The Learning Lab Reviews

- not gonna lie, whenever i see new teachers join, i wish i could tell them to run but i dont want to because i know they will be here to help me relief the load (very selfish i know) and i secretly wonder how long they're going to stay here until they realise it's quite toxic. i hear the sighs along the corridors, the deep breaths in the staff room, furious marking, the laments at 945pm that a teacher has to bring home her marking on her day off if not "where got time, cannot finish marking if i dont do it on my off days". one image struck me the most, the poor teacher who i saw just burying her head in her hands minutes after she ended class after being so animated and jumping around in her class with huge actions. 10 minutes later, her first student walks in, she organises her hair, and a bright smile appeared on her face with " HI XXX! how are you?" as if nothing happened. it pains me to see that behind that cheery teacher, is just one tired and overworked individual trying to earn a living. behind here, is also just a team who cannot do much for her. this scene really pained me because i could completely relate. - a few black sheeps that spoils the basket: not sure for other subjects and branches but it is always the same few teachers who are down, for whatever reason, legitimate or not. I have experienced covering for a teacher for 7 weeks in a row. in the novena branch, you know it in your heart that it is always the same few black sheeps. it is the same everywhere, that no one is happy to keep covering someone else's workload for the same compensation. some teachers are really out for real reasons but for some, dont know why company still keeping them? are there no penalities for these irresponsible employees? - workload: as you can tell from here, the workload is generally high and it’s gotten worse during the omicron wave + black sheeps. Many teachers are down yet the company doesn’t seem to have any viewable contingencies. Their solution: pile as much as they can on existing teachers who are healthy. (a few months back they had a genius solution of distributing korean masks to reduce the spread, AFTER the wave hit us). Some teachers are out for up to 3 weeks. In this omicron wave, it’s undesirable to be healthy. instead of being understanding, they adopt a plug gap approach. Result? An extremely overworked and tired teacher that cannot give their best in class. hiring more teachers to relief the existing load doesn’t seem to be a solution they consider, albeit for the short term or to at least tide through the omicron wave. korean mask is their solution! - middle management: as their name suggest; they are stuck in the middle. Nothing much they can do. They are at the mercy of the planning team too. - lack of transparency to parents: it’s not an unknown fact that LL’s materials are tough. yet they continue to sell the idea that it’s for everyone. NO. It is not. What happens on the ground is that the weaker students doubt their ability even more. They end up joining for a term or two then leave simply because it’s not working for them. - different teaching schemes = unable to retain new talent: more senior/experienced teachers are placed on a different teaching scheme. While this is understandable, the ones who suffer the most are the newer teachers, continuously. Some experienced teachers have greater “leverage” and get to reject classes. Although middle management “assures” that such things don’t happen, a simple chat with some of the teachers reveal otherwise. I once spoke to a senior teacher and teacher shared that she was asked to cover 2 classes but she managed to bring it down to 1, without much difficulty. Meanwhile, a newbie rejects a class, gets a good round of passive aggressive comments, "do it for the students" and planning team gets annoyed. Excuse me, planning team, you want to come and try teaching yourself and see what it's like on the ground? We know the planning team has it hard too, but if you guys are having it so hard, then one would at least expect them to empathise too. it's not the teacher's fault, not your fault that we are so understaffed so don't direct your annoyance at us. you think we want to reject if we can take it? maybe some teachers this is true but for most of us, we cannot. for many of us, we are borrowing tomorrow for today. It's stressful to plan operational needs but you cannot disregard that teachers, literally the people who are helping out, are humans too. Who has it tougher? What this suggests to new hires who plan to stay here long is that this company has no business continuity plans for beyond 5 years. A place that is unable to retain its new talent is not a place one should stay for long. That’s why for parents, it’s a hit or miss. A hit if you get a good teacher who isn’t too overworked by the company and he/she stays long enough to build enough experience to teach your kid, or you get a miss whereby the teacher is way too overwhelmed with other people’s work to sound excited or give her best as a replacement or regular teacher. - they don’t listen or explain. Many up and coming newer teachers have wither left or are in the midst of planning to leave. Leaving a few teachers to prop the whole name up.

The new CMO claims she was a media manager from Google previously. The truth is she was never a Google employee and she was a temp employee of a recruitment agency like Adecco and posted to service Google as a TVC (temp/vendor/contractor). Her role was temp as it was not important enough to be a perm role at Google so she had to leave at the end of 1-2 years like all TVCs. It was just a junior level role with no/minimal management responsiblity and mostly admin in nature. She is also a very toxic competitive person who is narcissistic and will backstab and frame you with her allies behind her acting as a "nice" person, so be careful of her. She is also an unintelligent incompetent person, which you can easily tell talking to her.