I'm an ESL teacher, I work full-time and I'm also desperately trying to earn money for an elective surgery that will significantly improve my quality of life so I do side-gigs as a freelancer and stuff. My current responsibilities are: plan my lessons, teach my lessons, mark kids' work, do tests, mark tests, write report cards. Easy stuff.
I've been working for my company for four years and I make about 65k in the local currency a month which is pretty much the high end of the scale unless you go to an elite, private school to work. I see an advert for becoming a Director of Studies/Line Manager which means becoming responsible for multiple schools (between 10 and 25 which on average 5 teachers per school), ensuring teacher training and development, developing course materials, mediating between teachers and administrators at their school and so on.
And well, I do have seven years of teaching experience and I felt like it would be worth a shot if nothing else. I get through to the interview and it's mostly a lot of 'what if?' scenarios to troubleshoot your way through to see if you have the ability to do DoS stuff. At this point I bring up the salary and mention that I would like 90-100k as a minimum, which I personally thought was quite a low figure given the increase in responsibilities. They said they understood my bare minimum and thought it fair.
I get through to second interview. More 'what if?' scenarios and again they seem pretty praiseworthy of my assesments and what I'd do.
THen comes the bomb. The job is 9-6 Mon to Fri plus occasional Saturdays in rotation being on-call for teacher who call out sick. If a teacher calls out sick any time during the week (Mon to Fri), even if you've already left work, it's your duty to go in and cover for the teacher. No transportation reimbursement. Only 500p/h for teaching.
Interviewer: “And you see, we like to think of ourselves not as an elite school, but more like a rustic, start-up company, so we don't pay our managers as much as you would get an an elite school. We pay our managers 60-70k.”
Me: [internally] I make that pay right now you dickwads. “Oh, I see. Thank you for your time.”
This company has scores of schools, if not a hundred across the entire country, plus multiple branches in six or seven other countries. They make as a bare minimum a hundred million US a year and that is vastly understating their income for certain. And they pay their managers the same as their regular teachers despite the vastly increased amounts of responsibility and duties.
Because “*they're a rustic, start-up company*”, which makes it perfectly fair.
Screw you guys. I'm going to continue being a lazy teacher putting in the exact amount of effort needed at my experience level to create engaging, fun classes which, for me, is next to none because I know what I'm doing.