Got an email back for a job interview accompanied by some links to supplemental videos we were encouraged to watch beforehand. I went in and just like everyone says- it was a group interview. The other interviewees and I made great conversation before the interviews got started, as SA essentially locked us all in a room together. First part of interview was super casual. Three very young professionals at SA go over SA and their mission, casually throwing out questions (that I didn’t feel graded on) such as “does anybody know which borough we’re not in?” Very easy if you watch the videos and scour the website before your interview The young professionals then led us all to another room where if I remember right, they swapped out the interviewers. Still fairly casual, and questions like “tell us about a time when you had to take the lead.” Very easy. Then things got weird. Up until this point, everything was very positive and upbeat (albeit a bit strange). Then they swapped the main interviewer for another woman. Essentially this new woman was the “bad cop,” and was there to crack down on us. This was the start of the “acting out” of scenario based interview, where the interviewers pretended to be children, and the interviewees pretended to be teachers at SA. It was uncomfortable at best, but made so much worse by the weird cult feeling that the main “bad cop” interviewer insisted upon. When it came time for me to act out my scenario, I was asked to quiet down a rambunctious group of students, and once completed, I said “thank you,” a seemingly normal gesture. The bad cop interviewer aggressively scorned me and told me they do not use manners in the classroom because children are undeserving of the time it takes to say please and thank you?? Ultimately that was the turning point. If you don’t have time to say please and thank you to 1st graders, you don’t have time to do a proper job. Things just got cultier and cultier and ultimately I decided that this company was too creepy for me. I have friends of friends who have worked for them and said the same thing- teachers are expected to treat their students like dogs and work 12 hours a day. Not for me.