Job Discussion Forums

[pinkflyd7]

If anyone is trying to decide on whether to work for Kojen or Hess, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Kojen is the better school to work for. I worked for Hess for 2 1/2 years (and you can read my experience there by going here:)

http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=41822

I've been working for Kojen for less than a year, and while Hess and Kojen are similar in a lot of ways, the differences are what puts Kojen ahead by a mile. Here are just a few differences:

1. Once you get to level 6 (about the equivalent of N6 at Hess), you no longer have a Chinese teacher working with you. The class is yours, to teach as you see fit. You have a lesson plan, but it's more of a "guide" rather than an actual lesson plan. You are free to add or remove whatever you want to the lesson to improve the class.

2. If you do work with a Chinese teacher, you are not required to spend extra time grading homework, quizzes, and tests. This was a major pain at Hess. If you had a class of 20 or more, it would take an enormous amount of time to grade homework and tests.

3. Your starting salary is higher. Hess starts at 560 NT an hour, possibly the lowest of any school in Taiwan (at least that I know of). Also, you get paid every two weeks at Kojen compared to montly at Hess.

4. Kojen is not obsessed with playing games. Here, another problem with Hess. Hess wants its teachers to basically be babysitters, and actual teaching is secondary. At Kojen, you will actually feel more like a real teacher.

5. You don't have to pass students that are failing. One of the biggest things that made me lose respect for Hess was when I had to pass a failing student just because his parents wouldn't pay for the next session if the kid failed. I mentioned this to my boss at Kojen during my initial interview, and he was shocked.

6. More variety of classes. At Kojen, they have almost an equal number of adult classes as they do kids classes. If you prefer one over the other, it is very easy for them to accomodate you.

Some people might think I'm a Kojen plant. I'm not. I've just had the opportunity to work at both places and I wanted to pass my knowledge along to anyone who is considering working for either school. I hope this info helps.

[BigWally]

good informative, and helpful post....one kudos point for you!

[Ferfichkin]

Hey Pink,

I've worked for both companies too, although only adults with Kojen, and you make some good points. I definately agree with you about the salary, and especially about passing failing students, that drove me crazy too. I'm curious about about two things though. I'm wordering who grades the homework? The CT's? Or is it graded in class? Also, I'm wondering about the game thing. How do you keep younger students interested in class without games? I guess you must play some games, just less, right? How does that work? Is it boring at all? What keeps the classes fun at Kojen?

You definately make some good points, and I'm just curious about those two things.

fich

[pinkflyd7]

The CT's grade all the tests and homework, usually while you are teaching your class. While I can understand the importance of having a CT in the classroom, at Hess it just became more of a hindrance. I worked with several CT's at Hess that didn't seem to have any respect for foreign teachers, and would often try to correct them in class, or question their teaching methods in front of the students. Personally, unless you're a beginner with absolutely no experience teaching kids, I don't think a CT in the classroom is even necessary.

To answer your other question: Yes, you can and should play games in the little kids classes. It's the best way to keep their attention going for the whole class. But my problem with Hess was that they wanted me to turn every single part of the lesson plan into a game. If you are familiar with Hess lesson plans, it's divided into numerous parts. You have: phonics, vocabulary, reading, sentence patterns, dialogue, and then some activity from their student book. My supervisor wanted me to turn every part into a game. So now we're talking 5 or 6 games per class. This is not only ridiculous, it's impractical. There is no way you can cover the entire lesson plan, and still have time for 5 or 6 games, especially if you have a large class and you want every student to participate in your game. So at Kojen I normally play 2 or 3 games with my little kid classes, and I try to spread them out so it's not just one game after another. I think having a balance between teaching and games is the best way to teach a class.

[Ferfichkin]

Hmmmm? It seems to me like the CT's kinda get the shaft a little bit at Kojen in term of homework. If they're grading all the homework from both your classes and their own classes, wow, that's a lot of homework. It's seems like your gain is kinda their loss in that respect. I know you were initially talking about the benefits of Kojen over Hess, but in this case, I guess this would really be more of a benefit for NST's and actually a bit of a drawback for prospective CT's. Hmmmm? I'm not really sure who goes on these forums, but maybe some Chinese teachers do too, who knows?

I think in terms of the games, maybe you just had a different experience than me. No one ever told me how many games to play. They told us at the trainings that VARG had to be a part of our classroom, but they mentioned that with higher level classes it should be reduced considerably. I played a lot of games with 'Tree House', and 'K', and low level 'N', and it wasn't a problem at all, there was a ton of time. It's not hard to play 4 or 5 games in low level Hess classes, there's enough time, at least I thought there was. But what about high level 'N'? Was your branch director getting you to play 4 and 5 games in N11 and N12? I would totally agree with you there, that's impossible, there's no time. Same with N13-N16, there's no time for a lot of games in those levels, and most of the games in those levels are written into the 'ME' books. Hmmmmm? Again, I don't know, but in this case I think that we just had a different experience at Hess.

fich

[pinkflyd7]

I was advised to play games with my classes up until N12. After that, the games were part of the lesson plan in the "ME" books. The head NST at the time talked to me after one of my reviews. He told me that I should try to turn everything into a game. The phonics, the reading, the patterns, etc. When I asked him what kind of game I should play during the individual reading, he said have the students race to see who could finish their sentence first. This was the height of stupidity in my opinion. This is not the way people read, and it makes correcting pronunciation almost impossible.

[blateson]

listen you've done a great job on making your reports about your experiences, I wish I had the time and patience to write it up but all I can say is I had a terrible experience with HESS, worse than yours even. but it's good to see someone writing about it. but in summary, the fact is that when working at hess you always have someone telling you what to do, not only is it disrespectful but it makes ESL too rigid, which it isn't supposed to be. the story goes deep maybe i'll report it sometime. good job on your posts.

[pinkflyd7]

I think you should write your story. A lot of people would love to read it (including me). I think it's worth the time to write if it can help other people in making their decisions on where they should work.

[Ferfichkin]

Hmmmm? Again, I don't know, I just disagree with you on this point and had a bit of a different experience than you at Hess. No one told me I HAD to play games for each section of my lesson, although, I usually did. In a typical N1-N8 lesson for example I would usually play 4 or 5 games; 1 for individual reading, 1 for the reading questions, 1 for phonics, 1 for patterns, and, especially with really low level N, another game with the extra time I had at the end of class. Again, I didn't play them because I had to, although I did have to play games of course, I played them because it motivated the kids and made the lessons more fun (both for them and me).

As far as the individual reading thing goes, I think letting the kids read 100 miles an hour, making 10 mistakes per sentence is a choice made by the teacher. At the beginning my kids tried to do that, it's natural I guess, they want to win, but as the teacher you need to stop them from doing it. What I did was to divide the class into two teams; I would take one team and the CT would take the other. I played lots of little silly games for individual reading; sometimes I would just do the basic, each student reads a sentence or paragraph or page until the pages are done, and then the winning team gets points, or I would do other silly little variations. Sometimes I would give each student a number and then give 1 member of each team a die, that student would roll the die and whatever number it landed on that student would read and so on until the pages were finished. Sometimes I would use cards instead of dice, sometimes I would put all their names into a bag and have 1 student on each team draw the next reader, sometimes I would get them to stand up for every verb, or noun or whatever, there's a million silly games you can play for individual reading. And the kids love it, they love the competition, and, in my opinion, that's what often motivates them and keeps them interested and participating happily, rather than through a feeling of 'outside pressure'.

My main point however goes back to what you said about games and error correction. Like I said, I would take one half of the class and the CT would take the other, and we would follow the readers throughout the game. What I did, and what I talked to the CT about doing as well, is to not accept that 100 miles an hour, mispronouncing every word thing the kids try to do. If they were reading too fast I would stop them, if they were skipping words I would stop them, if they were mispronouncing words I would stop them, ect... It took at little while, but after a few weeks the kids got the idea that myself and the CT stopping them every 5 seconds was not the best way to win the game. They started to slow down and read more normally, and once they got used to it and understood that the other team had to read normally too, it was fine. Kids are cool that way; they get used to things and can adjust easily to structure.

Again, I don't know, but I think we just had very different kinds of managers, and that's what's given us such different opinions about Hess.

fich

[davidla]

[Darotker]

I'd fully agree with the main poster in what he said about HESS.
I don't have experience with Kojen though, so I can't make that comparison.

HESS isn't a horrible Company to work for. That said, why would anyone want to come abroad to work at a Company which is below average?
There are so many better opportunities out there. To me, part of coming abroad is having an individual, different experience. Hess is the Wal Mart of Taiwan buxibans. It's large, impersonal and very bureaucratic.
I didn't have a horrible experience with HESS and they were fair to me.

Here are a few pros and cons for HESS:

Pros:

1) As much structure as a person could possibly want in lesson planning, arrival, etc.

2) A very organized curriculum

Cons:

1) It's literally the Wal Mart of Taiwan buxibans. The students at Hess get a formula curriculum taught at theme everday. There is very little room for creative thought on the part of the teacher or students.

2) A lot of the foreign management have been at Hess for too long. The Head Office people and a lot of the managers are out of touch. They are nice people, but they have so many teachers to worry about that you are really just a number to them. I'm sure they do the best they can, but at the end of the day, they have to worry about hundreds of teachers and don't have time for individual attention.

3) Among the worst scheduling of any schools I've heard of. You work split shifts, which means you could work from 9 to 12 and then from 5pm-9pm. Most teachers also work Saturdays.

4) Seclusion from locals. Out of all my friends at Hess, very few people really interacted with local Chinese at all. We all just hung out together in our little foreign world. That's fine and there are some benefits of being surrounded by Westerners. However, Hess has so many FTs that it does make it harder to surround yourself with Chinese people. It's just inevitable. A lot of my friends who worked at smaller schools (of which there are many options) had many more Chinese friends than me. Certainly, this is my fault also... just pointing it out....

I'm back in Canada now and I had a great time in Taiwan. I just think it would have been better had I not been at HESS.

Overall, I say the best analogy for HESS is that it's the "Wal Mart" of Taiwan buxibans. It's such a huge corporation and it comes with all the pros and cons corporations have.

I guess my point is this: Why move halfway across the world to work at Wal Mart, when there are other options?

Some of the above may be biased, but can any Hess employee really disagree with it? pretty fair, methinks...

Just my take, Yo!

[pinkflyd7]

[Darotker]

[davidla]

You have to teach the things Hess want you to teach, but you don't have to teach them in the way they say you do.
The Teacher's Guide is a guide not a Bible!
At least, that was my experience.
David

[kaox0018]

Hello, i'm coming on july 5th and already sent in my resume packet to kojen via email.

any idea on how long it should take them to get back to me and if I should try to be aggressive and contact them when i get here?

any tips would be nice.