Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Yu_Bum_suk]

[ED209]

Not many here in korea and they are kinda infrequent. Sorry don't know any links. Your best bet is to either go home and do one or spend a month in Thailand. At least that way you'll learn how to cook Thai food

But it really sounds like you just need to change your job. There are better places out there. Although get prepared to get burnt when you tell your director you are leaving,

[Rapacious Mr. Batstove]

[Scotticus]

[Privateer]

I can't add anything to the great advice you've already received except for one thing:


If you decide to stay and if the boss withholds your pay, you withhold your labour. No complaining or negotiating: just, the minute you find your pay is short, you don't come in. Nothing causes the boss a bigger headache than that, but you must be willing to quit and leave the country if the situation does not resolve itself.


Secondly, I heard a rumour the CELTA is now available in Seoul - sorry got no concrete information, and you might prefer to do it back home anyway.

[confuzed]

[nautilus]

[dee]

[Fresh Prince]

The advice here is great. I don't have much to add but one thing is that teaching at a hogwan is not easy since they typically provide no training but you will get better at classroom control with time and experience.

I doubt that the student's parents pulled him out of the hogwan because you made him leave the classroom. It's fairly common for Korean teachers to use corporal punishment on their students, even in front of their peers. More likely, the student's parents were looking for a reason to get pull their kid out of the hogwan and just used that incident as an excuse. The hogwan may have raised the tuition when they got a foreign teacher, or a friend from church decided to open a hogwan and they wanted out.

[tomato]

The parents probably didn't even give that as a reason.
The director probably lied.
It is quite common for directors to blame all their losses on foreign teachers.

I once had a director send out notes with all the students.
Soon after that, two-thirds of the students quit.
The director told me that they quit because I was such a bad teacher.

Only one-third of the students were in my class.
Besides, another foreign teacher asked the advanced students what the notes said.
The notes announced a tuition increase.

Another director told me that I was such a bad teacher that all of the students were soon going to quit and she would have to close the school down.
So I went to all the other English schools in town, passing out my resume.
She found out about this and gave me an angry phone call.
I said, "Why are you angry? If I go to work for one of your competitors, that competitor will close down!"

[Travelous Maximus]

[merkurix]

[tomato]

In reply to TM's question,
directors are probably taking advantage of the language barrier.
They can tell us anything they want to about what has been said about us by a third party, and it would be difficult for us to check up with a third party.

Likewise, THEY can say anything they want to about us to a third party, and it would be difficult for us to check up with a third party.

One of my directors advertised that I taught elementary school in the United States for 20 years and that the other foreign teacher taught elementary school in Canada for 10 years.



She didn't think I was smart enough to read the ad.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

[Scotticus]