Toxic - Admissions Abbey Road Programs Employee Review

You get to teach in another country.

Do not teach for this program. They hire you as a teacher but the actual job is a glorified tour guide and camp counselor. Yes, you do get to teach – but you mostly babysit. You are in charge of the students 24/7 and it is just you and one other teacher. There is no chaperone in charge of student needs. Students would knock on the bedroom door at 3am hysterically crying because they were fighting with their roommate. No one teaches you how to deal with this stuff. Even at night, you do not get any time to yourself. There is no time off. They tell you that you get a few afternoons and evenings off – this is a LIE. If you try to take a day off the other teacher is left to handle the students by themselves, and that creates a whole mess and is honestly unfair to the other person. There is absolutely no time to plan lessons or a space to teach them. You basically teach on the go, and you are always on the go, because the program plans a ton of activities ahead of time and books the tickets. The weird thing is that they don’t always inform you that they booked things until the day of, so you might make an effort to plan out a great lesson for the students and it all goes to waste because you get an email with tickets to something that day. They also plan activities that happen back to back and leave no travel time in between. We were always rushing! The students are a lot to handle, this is freedom from parents for them. They sneak out in the middle of the night when you are sleeping and you then have to deal with their parents. Yup, YOU deal with it – not the people who run the company. Parents blame you when their kid sneaks out, as if you have the ability to prevent it after working all day long. They actually yell at you over the phone and write nasty emails. The company also does the same, they would be very nasty if an incident happened that you had no control over. For all of this work Abbey Road completely underpays their teachers. They hang this “bonus” over you which very few people actually get. On top of all that, you need to keep every single receipt for purchases made and type every expense into an excel document each night. That's every receipt for a program which might include 25 students (every receipt they produce for every meal). You are beyond exhausted at this point and don't end up getting to bed until 2am after all is said and done. They have extremely high standards for their educators, which is odd since they are so abusive to their workers. They came to my university (a competitive one, which I will not name here for privacy) looking for grad students who wanted to gain teaching experience. They said it would be a good experience and we just had to lecture the students. NOT TRUE. This is NOT the job to gain teaching experience, and we definitely did more than lecture. You need 10 years of teaching experience before diving into this. They should really only hire experienced teachers who know how to handle student issues, or they need to hire a staff member who handles that stuff. Both myself and the other educator will never work for this program again, or speak positively of it.

You dine three times a day in restaurants

You can work 12 hours per day, the hours are not fixed.