The Learning Tree - Ko Samui Branch (KSTVS aka The Koh Samui Tutor and Vocational School )

KSTVS / Five Star Language Samui is a farce and a racket steeped in the corrupt swamp in which it wallows on Koh Samui. I am not alone in this estimation, as anyone can see by perusing online reviews of KSTVS / Five Star Language Samui.

Anyone considering working for KSTVS / Five Star Language should heed what is delineated in what follows. Consider these facts:

• You will be provided with no assistance in obtaining a visa that will permit you to work in Thailand legally until you have already been working illegally for months, and you will be asked to work illegally for KSTVS / Five Star Language Samui continuously to save that company the expense of producing the documents necessary for you to be able to work legally.

• You will not be provided with the material KSTVS requires you to use until hours before your first class; in my case, this happened the night before I was scheduled to teach my first class the following morning, and the material consisted of a kind of makeshift amalgamation of poorly Xeroxed copies haphazardly stapled together.

• You will be required to suffer verbal harassment and abuse from Mike, the Iranian lackey of the school’s owner. The owner of KSTVS is an elderly British ganja enthusiast named Dave. Furthermore, you will be baselessly accused of things that you have never done by Mike. I am in possession of messages detailing such verbal harassment, abuse, and outrageous accusations, and these are accusations for which not a shred of evidence exists.

• In violation of all professional standards regarding protocol and etiquette and unlike any supervisor most of us have ever had in our lives, if Mike decides he does not like you for whatever reason, you will not be given a day’s notice let alone two weeks before you wake up one morning to receive a cowardly email informing you that you have been terminated on baseless grounds. In my case, this occurred the day after Mike had told me how happy the hotel staff I was teaching were with my performance and while I was en route to obtain the visa that KSTVS / Five Star Language Samui had sent me to obtain, which made their conduct all the more inexplicable and egregious. The fact that Mike and Dave have yet to pay me the nearly 550 USD that they owe me for the work I did in August 2019 is a further testament to their corruption and criminality.

What makes Mike a despicable person is the fact that when he is confronted with his negligence and unprofessionalism, it is of course not his problem but rather that of the employee in my case or that of the customer in his or her case, as can be seen in the reviews below. This makes perfect tense owing to Mike’s narcissistic wound and the enormous amount of effort that has been required on his part to try to heal his ego; as someone who can barely speak English yet pretends to be an English teacher, one can only imagine the amount of cognitive dissonance this pitiable man must have undergone throughout his adult life.

For the reasons given above, it is advised that anyone interested in working for KSTVS / Five Star Language Samui should look elsewhere: If for no other reason, it should be borne in mind that any company in Thailand that encourages or pressures its employees to work illegally with utter disregard for how working illegally might affect the employee, e.g. by the employee’s being deported, detained, or imprisoned, should be considered suspect if not simply criminal.

KSTVS / Five Star Language Samui might attempt to refute what is written here, but they would be unable to do so, for everything presented here it true, and it would not be difficult to disclose evidence of its truth. I am grateful that I have for the past six months been working for a legitimate company and receiving remuneration – and more importantly, professional conduct – far beyond what I would ever have received from KSTVS / Five Star Language Samui.