Back in January, a review was posted of Manhattan Kids Club in Shenzhen by gengrant, a forum member over at our partner site, Raoul's China Expat Saloon. For a few months, this review went relatively unnoticed here. A few weeks ago, however, a reply was posted anonymously, which questioned the integrity of gengrant's character and accused him of slandering the school. The accusations of slander aren't all that surprising, if you look through our reviews database you'll see that a few other reviews feature back and forth accusations of wrongdoing. What made this different was that, within a few days of the postings, I was contacted via email by someone claiming to be a teacher at MKC, who asked that I take down the review.

The points raised in this review and the ensuing debate basically boil down to issues of believability. Everyone wants to know who is telling the truth, and who is trying to sell it, but the fact of the matter is that with a site like this, that kind of knowledge is just something we don't have the level of oversight to determine. Therefore, we encourage our readers to take everything they see here with a healthy dose of skepticism. Nothing should be regarded as gospel, and teachers who take that into consideration when they read this site are much more likely to have an enjoyable teaching experience.

With that in mind, gengrant has been a significant contributor to the forums over at Raoul's for quite some time now, and I would say that this certainly gives him an edge in our eyes when it comes to credibility. When the responses to his review came in the form of anonymous character assassination and emails calling for the review to be pulled, all without anyone ever questioning the substance or truthfullness of what was stated in his review, that tips the scales further in his favor.

This episode has made us re-evaluate the way we do things here. We've modified the software we run the site on, so that anonymous comments on reviews will no longer be allowed. Furthermore, posts consisting largly of ad-hominem attacks add nothing to the site and we reserve the right to refuse or delete posts which fit that profile. Finally, making personal requests via email for us to delete a review because you don't like what it says is unlikely to persuade us to act in such a manner.

We hope you have all found this informative. If you have any questions, feel free to send us an email.

Posted By: tingbudong
Posted On: January 6th, 2006

Tingbudong gives us a fairly good rundown of what to expect when we teach at the school. This also happens to be our first review of a school in Nanjing, (at least since the Great Crash took down our site back sometime last summer). Some of the highlights of the review are listed below:

Expect to have approximately 400-500 grade 7 or 8 students staggered over 12 classes. I had three classes I enjoyed. For the remainder, it was almost as if I wasn't in the classroom. Listening and attention span is a problem.

The positives. There is nothing bad about the school, just the students have the potential to break you. The classrooms are a bit dirty and sometimes the AV equipment doesn't work. It can also get a bit chilly in the winter. But those are mostly trivial.

Click here to read the whole shebang.

It's been awhile since I posted a review on the front page, so I think it's about time it returned here. Here goes nothing:

Luliang Higher College, Shanxi Province
Submitted by Simon McNeill on Tuesday, November 1st, 2005
Luliang Higher College is a really good school.

My appartment is massive (I had a fifty-person halloween party here last night and they all fit in to three of my four rooms), the school basically leaves me alone to plan and organize my lessons as I see fit, they delivered everything they promised, the pay is always on time and the students are all friendly and mostly actually interested in learning English. The locals are friendly and don't try too hard to cheat me and the food here is some of the best on earth. What's the catch?

Click here to read the rest

Hello everyone,

So after a long hiatus, we finally got the site back up and running. And it's better than ever. There's a totally new look and feel to it, which should make searching for reviews/schools/etc much easier and more friendly.

In the interest of getting the most important aspect of the site, (the reviews), up and running as quickly as possible, there are still a few objects, most notably School Information Requests, the forums, and the Job Postings Sections, which are still hosted on the old message boards. This is on a strictly temporary basis, until something better can be found. Still, I wanted the option to be there.