For my review I do wish to remain anonymous. I can this about working for baidawei. Is that a great portion of which you described Jessie I have experienced. Maybe not all but some. I can say this is I would not recommend working for baidawei. This is a training school that even though you are working 20-25 hrs a week you will be putting in double the amount of time. If you have an issue or complaint it will be looked at the other way. If you want to properly defend yourself you will be looked at as an enemy or a distraction to other staff.(basically make baidawei look bad if you are complaining about them).... I do have to say David did help me out of a situation but i believe it was for his own personal gain to make himself look good in the eyes of others. But be prepared for chinese teachers who don't care about their job and be prepared to be disrespected by the chinese staff. I can personally say this had happen to me many times. Even though David and the managers may look good on the outside.... You have yet to see what they have in store for you on the inside. They will play nice and act like everything you are doing is okay and fine but they will stab you in the back when you least suspect it.

Now the positive experience..... I can't stress this enough but I am forever grateful for the friends I have been able to make here at the school they have become a 2nd family to me. And when some of those friends heard that I was leaving baidawei that it was a blessing in disuse..... The children are forever forgetful. I am so happy I got to meet each and every child in my class. I loved teaching them and getting them to play games and hear their laughter made me forget how much I hated working for baidawei. I urge you DO NOT WORK FOR BAIDAWEI. I am doing my best to not make this a personal attack and focus on my experience alone. The reality is all schools whether they are a training school, kindergarten or company... you will have these battles. Make sure you do your homework.... I didn't/couldn't because of my personal situation I needed a job fast and took the first one I could get.... If I had time I would of politely declined..... My first meeting with BAIDAWEI I felt I was in an interrogation room.. Time and time again I kept getting ask if I was giving cards to help me around the city... That never happened, Training RARELY HAPPEN. The first day I was hired I observed 2 days and then left to fend myself. If any wants to personally contact me please state so in the forum and I will find a way to give you my contact information. Because that's just the icing on the cake... Everyone that has left reviews I can relate to almost every person in some sort of way. So I would be just replicating what they said. But this is my true first hand experience with me.

Bottom line is everything Jesse is saying is true and I stand behind him 100% and wish everyone reading up on baidawei the best of luck

Not that this says anything...... If my calculations are correct in the last two years there have been 12 runners alone. One runner I personally was getting to know but never found out the reason she ran.... The question david ask us in our mandated less then 24hr notice emergency meeting was "why?" If there have been so many runners you should know the answer. Yet I haven't been there long enough to know the answer after reading further into Jessie's review I don't blame them for running and I feel bad that they ran.... Because they were great teachers that could of made a really great experience for the children here.

Warning David will try to influence and manipulate reviews to make him look like the victim. He will make it sound that they are just teachers who want to personally attack the school with nothing to back it up.... Well this has been my experience and there is nothing that can change my mind. The only thing I will miss is the children and my dear coworkers. Take care everyone

It is hard to make an adequate enough disclaimer when really doing such a scathing critique as I am about to do. I guess I will just say that I understand that a lot of people post bad reviews on the internet with somewhat greater fanfare than they would get with good reviews. I feel so sorry for the people who are new to the process of finding jobs teaching english in China and are not entirely used to the process of cross referencing reviews of schools with the picture recruiters have painted of them... DO YOUR RESEARCH! Do not let the school give you the majority of the impression that you should just be forming by yourself by researching and emailing employees, etc. I thought I had an ace in the hole by having already met David P[edited] the first time I was teaching in Changchun (the director of studies and co-owner of the school) and finding him to be a very mild mannered and professional man I took the job despite the relatively lower pay and lack of benefits that would have been available at other schools. I legitimately believed that David was a proponent of the communicative method of teaching, from his years of experience and education in the field but soon discovered how robbed of honesty he actually is and how farcical the whole diplomatic charade of professionalism was during the interview process. I speak from my 3 years experience teaching when I say that it is an antiquated, disorganized, low quality school that is well behind the market's progression into modernity. I hope my reservations with all of the problems I am about to mention can be seen in the context of being a foreigner, alone, in China, in a distant development area of a city with no public infrastructure and the difficulties of trying to make the most of an experience that in the case of working at Baidawei asks so very much of you. I think that at one point in the distant past I heard of 'glory years' for the school and for those who worked here, I pray you do not make the mistake of giving the benefit of the doubt and try to think of the following list of grievances as being reasonable. I will contextualize as I go along to give prospective employees a better idea of the nuances of what you can expect when you are placed in a certain location, kindergarten, etc. Please bear with me.
The classrooms are scattered very very far across the city at the most distant ends imaginable. You will be responsible for commuting in some cases as long as forty minutes one way without pay through stop-and-go traffic, another forty minutes on the way back. The commuting van is unforgivingly prompt at leaving the main branch with or without the teachers it means to drop off at the teaching locations.

The standard apartment complexes the foreign teachers are put up in are basic, old, generally dirty and isolated in a part of Changchun that is completely devoid of any social life, stores, or modes of transportation besides Orwellian buses.

You will have generally happy-go-lucky foreign teachers who work in the school but never work with you. I taught in a kindergarten with one other teacher and no-one else. There were some days where we would not be told about meetings or would not have been invited to school functions because of what i suspect is our relative alienation from other teachers. Some teachers teach all alone in schools. It worked out that I would never want to go into the main school other than to just catch the van.

The day-to-day of work was absolutely wretched. The time in the classroom is always good though I loved teaching my kids and had a great time building bonds with my students and teaching assistants. There is never any doubting the magic of children and students and learning to improve your outlook on life and improve your mood

That being said it will become a desperate and stressful relationship that will get the better of you. I would wake up at 6:50am to quickly get ready before running the 1.2 kilometres to the main school to catch my ride to the kindergarten. The ride would be around 40-45 minutes and we would arrive in another, equally isolated part of changchun with no restaurants, public transit or anything, from there we would walk through the school to our offices where we were vicariously allowed to leave our bags, coats, etc. From there I would have six half hour classes in a row from 8:30-11:30 all at different parts of the school. You definitely get used to it and get some good exercise from walking so many stairs, so luckily i found that to be a plus, but sometimes its hard to feel that way, haha.

After the last class I would be allowed my half hour lunch break which the headmaster at that location politely asked if I could reduce to twenty minutes to then finish my following class that originally started at 12:00 and ended at 12:30 a bit earlier. I would then walk briskly everyday, starving, from my last class to the cafeteria and try and scarf down enough food in the roughly fifteen minutes I would have left. I would stand in sometimes a long line for the cafeteria, eat and run to the next class which was by far my worst class because they (like me) were being overextended to remain in class after the time when all other kids were having their nap time. That would always be a terrible class because of that and I would often be in a testy mood.

rom there i would have an hour and a half while the school shuts down for nap time. All the local chinese teachers also nap and or chatter away amongst themselves with their phones. I am an upper intermediate Mandarin speaker and was not able to make any friends besides the casual passing conversation with local teachers in class, during class time. I would spend very day alone, in the huge empty auditorium with no one... no sounds... just peace and quiet. I managed to study quite diligently and raise my chinese ability quite considerably over the time I was there. After that I would have another two classes back to back, finish and bolt out of there at 3:00 like a rocket with a new lease on life. It would take roughly another 40 minutes to get home and back to the middle of nowhere. The driver can drop you off along the small amount of the route that isn't an elevated expressway but there isn't anything around anywhere anyways. We would get back to the main school where I would try and get to the trendy and cultural part of town, Guilin Lu, to attend my Mandarin class for 4 o'clock. Again I would be rushing because the school closed at five and my session was an hour long. From that point after finishing my mandarin class onwards I would be so terribly exhausted and empty of communicability I didn't manage to have much of a social life. Nor does Baidawei provide you with opportunities for having one either.

The other teachers at the school are very nice and will always try and support you. Baidawei will contemptuously keep their 'contractual' obligations to you and nothing more. I had to become a professional contract lawyer while working here. David plays every single angle to get you to come in for emergency meetings or to cover extra classes that you don't have to take if you are 'at hours' (but should feel guilty about if you don't because it means the teacher who for whatever reason isn't teaching their class will be fined for not having cover. You will be made to feel guilty for not bearing this onus as Baidawei has never effectively introduced a sick leave policy other than a infinitesimal, inadequate, and idiotic system whereby two hours of sick leave are acquired every two months. We had two 'emergency meetings' where so many teachings were running away on payday that David called all teachers in on a sunday night at 9pm (a meeting which we had no choice on whether we could attend or not regardless of our days off) he subsequently set up his henchmen Linda, Maria, little brother, maggie and some of the other staff like tina etc at the front of the room to eye us as David acts as grand theatre actor in the play of utter bullshit. He would talk about how he would never see it coming, all these people leaving, and that people with any grievances should come to him immediately for help. The inevitable end of his blustery, verbose, idiotic soliloquies were that we were getting new teachers soon and that we should put our best foot forward and try our best to impress them, wow them and make them feel at home. And we did. The foreign teachers stuck together as I believe they still do because we have NO ONE ELSE. There were welcome parties for the new teachers once enough teachers ran away and david felt it necessary to take measure to retain new teachers. None of the other people who started teaching around the time i did in september received any welcome or party and I only ended up meeting a lot of the new teachers for the first time in the emergency meeting.

If you are sick you will be MADE, chaperoned, escorted, delivered to the hospital. Just short of clubbing you over the head and dragging you there you can be sure school reps will come to your door and demand, diplomatically, in concert with david that you come with them and pay for your own taxi and pay for all the tests you need to have your state of health checked. Be damned whether you are too sick to leave your apartment YOU MUST GO TO THE HOSPITAL, there is no negotiation in the matter.

And this brings me to my final dogged point. David P[edited] is an uncompromising, overdramatic, pugilistic control freak who will employ tactics of deceit, passive aggression, plain aggression, and public shaming to keep his loose grip on power wrapped around his dirty hands. And trust me his hands are dirty, I do not smear the characters of people without there already being a smear there in the first place. I believe every word of every post in this thread, almost, as nearly everything i have seen coincides with the experience I have had as well. The frequency of teachers running away has increased drastically the last few years and for good reason.

I left Baidawei with six months left on my contract, completely fed up of being continually disrespected. i went to David multiple times with some of my grievances which included my feeling of alienation, problems with the apartment, and the prolonged delay of updating our overtime pay raise in our contracts. David would usually try and listen from a distance and make general observations, some helpful advice about depression which was nice of him, but anything relating to work he was defensive and secretive about.

After I agreed to extend my departure date from Changchun to accommodate David's request of covering pre-holday classes I had to subsequently pay a fine for taking a flight the next day after my final contract day and had to pay for my own personal visa for this barely even one day period (16 hours). They told me to clean my apartment to avoid a 200 rmb fine and when I did they charged me anyways. They rushed me out of my apartment after a busy day of work... quickly running home and hurriedly getting my final things together as they clamoured to leave as early as possible after coming to inspect the apartment. In these final weeks I never spoke to david. I barely ever did because i imagine he was embarrassed at his school, as I would be. Shameful, really. The truth is that we foreign teachers are treated the same as local chinese teachers who are always having more and more expected of them with no raise in pay or position.

The very foundation of Baidawei is built on cutting corners to save a penny. Outsourcing, liquidating, lying, stealing, cheating, and mismanaging in order to keep together a school that pays nothing to anyone except those at the top. it is an organization devoid of anything worth saving besides the unfortunate foreign teachers that continue to come despite the unbelievable odds against their remaining and thriving in this toxic environment. I cannot understate the backwardness of this company and its being no place for a serious minded teacher with even a smidgen of self respect.

I have never ever said this about anyone on a public forum before and never plan on having to say it again, I have learned from my mistake of working with Baidawei but... David P[edited] is a liar and generally terrible boss along with his whole office of executive minions. Baidawei is the worst job i have ever had.