I am posting this review of Alexander Academy in Taipei in its own thread in hopes that it will get picked up by search engines. ALL details are relevant to the Xinyi (Guangfu) branch, and most details will still be relevant to the Daan (Xinsheng) branch.
Pros:
They have strong, reasonable philosophy around what a quality education is.
As I write this (January 2020), there are no consequences for breaking your contract, which is good because you will probably want to quit.
Cons:
Undoubtedly, I forgot some of details about my awful experience at Alexander Academy, so the following is an incomplete list of cons:
The owner is the worst communicator Iāve ever met. She will not hesitate to lie to you to get what she wants. You canāt trust anything she says. She is always on the edge of throwing a tantrum, constantly shaking, laughing nervously, and her voice quivering. Every couple of months, she flies into a rage, screaming at people over complete nonsense. Sheās good at first impressions, but donāt let that fool you. There is no doubt that she has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which you will find out if you work for her. You are not allowed to disagree with her. You may only praise her, otherwise she will start shaking and possibly screaming. She has the emotional maturity of a toddler. Hereās a quote of her giving someone feedback about their weekly brainstorm: āYeah, your brainstorm is really bad. Really, itās quite terrible. It needs to be better. This school is a whole language learning school, and yeah, this is just not good at all.ā This is her speaking style. She speaks broadly with significant negativity and has no ability to discuss specific details in a positive way.
You get paid literally half of what you can earn at any other job as an ESL/EFL teacher. The reason that people accept this is that the schoolās teaching philosophy is good and the owner is good at first impressions. Again, donāt let it draw you in. Not only will you hate your job, but you will get paid half of what you could elsewhere. The low pay is completely unnecessary. The owners are very wealthy. I ran into their āfriendsā outside of work once, and they told me about how nice their house & cars are and how the owner even talks down to her friends as if sheās superior to them.
Middle management (i.e. the āHead Teachersā) only advocate for the owner and will NEVER advocate for the teachers. If you raise any issues about the school with them, their first response is to get angry at you and tell you to be quiet and āknow your role.ā If you continue to raise such issues, they might try a softer response, but they are only paying lip service to get you to be quiet. Even if they agree with you, they will never take a stand for whatās right. They will only ever kiss the ownerās feet.
The HR & Operations executive is a kind, reasonable person to interact with, but unfortunately, heās not good at his job. When youāre doing onboarding paperwork, things will constantly fall through the cracks and you have to remind him several times about important tasks. Additionally, even though heās head of operations, he is completely removed from the day-to-day operations of the school and has no idea what types of issues exist. Although heās a nice guy, he has admitted to me that heās āvery lazy.ā
Thereās a very high turnover rate, so you constantly see new faces. Thereās literally no effort made to make new employees feel welcome, not even a name introduction. Literally nothing. One of the foreign kindy teachers had 4 different Chinese teachers in a span of 5 months because turnover was so high. Also, staff is never notified in advance when someone joins the team, even if youāre going to work directly with that person.
Thereās a big rift between Chinese staff & Foreign staff. Management asks Chinese staff to report on Foreign staff without the knowledge of Foreign staff. This would be acceptable in some circumstances, but they do this in place of any form of communication whatsoever. This contributes to an āusā and āthemā mentality rather than a strong team dynamic.
Chinese staff is explicitly encouraged to make negative reinforcement their default behavior management system while Foreign staff is told to make positive reinforcement the default. Chinese staff constantly yell at the kids and sometimes even push them on the floor or yank on their arms really hard. Chinese staff will often preempt undesirable behavior by yelling at children before they even do anything wrong.
Some Chinese staff are really nice when they first start; however, it usually only takes about 1-2 weeks for them to become extremely negative and abusive due to the culture of spite and resentment.
When a child wets themselves (it happens at kindergarten ages), the Chinese staff is responsible for cleaning it up. They do not even use cleaning solution to wipe it up. They just take a water-damp rag and mop it up (and then everyone wonders why the whole school is getting sick all the time).
The school is incredibly messy, disorganized, and in disrepair. An example: A plywood board that had been stapled onto a cupboard door frame was coming off and had staples sticking out of the back. As it was coming off, kids could see a big opening in the door and stick their hands through it, risking cutting themselves on the staples or plywood. It took the school nearly a month to fix this. There are many other areas of chaos and no plans to fix them.
Middle & upper management blames absolutely everything on the teachers. There is no sense of personal responsibility with management.
You often (not always) have to pay for your own supplies like pens, markers, etc. If you request such supplies, they will pretend like they might get them for you but then just never act on it.
They just donāt care about you. Everything is about the owner.
This school seems to have a lot of Chinese people working for them. Is there a reason for that?
Iām not really sure how much āa lotā is since my experience at other schools is limited to subbing. All I can say is that thereās one Chinese teacher per class and then something like 15 (give or take) administrative, cleaning, and cooking Chinese employees.
Thatās a heck of a lot. Is it a Chinese franchise? Iāve been here for twenty years and Iāve only ever seen Taiwanese people working at Taiwanese schools.
Are you saying they are only paying you half as much as you originally agreed to? Did you sign a contract which stipulates your pay level? Are you getting paid at that same level?
I worked at AA, and quit 9 months ago. I can confirm the work culture was shocking. The owner just loves to have meetings and shout at people. There was no constructive criticism or a even a clear reason she was upset. She would just yell insults at you, when you asked for clarification of what her specific criticism was she would answer with the same vague insult. In the whole time I was their she never watched me or any other teacher teach, she is just mentally unstable.
To specify I worked in the elementary part of the school. Iāve worked in many schools and Iāve never really had any major problems before. This school was by far the worst environment Iāve ever worked in.
Ah, thereās a miscommunication here. In the school, they refer to all staff of Taiwanese/ROC origin as āChinese.ā I donāt believe itās a PRC school.
I know a certain school that employs mostly Chinese teachers because Taiwanese refuse to work for the manager, whom the owner refuses to fire for some unknown reason.
Just noticed the above post. Iām actually referring to mainlanders on work visas.
I was one of the people who posted a negative review of this school in the blacklist thread. I didnāt expect to see a thread pop up about them ā honestly, staff turnover was so high when I was there that I wasnāt sure the school would still be around. Iām sorry to hear that things there havenāt improved.
I can confirm what the OP wrote above, particularly the bit about the owner being volatile and unpleasant, to which Iād add that in my experience she also had a penchant for talking about her employees behind their backs. (Iām not sure what she was thinking ā that the staff wouldnāt compare notes?)
When I was there, the amount of prep work and paperwork we had to do was absolutely overwhelming, although itās possible thatās changed since I left. It was really demoralizing to come in every day, try my absolute hardest to get everything done, and still feel like I was on thin ice with management.
Additionally, and I donāt think I mentioned this in my post in the other thread, when I was there we had a couple of kids with serious behavioral issues. Iām not talking about passing notes, these were students who in the US would have been in special ed. classes. I remember teachers bringing up their behavior with management several times and getting blamed for it ā āThat wouldnāt happen if your lessons were more engaging.ā This encouraged teachers to keep it to themselves when their students acted out, which I think is very irresponsible and damaging, but understandable when oneās job (and ergo oneās ARC and residence in the country) is on the line.
Iām still in contact with many of my ex-coworkers, whoāve gone on to work at other schools where theyāre much happier. I still donāt know whether there are any perfect schools out there, but I do know there are better ones to work at than this.
Completely agree with this. Iāve worked in a number of places around the world and this was by far the most shocking. I can perhaps excuse the poor management or lack of communication, but the thing that really got me was how little they cared about the safety of the children.
The most shocking example was a 7 year old student (as of July 2019) was being beaten by her father on a repeated basis and the school was reluctant to do anything. From my recollection, the student came into school covered in bruises and was quite unresponsive and emotional. The local staff/teachers assistant essentially tried to downplay the severity of the situation and encourage the foreign teacher to āpay no attentionā to the issue. The idea being that the school would handle it. Their idea of handling it was to pull the student out of class and scream at them for being a disruption.
I believe the foreign teacher both brought the issue up with foreign and Taiwanese management (to which they did nothing) and eventually ended up contacting authorities. At this point the school was forced to react in the best interests of the child. As a result, I believe the father ended up moving out of the home but only because of the actions of the foreign staff.
I applaud the efforts of that staff member, but the whole experience really soured me towards the company. The fact that they would not only protect the father from the authorities but further āblame the victimā for their misbehaviour really showed me their true colours.
Please, reconsider this place if they offer you a job.
