English teachers in Poland - why are they so unhappy?

Unless, of course, they're smart enough to focus on business courses that run year round.

The thing that made me real angry about teaching in Poland was the fact that when you compare it with TEFL teaching in China, Korea Saudi Arabia etc its a joke here. I have a friend who was a Director of Studies at Bell here in Gdansk, he moved to China because they offered him a flat for free, they pay for 2 flights a year, a good monthly salary (paid 12 months a year) and given time off to travel the country if required.

They would never take on anyone unqualified in Asia, a CELTA being the minimum, DELTA being the most desirable. They would never take some Brit who just got off a plane and cant string a sentence together as they seem to do here. The amount of Brits and Americans I've seen teaching here who don't know the difference between there, their and they're is shocking.

I left teaching because I made so much effort and all I could see around me were lazy Brits who didn't give a damn

Moved from


The real ones are I agree.Ask the English teachers here,lol one time mentioning ENGLISH TEACHERS would get you permanently banned from the forum here.

Yes, they were golden times for English teachers. Other members had to take their hats off and bow low before them. Pity it is no more.

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I remember that very well Cargo.
And since all the ex-pats posting here were English teachers they use to have all the power here.
But then we got new Mods and all of that changed. :-)

There is no "power" here.... turn your attentions to something useful instead of playing narcissist mind games with yourself. No one is impressed with you or recognizes any "power" that any posters here have.

You obviously missed some crucial stage of mental development. I suggest you find a therapist who can help pin down when things went wrong for you....

No need when I have your meaningless daily suggestions/opinions.


Not as much as they use to have.
The English teachers (ex-pats) that use to lord over people here who had English as their second language that got mocked and belittled by these sad old drunken unhappy ex-pat school teachers from Britain.

And even today they seem so depressed with no excitement in their lives.
They have no hobbies, they don't participate in sports, they get zero exercise, they make crappy wages, they live in gloomy flats, and their highlight of the week is going out to drink alcohol.

No wonder they are so unhappy.

_they_ seem ??????

the rest looks like an embedded confession....

did I stutter witless ?

Imagine trying to support a family with a teachers salary and showing on a forum that they are living a high life,even in Poland they save on every grolsch they can.Just calculate how they must live in Poland coming from UK.NO wonder they die so soon,being obese and living with a disease with no cure.

The only happiness they get is posting on a forum and dreaming the life style they could live.lol they even are not good in business the reason they tend to work as teachers and moonlight washing cars and shinning shoes.

They are unhappy because Poles arent nsive anymore.

I mean, I wanted to say `naive` not `nsive`. See, this happens when you inject post in hurry by the phone.

After this description of English teachers (meant as native ones), you should also say a word or two about teachers of English (meant as non-native).

That might be equally funny. :):)

I have noticed this also.
Why are they so bitter and depressed ?


I have noticed that too while posting over the years here.
In fact every single teacher teaching in Poland that I have met here on the P.F. have been or are suffering from alcoholism.
This includes both ex-pats and native Polish teachers.
And since alcohol is a depressant it might quite well explain why these teachers are so unhappy and like to argue just to argue.

They are depressed because I told them that the teachers in District 211 in Palatine make $130,000 a year.

The average Teacher salary in Poland is zł35,292 per year.
Entry level Teacher positions start at zł31,200 per year.
Experienced senior Teacher positions can get up to zł43,200 per year.

grabjobs.co/poland/salary-guide/teacher

I dont know how anyone could live off that salary and imagine if you have children. yikes!

In the UK

The teacher pay scales for leading practitioners are:

AreaMinimumMaximum
England (excluding London)£44,523£67,685
London fringe£45,749£68,913
Outer London£48,055£71,220
Inner London£52,936£76,104

A headmaster ( lol) can earn even more.

getintoteaching.education.gov.uk/salaries-and-benefits

I cant imagine why Delpf would leave the UK for that! Hahahahaha

State school Teachers, and (as is common in Poland) many people have additional income and low housing costs.


He doesn't work in a state school.

Looking at the OP, he's actually talking about EFL Teachers in Warsaw.

There are still plenty, however the market in Poland has changed, and particularly out in the provinces there are people who really don't know how to teach but are just there because their partner is Polish. These are easy meat for the 'method' schools because they rarely speak good Polish and want to work.

I've even seen people online saying they want to do 'conversation lessons' and assuming that just means talking with someone without knowing how to put together a scheme of work (or knowing what to put in it) or understanding the concept of triggers or scaffolding.

Easy prey for unscrupulous private language school owners (the type that employ a 'metodolog') and of course that forces down the fees for professionals. many have gone elsewhere unless they're trapped in PL or have very little to offer professionally and/or are reduced to online work. The best of the people I worked with 20 something years ago in Warsaw now do oil/gas training rotations in very hot places for 50% of their time and come back to PL for every other month.

And how did you manage to establish it??? :):):) Did you install secret cameras in their houses and recorded compromising materials on them??? :):):)


Before or after tax???? :):):)


Me, neither. :):)


Excellent. Good pay for risking your life each working day........ :):):) Besides, they need to earn a lot to be able to pay property tax and tuition fees for their kids` good private education.... ):):)

One reason people come to teach in Poland is the relatively comfortable standard of living, the ease of travelling home and of course the fact that Poland is within easy reach of many other European countries.

And of course there are a possibly surprising number of people who work in training and education elsewhere who live in Poland and travel elsewhere for work

I've been recruiting recently for people to work 6 weeks at a time in Africa with 4 weeks off between rotations there. Several of the people who were/are interested are based in Poland but don't work there.

...as opposed to faraway Germany?

Who mentioned Germany? Plenty of people live there too.

A pointless comment (and threads can survive well without your insane input) since we aren't talking about Germany however if you know any special reason to work teaching English in Germany rather than Poland, free l feel free to share your extensive experience teaching Germans and about the training and educational landscape there

Since you don't have any, all I'll say is thre points. Firstly, the market in cities is saturated there, secondly, there's good money teaching technical English however there is limited demand. Thirdly, many Teachers refuse to teach Germans. You would know why if you'd had them in a class.

I did to a pointless comment...


...and relocating from point zero of Europe to its Eastern edges is a move up. Sure...You should have checked the restroom situation first.

A Brit moving to Poland makes as much sense as ... Actually, it doesn't make any sense unless the teacher himself barely speaks such bad English that the Poles wouldn't notice or care.

Now that Poland has 4 million new residents - with another 4 million on the way - the opportunities to teach English are endless. This way, Poland can send them on to the UK.

They can't, unless they satisfy requirements and in any case, the jobs market in Poland is healthy at the moment. The current right wing government promises to deuce migration. They will however probably want to learn English if they plan to get a good job in Poland.


You don't think much of Poland, do you.

Or perhaps you just can't help making pointlessly negative comments. You should learn to button your lip.

a pig ignorant statement.... fewer refugees in Poland now than in April-May last year.... stop listening to proven liars like RT and tune in to the real world....

English teachers have been complaining about lousy pay throughout Europe for decades, but the problem remains; if the government wants qualified instructors, they'll have to be willing to dig deep and hire NATIVE SPEAKERS!!

Poland, the former Soviet Union, along with many other European countries have been plagued by state-sponsored, non-native English speaking hacks who merely studied briefly in the UK, for longer than most of their students/pupils would care to remember. I know of so many students of mine who'd bellyache to me about how awful their grade school English instructors and how boring their English classes were. Frequently, they'd come to me in order to literally "undo" the poor foundation they were forced to endure.

Pity that only at the university level are native Yanks, Brits or Canadians prerequisite for teaching English language as well as literature courses. The answer though is all too obvious, namely, that the government would have to pay them at least a living wage, if not higher in order to keep them for more than a semester or two.

However the irony is, that of course it's not at the highest levels that native English speakers are required, but instead at the beginning of one's instruction so that the correct pronunciation and usage are cemented by listening to native-born, educated Anglophones.

By college age, it's often too late!

To a point. As I'm sure you know, a beginner, especially a child, can learn from a non-native teacher who has ingrained errors without necessarily acquiring those same errors. Chomsky and Krashen have been arguing about this one for years.

It's often around B1 and B2 where it matters.


The private language school market has degraded badly. Too much competition, too many people doing it without knowing how to teach. As I mentioned earlier, there are some good ones, however the best now work where the hot weather, oil and money or the warm weather, valpolicella and fashion are.

Online stuff is still routinely poor, youtube videos riddles with errors, irrelevance and no real pedagogical/anthrogogical base.

In state schools, it's simply not feasible to routinely get native speaker Teachers for reasons of both cost and sheer availability.

Nobody knows exactly. But we are helping them all and that`s what counts.


Not Polish but Polish teacher`s DNA. That is a huge difference. Ha! Never forget about it. :):):)

Are you sure that local teachers are sure they won`t die or get wounded in another American school massacre which will make headlines like the previous ones??

Of course you can`t be sure of it and neither can they. Ha! People in Santa Fe hadn`t expected a school massacre would take place in their area. But it did.

That is why I said - your teachers risk their lives every working day when they come to work. And you know I am right.

So, let them have their earnings of 120.000 $. :):) I am not envious. :):):):)

PS. BTW. Do schools in Palatine have metal detectors at every entrance??????? Or not yet????

@jon,
Not to flog the proverbial dead horse now, but Pinkert maintains even more adamantly than either Chomsky or Kashen that speakers of different languages are "circuited" differently (Pinkert's words, not mine) from one another, thereby respond inherently to varying language stimuli. Sausseur insisted that any child could learn another language provided they had non-stop aural exposure to that language from earliest childhood on, often never needing a textbook in order to "learn" to speak that language! Reading and writing, naturally, are a separate matter entirely:-)

I prefer Sausseur to Pinkert however we're talking seriously differing languages here (far greater than the difference between English and Polish) and of course there's no sound neurological basis for Pinkert's ideas. The only time it's been tested produced much the same EEG results as when speakers of standard English (saying "I like swimming") and speakers of American English (saying "I like to swim") were tested.

Teaching in Poland, you do need to be aware of the differences in linguistic evolution and of course the sociolinguistic differences however quite frankly most who teach in Poland have no clue about either.