ESL Teacher - Anonymous employee fast school Employee Review

You can work from home

Constant criticism, you work a lot more hours than paid.

They paid.. it didn't take too long to prepare for each class. Some nice people working there that were friendly and helpful whenever I needed anything on my end.

The biggest con would have to be the fact that you only EVER get one maybe two hours every weekend and they never offer anything during the week really. I worked for this company… It was one of the strangest work experiences I have ever had. When I first began they kept referring to this one guy who it seems that they think is some sort of rock star teacher and the manager kept telling me to be more like him.. Nearly every class she would refer back to this guy’s classes that she had sent me a few times. So I began to do everything she said, but to a greater degree seeing as I was already doing what she was saying in my estimation. I think it was just that because I wasn’t as super energetic and almost clown-like as this guy she assumed that I didn’t have “passion” as she would like to point out(little did she know that the root word for passion means suffering.. and I felt that the exorbitant amount of energy I put into this job made me one of the most “passionate” teachers China has). That aside, one thing that REALLY made me irritated about this company is that they will set you up with a wechat group and you will get to talk with everyone on the admin / tech side BUT it’s against their company policy for you to get a hold of any co-teachers. I honestly thought this was so absurd. And the way that it was framed to me when I pointed out the absurdity was just outrageous because they told me that they, “protect their teacher’s personal information”. I pointed out that I’m sure that most teachers would probably love the chance to get to know the other teachers that they are working alongside with. To which I was told, “sorry, we can’t allow that”. SMH. At any rate, I worked with FastSchool for a few months.. and I should point out that when they installed their program onto my computer they had to manually come onto my computer via some device that allows them to use my computer from their computer. After the software was installed my virus protection kept alerting that it had a virus and they just kept telling me to turn it off an ignore it… Sketchy I know. So after some time they told me that there wasn’t enough demand to keep teaching the classes I was teaching and that I would be able to start doing these classes with 200-500 students. The rub was that I would have to buy a brand new laptop that had an i7 processor and 8gb of RAM.. Well I have an i5 and 8gb RAM but they told me that this isn’t enough.. despite the specs being pretty much negligible.. So overall I calculated that I would have to work about 3-4 months with this company before I would break even after buying a laptop(new or used) which they demanded I get for the job. Suffice it to say I couldn’t find one for a reasonable price so I just feigned that I was trying to find one until they paid me. They ended up paying me and I never heard from them since. They never said a single word.. didn’t even check back with me to see if I had found a laptop which I found very odd; this just tells me that they must have a very high turnover rate. Overall, with all of the money I spent on props and on programs to help with OL classes.. I am not very certain that I broke even with the money I made from FS. They only ever give you 1-2 hours every weekend(If that), and so the $30 an hour seems enticing. To be honest though, when all was said and done I felt like I had traveled 100 miles for a cracker.