Something online about ECC

ECC is the Eikawa (English Language School) I work for in Japan. They're a really big chain of schools, especially here in the Kansai region.

However, before I moved to Japan I did a lot of extensive research online to find out the juice about the prospective companies I could work for. I found an online debate regarding NOVA and plenty of info on AEON and GEOS, but nothing at all about ECC. I took the general silence as a good thing, apparently no one had anything to complain about and they DO offer 7 weeks holiday a year and only 29.5 hours a week.

Well anyway, from what I can tell as far as the big 4 go, ECC is really the best company. But it's going down hill. This year they handed out random pay increases, which ranged from nothing to basically nothing, but there were so many good teachers completely overlooked and plenty of average and very new teachers who were rewarded for doing very little. It was offensive, in fact it seems that all the good teachers I have spoken to received less than the teachers I know who drink beer before their shifts and are screwing the students.

On top of that, they failed to meet teacher's requests regarding the classes they want to teach and have forced every teacher to take kids classes on board, even those with medical reasons against teaching kids who will push and pull and punch and turn the classroom into a sumo playground.

Don't get me wrong, I love teaching kids so I requested heaps of classes, so how did they reward me? By squeezing every last drop of blood out of my body and taking away my preparation time before my first class, so they could squish in more classes and really work me right down to the last nanosecond of my schedule. I complained. I told them it was going to adversely affect my willingness to take on the responsibility of a high number of kids classes next year, so I think that made them take note since I'm of a very rare breed of teachers, they said they'd change it next year, well next year will be too late because I'm not staying that long.

I've been here a year and a half, and I just can't keep up the energy it takes to teach 15 different classes filled with insane kids high on sugar and suffering undiagnosed ADD.

So there you go, anyone searching for something about ECC online, I hope this helps. Maybe I'm the first to have a rant, but I seriously suspect I won't be the last.