he was a dirtbag.

The variable-pay contract thing is true. If you have 25 hours a week, 5-10 of those will be demos. They have had several versions of the variable-pay contracts. They lowered the rate in the later versions, and then retroactively applied the new rate to people on the earlier contract. Given that contracts without legal visas are (according to a recent court case) legally unenforceable, what are you gonna do? They also changed the definition of a class hour when it comes to demos, counting all demos at the same (low) length of time, regardless how long you actually spend on them. Since the definition of a class hour was not rigidly defined in the contracts, they're perfectly free to change the game in other ways, and given they had a history of doing that, I wouldn't put it past them.

They wanted me to renew with them under the new contract. This was after I spent an hour and a half lecturing Larry, the VP in charge of HR at the time, and the new HR ladies (HR has a lot of turnover there) about my grievances and those of other FTs (and some of the CTs). They kept insisting "but you'll get one thousand more!" without specifying more than WHAT. I believe it was that I'd be getting 1000 more than a new teacher, which based on what the teachers I knew under the new contract were making, would still have been a pay cut. I'm not staying on with a company that's lied to me continually for a year and taking a pay cut for the privilege. If I'm taking a pay cut, I'm going to go somewhere better.

We had 4 foreign teachers quit in the span of a month, and this was in the middle of a slow trickle of resignations. Some people bitched that all they cared about was money. But at least one guy was going back to the US with medical problems and no insurance, and two went to other schools for lower pay.

The guy who harmed someone in a classroom was drunk, and he picked up a student, and dropped her on her head. She had a throwing-up-go-to-the-fucking-hospital concussion. Smart guy, cognitively; dumb as shit behaviorally.

Something only tangentially related to the position per se, but indicative of the kind of corporate culture that Best Learning has: The principal of my school poached all the best sales prospects from the sales staff, taking the sales commissions for herself. Meanwhile, she was Glengarry/Glenn Rossing the sales staff monthly, whoever sold the least got fired. We lost a lot of good sales staff that way, and those who were left were the ones willing to do things that caused disruption to classes: placing students in classes they couldn't handle, bringing demo kids in to sit in on classes unannounced, things like that. Anyhow, she DID eventually get fired for it, so there's that.

The school I work at now, Maxen Education, hasn't had anyone quit in the middle of a contract since I've been here. Meanwhile, two of my former Best Learning coworkers are here with me, and at least one more is across the street at another school, and from what I hear the turnover continues pretty quick at Best Learning.

I feel kind of guilty for not posting about this sooner.

Here's a test to find out if a school is going to screw you on the visa: In the interview, intimate that you do not have a college degree, or are under age 24, or don't have any work experience...anything that would disqualify you from getting a Z visa. Ask if they can still get you a visa. Some schools who DO get all qualified teachers Z visas don't actually care about your qualifications if you come with your own visa, so that's the telling question. If they say YES, without asking YOU any additional questions, then they will not get you a Z visa; you will be working illegally.