Interview at a Callan School

I saw the best of both worlds in Gliwice. As many as 4 teachers were more or less fully bilingual. The lead singer of Papilla was a teacher there. Marcin Pasek, check out his group. They have played on national tv and did well. The Walkiewicz brothers were schooled in Poland but hail from America with a Thai mother, nice huh? What a world we live in. Gosia wasn't quite as good but her Polish is right up there with the best non-native speakers of it.

The thing is, they didn't score that well as some groups liked the fact that they were bilingual but others were clearly jealous and marked them down. I wouldn't describe any of them as natural born teachers but they were more than good enough for Callan.

Well, we have plenty of dummies where I work. Teaching will always be a popularity contest with most students - it seems most of them come to these schools in the evening hoping to go back to their schooldays. Perhaps they were the quiet ones at school but now they pay money, they want to chat, play with their phones and flirt with the teacher. The schools often encourage this by trying to be as much like a state school as possible too.

Jeez. Last year I had the misfortune to be in a room next to a Polish teacher who I kid you not just chatted in Polish with the students for 90 mins. Now and again you'd hear a snatch of English but it would be on a tape recording and it would be followed by a lame attempt to repeat it and a load of laughter. Sadly he is one of the most popular teachers in the school. No wonder so many teachers turn to alchoholism.

Yeah, I knew a teacher like that. She gabbled away in Polish and was eventually caught out. What's the sense in paying for English if you are not gonna use it in the classroom? It's just a selfish thing to do.

I often wonder but most students seem to think that by sitting and doing exercises , chatting in Polish with their friends and passing an exam at the end of the term they will master the lanaguage. They are genuinely surprised when they can't introduce themselves after 5 years of lessons.

And these are the people writing feedback about you...

Exactly, I have a student here who doesn't even know that tak is yes. She is easily intermediate and she says jest instead of yes. Holy smoke!! Passing the exam with their friends too.

I don't give a hang about feedback. I judge my own life and how I'm doing and I'm more than aware of my current failings. I don't need some other git to get involved.

Ah yes I had a student today trying to tell me that two words had the same meaning when in fact they do not. She was insistent that she was correct. She is paying me cash so if she wants to be right so bad than so be it. She is still wrong though.

Which 2 words were they, do you remember?

I am a native speaker. In fact I am the only teacher from England out of 15. 1 other is American and another is South African, but other than that its all Poles. Everyone there gets paid 25zl per hour. I rung some other Callan schools to try find out what they pay but they didn't tell me.

The owner and headmaster at the school are both really cool and give a good amount of hours to me, but I guess in the end money is far more important to him than anything else and that is why he only pays teachers 25zl brutto/net.

Please remind me, it's 25PLN per 40 or 50 mins?

its 25zl per 50 mins.

Teachers at Speed in Gliwice get 28PLN per 40 mins. 25zł is an insult.

Do they get ZUS as part of that too? 25zl seems even worse considering there is no health insurance as part of the deal.

No, ZUS is not part of the Callan package. At other schools it is. I pay my own and it's around 330PLN per month for the first 2 years.

So most Callan schools pay their teachers cash in hand then? How do they get away with that, is it easy for schools here to do illegal things?

sorry it is lost from my memory now...

It's very easy for schools to do illegal things. Yeah, I was paid cash in hand even though I had a bank account set up. It was all a fraud!

As far as I know, the most common way to do business is to make the teacher responsible for their own tax affairs. It does depend on the school - my one gives people the choice of paying their own tax or getting the school to do it for them.

But non-Polish teachers seem to often be offered the 'brown envelope, no questions asked or answered' approach, especially if they're working without a contract or any real proof of them working there. It's this approach that often leads to them being ****** over with payment, although Polish teachers can be ripped off just as well.

Given that many language schools operate in cash anyway, it's easy enough to 'lose' a couple of thousand zloty to pay someone in cash.

But - one thing I'd argue is that even 25PLN an hour isn't bad (although you can make much more!) when you consider the amount of effort required - if you just have to turn up, take a book and "teach", it's a doddle. I've heard of schools demanding full lesson plans to a certain format for every single class - with the consequence that you could easily end up spending over an hour preparing a two hour class. 100zl for two hours isn't that much when you add in an extra hour for preparing - and any non-'method' class is always going to be more demanding on the brain.

Still, you get what you pay for. A Polish teacher might be happy to accept 25PLN/50 minutes because it's still more than they'd get in a state school. But a native can always get more, simply because there are options and demand.

Even the schools that do the accounting for you botch it up. I had to get my financial guy to take over and rebalance the books. Even he made a pig's ear of the PIT. I had a little trouble at the tax office again and I told them that I wasn't in the mood for playing games. They thrive on petty squabbles here.

The lack of a tax code system here is what surprises me, the whole fact that they could be deducting tax from you all year, only for the tax office to throw a big bill in your face is absolutely incredible.

That's why it's better to get an accountant and stay safe.

Yep - though it's (yet another) a grey legal area. The tax office apparently frowns on the practice of requiring an employee to set up their own business and then work solely for the school. If you're going to do this (register as self employed), you need to be a genuine business with a number of your own customers or it's just another tax dodge for the school.


Schools love doing this, don't they? Think about it - you start the year with a few hundred students paying up front (often in cash) for a year's tuition at maybe 2000 zloty each. That's a few hundred thousand zloty of untraceable money straight into the pocket at once, earning interest for the year if you decide to invest it. If not, pay the teachers cash in hand and don't declare it. What an earner eh? In fact I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of language schools are fronts for money laundering rings.

Not too wide of the mark with that last comment, MrBubbles. I know some activities that have occured that would support that but I'm not at liberty to discuss them. Yes, an inextricable connection to Callan ;)

Any idea what percentage of private english language schools in Poland (especially large cities) are owned by Poles? By Brits? By Americans?

I think the majority are owned by Poles. I don't have any stats to back that up, just a hunch. The majority here are owned by Poles, they know the bureaucratic loopholes better ;)