International House Bogota
A Warning about Working There
Introduction
IH, International House, Bogota is a part of the IHLS, International House Language Schools, group of language schools. The majority of teachers who worked there really hated it and were treated with utter contempt by the school. In September 2009 a job advert for teachers at IH Bogota was posted on celtastars, an email group for CELTA graduates from IH Barcelona (also part of the IHLS group of language schools). I (James) replied to that post saying that I did not recommend teachers going to work for IH Bogota.
This web page covers this conversation thread.
The Posts
The thread starts off with myself (James) and another teacher (who decided not to work at IH Bogota) called Selina commenting on the behaviour of and working environment at IH Bogota and the way in which they conducted their business with their teachers. At the end of the thread Jonathan has had a reply posted on his behalf (by the group moderator Tom), he is the director of IHLS. His reply fails to answer a number of important points raised in the previous posts and attempts to discredit them using emotive language. He tries to suggest that we are just “scandal mongering” and that only a small minority of teachers felt like this and that the DOS was upset by the teacher’s attitudes rather than the poorly run school.
I have removed all email addresses and surnames from these posts to stop the threads being given as results by Google when someone is searching for one of these people by name or email address.
You can read the thread from the yahoo group here:
The Replies
After Jonathan’s post I forwarded the thread to several other teachers who had worked at IH Bogota with me. I asked them if they wanted to comment or reply to Jonathan. I also composed a reply of my own to Jonathan. An ex-teacher from IH Bogota, wrote back to me with a very good reply to Jonathan and asked me to send it to the group for other teachers to read.
I was then informed that our replies could not be posted to the group by Tom, the group moderator (the reason given was that people would complain if there were too many posts on the same subject). You can however read our replies here:
Tom sent out a message telling members of celtastars that the topic was now closed. The message can be read here:
Read More
There are various other threads on the Internet about IH Bogota. If you want to read more about International House Bogota I suggest that you start with these sites: