Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Gladiator]

I'm leaving the crazy old peninsula after almost ten years of residency in March and find myself pining oddly with nostalgia for the wild west hagwon days of the mid to late 90s when professionalism and peace of mind in hagwon jobs was akin to law in Iraq now. It really was a palace of madness. Anybody could get a teaching job at a university, the immigration department did routine raids at Jimmy Kim backstreet hagwons, sometimes deporting as many as twenty backpacking, tourist visa holding offenders in one swoop. I met a young American man fleeing a frightening family in Taegu holding him hostage to teach its kids English, I met another woman hired by some unscrupulous wonjang under false pretences living in similar circumstances in an attic somewhere in the Kimpo area. Every third foreigner you met on the street in Seoul seemed to be on the run from deranged, psychopathic hagwon owners who'd cheated on wages (those were the fortunate ones who hadn't had their passports swiped!). Nobody knew where the Ministry of Labour was located and 'labour laws' were abstract things completely. Chongro 3 ga and Kangnam were jam packed with institutes. Koreans chased you down the street to practice English. It was a wild, delirious insanity to be caught up in no question.

I'm trying to recall the things that went wrong at the anarchic hagwon where I worked in pre IMF '97. I recall arriving a day before business opened and there being no books or syllabus in place. I recall being housed temporarily in a knocking shop hagwon, then being placed into a single room Office Tel miles away from work which I had to SHARE with another male teacher and which was furnished with a brand new washing machine that was unusable because there was no outflow pipe! I recall countless guff ups with the timetable that the hopeless Hakangnim refused to take responsibility for. I remember (illegal)off site classes where I was sent to an empty building. I remember the school hiring some of the strangest people I have ever seen as part timers.

I stop there because hopefully this is where you folks will take up the story. What's the most bizarre thing that's ever happened at your hagwon? What moments have arisen in your Korean EFL career when you have thought: "I simply cannot be living on planet Earth?" Stories of madness from the late '90s would be particularly interesting.

[jdog2050]

[Unposter]

So many I can't seem to remember them all. It was so long ago...

My wongjangnim hired this gyopo to teach at our hakwon. He was going to pay him on commission for all the students he taught. But the guy didn't have any money so our kind wongjangnim got him a bed at a homeless shelter for 3-D workers.

Everyday he would drop by our dump villa apartment and marvel that we had four walls and food in our refridgerater. It really sucked to be him.

One day he just disapeared. I never saw him again.

Supposedly one of the teachers who worked there before me was forced to live in the hakwon. They turned one of the classrooms into an apartment. The only problem was he would be locked in the hakwon at night when the hakwon closed. If there were a fire... Anyway about the time of the crash of 97 he did a midnight run. Imagine that.

At that time, I was fortunate enough to be given one of those little shacks ontop of someone else's villa. When I arrived it was still littered with the stuff of a previous teacher. So, of course, I start looking through it all. Amongst the stuff was a half-written letter about how the person was being stalked by the wonjangnim and how she just wanted out.

I didn't have any of these problems. Though my wongjanim was as weird as they get. He use to play balloon-volleyball with himself but he would pretend there were imaginary players in the lobby of the hakwon when we were not too busy. I kid you not! Once I even played with him. What the he!!.

I could go on and on. Korea has really changed a lot . (I've been here since '97) And, this industry has become a lot more professional. Me too. But, at one time, this place was wild and out there and quite amusing for someone with the right personality.

It seemed like we just rolled with the punches and did what he had to do to survive back in '97. The money was shyte; most Koreans were worried about loosing their job or had already lost it. Hakwons were going under right and left. I remember cheering when the Korean won hit 1600 won to the U.S. dollar (in 1998).

Who knew there was a labor board?

I left that hakwon to work at a university and I have never looked back since. But before it all worked out there were some fireworks. The university I wanted to work for wanted a letter of release from my hakwon. I have no idea why since my visa was to expire but they wanted one anyway. My wongjangnim refused. He wanted the university to pay him for letting me off his hands. I just told him right then and there I wasn't going to teach anymore and I just sat down where I was. He got all angry and told me ok I'll give you your release letter so I went back into class. After class, he said if I ever do that again he would call the police. I just walked away.

He never paid me my severance. He said because of the economic crisis he just didn't have any money. I just wrote it off like everything else in '98; the exchange rate was so bad it didn't matter. I was going to teach at a university at a substantial raise and I just didn't care. It was all part of the adventure.

Oh heck. When I first arrived in Korea, I worked in a village in Gyeonggi-do. There wasn't even a lotteria. The only place to get pizza was at the New York Bakery. If you were waiting at the bus stop, someone driving by would just stop and give you a ride, even me the foreigner. We had rice paddies outside our hakwon. The villagers made huge vats of kimchi in our hakwon on the weekend.

At this little village hakwon, the owner was running the whole opperation WITHOUT cash. The parents would give her IOUs on paper and she would get credit at the local businesses. When the '97 crash hit, the bank asked her for their money back and all she had were all these papers with IOUs on them.

I will give her this (the owner), she actually paid everything she owed me completely 6 months later even though I was working at another place. She was an honorable woman unlike the next hakwon I worked for (my first stories).

Sorry for the ramble...they were interesting days 97-98.

[Ilsanman]

News flash dude, not much has changed here.

[RACETRAITOR]

My uncle taught in Yochon (now absorbed by Yeosu) in 1996. I came to visit him for a month in, unfortunately, August. When I was going to the airport to leave, there were thousands of soldiers sitting on the streets in Seoul to bust heads for the August 15 protests.

I am curious to know if anyone was around back then and somehow knew my uncle, Barry. Or the Serbian couple we stayed with in Seoul. The father was Serbian and the mother was Bosnian-Muslim. They had Canadian citizenship and their daughter would've probably been drawn-and-quartered if they ever went back to the Balkans. If anyone knows them, that would be very cool. My uncle is possibly coming back to visit next summer. I might make a post about this.

[Gladiator]

Excellent. Keep them coming.

[leebumlik69]

[Ya-ta Boy]

This is from '94.

We had our mail (this was before e-mail) delivered at the hakwon, a common thing. We were told that it was because the post office was used to delivering anything in English to the hakwon because the mailmen couldn't read English. That turned out not to be entirely true. The real reason was that the wongjangnim would rent an apartment for a teacher and then never pay the monthly rent. After a time, the landlord would get fed up and order the tenant to move. I was moved at the end of my first week.

There was another reason. The wangjangnim liked to go through our mail and decide what we needed to see. We learned this when the married couple had had enough and started looking for a different job. "Joe" happened to notice an envelope in the trash with his name on it and the logo of a school he'd applied to. Since the boss didn't want us checking out other jobs, he simply tore up any letters he didn't want us seeing.

Joe did not take this well. That evening, after work, he and his wife (both very short people) hid in the dark on the balcony, waiting for the boss to come home. When the boss arrived, Joe and the little woman ambushed him and beat him up with their umbrellas. (The boss wasn't all that peeved at getting beat up. He was more or less used to it. He regularly came to work with black eyes because his brother-in-law regularly beat him up after the boss beat up his wife.)

Other controlling behavior of the boss that got on Joe's nerves: We were told not to talk to the teachers at the hakwon around the corner. "We don't want them knowing about our programs." Actually, the boss of that place was a decent boss and his teachers liked him. Our bank accounts were set up half way across town (Taejon) so we couldn't have easy access. Why? On payday he would ask us if we really needed our money. He already knew the answer. He had a friend at the bank and would call to check on our bank balance. If we had money in our account, then we wouldn't be paid. If our account was low, then we'd be paid part or all of our salary.

I stayed 6 months.

A couple of years later he put the business up for sale. Found two buyers and sold to both of them. One buyer in the morning. A different buyer in the afternoon. Then he skipped town with money from both and hid out in Seoul.

[jaganath69]

This thread is pure gold, guys.

[Gladiator]

Ilsanman wrote:

[twg]

[Gladiator]

To add to my original post, the Academic Director of the hellwon per excellence where I worked in '97 was an astonishing man because he didn't do any work for the school, at all.

Despite receiving a salary that was probably five times larger than the foreign teachers' and ten times larger than the Korean staff's, all this extremely unctuous, obseqious and pompous man did was operate his own little "Yoohak Sangdam" business on the side (just as that get rich quick, book your places while you can bandwagon was accelerating out of first gear across the Korean peninsula). Incredibly, he practically used the school staff room for his consulting sessions and waved away our requests for his help when he was in mid spiel to some gullible parent entrusting her child's future to that serpent. I mean, it was his job to help us! More galling was his abuse of our time to proof read English documents related to this work and people who came into the hellwon for ad hoc proofing. He simply took us aside, lied to us we'd be paid overtime for reading the document, charged the customer and pocketed the cash. My god, he was a gangster!

The weirdest thing in all of this and what reinforced the chain of incompetence was how the owners and useless wonjang of the school (son of the president, a 'safe pair of hands' according to Korean thinking ) completely accepted this arrangement that was so obviously bad for the pedagogic standards of the school. He was one of those guys that possessed some questionable Masters in linguistics in some anonymous Californian college but was milking the credibility as an educator that gave him in Korea with the nous of an industrial dairy farm. The man was a TEFL money making machine, taking his lousy consulting with him outside the academy and close to the time the school imploded he just dissapeared. He was the most venal, opportunistic human being I have ever met. He was a man who would easily have sold our livers to international organ trafficking gangsters if it would have incurred no expense to him. He lied about our qualifications to students, he claimed credit for a writing course I devised with absolutely no help from him, he lied routinely about everything.

I don't know if those academic director positions exist still in most hagwons or if Mr. Kim was representative of the type. Did anybody work with a similar Academic Director back then?

[rothkowitz]

Sounds like he was quite competent.

Koreans will routinely BS.If you don'tspeak Korean fluently,how are you going to have them up on it?Complain in English and it'll be put down as a "misunderstanding"

[OiGirl]

[Adventurer]