Korean Job Discussion Forums

[rutan668]

How I ended up back here

I was on holiday in Thailand and not quite sure what to do next when I got this email from Becks at eZenglish which offered me three months holiday 20 hours and 2.5 at a public school in Chungcheongbuk-do near Cheongju.

When I enquired further I was told there were positions for both me and my girlfriend which was obviously good.

So we flew out to Incheon airport and were met there by a guy from a different recruitment agency who warned us that he didn�t know anything - his job was just to meet us and get us a ticket on the bus. However he gave us a public school employment contract which infact only mentioned 14 days paid vacation. So we got a bus to Cheongju and were met by �Brian� who took us to a motel nearby. When he picked us up the next morning he turned round and said �So you want to work in institute, right� We said no, but just to take us to whoever was responsible for this whole system. He drove us to a brand new hagwon in the town of Jeungpyeong gun. They wouldn�t say anything about a public school job but offered that we could work in the hagwon. We showed the contracts we were given (but hadn�t signed) to the hagwon director looked at them like you would look at a meteorite that had just come though your roof. She didn�t speak any english but even she could see that it was a little odd that we were given a public school contract and then taken to her hagwon. I didn�t want to but I had nothing better to do, so I offered to work for them on an hourly rate paid daily while I worked out what was going on and looked for another job.
Brian then went away and for the next few days the only person we could talk to in English was Mike Song a manager at the hagwon which was called �English Mentor�.
After a few days the CEO of English Mentor arrived on the scene who told us that English mentor was actually the recruiter for the Chungcheongbuk-do public schools but that they couldn�t get teachers for their small town hagwon so they decided to tap into the stream of public school teachers in order to staff their it, and as for the 3 months no one had ever said that, but we actually had a choice;We could work at this hagwon or a public school - well not one public school actually seven different public schools - one per day except Thursday and Friday where it would be two per day! And the hours would not be normal teaching hours but six forty minute classes per day adding up to thirty classes a week.
I said I sure as hell wasn�t going to do that.

So we continued working at the hagwon on an hourly rate. During this time we were building some sort of working relationship with Mike until my girlfriend heard one of the other teachers saying that he was about to leave. When asked about this Mike said �Who told you that!� and admitted he was leaving, but not for a month. He was gone when we came back on monday. Just before we were going to leave Brian came and saw us again. He offered us two jobs: One was the public school job but now with four weeks vacation and the other was really quite a good job at a hagwon for 2.3 and four weeks paid vacation with friday off! The only problem was that one of us would have had the bad job and the other the good one which wouldn�t have been good for our relationship.
So I phoned Brian and said we wouldn�t be taking the offer to which he said foreigners that are never satisfied, I called him a liar and that was about that!

[JD1982]

Get the hell outta there. Why do you even bother teaching at hagwon illegally?

I hope you haven't given them any of your and gf's original documents for E-2 visa.

[rutan668]

We are out of there - teaching in Seoul now

[yingwenlaoshi]

It's called, "The Korean Hiring Process". It's well documented.

[pest2]

Yeah, I'd have been outta there the minute I was taken to the Hakwon.

However, thanks for posting and warning us! Good job.

[Cheonmunka]

You could have flipped for it. Or arranged to do six months each.
Sounds like the people there liked you both.
I could be wrong.

[Saxiif]

Daaamn, I never thought I'd hear about Jeungpyeong again. I had my first job there are got screwed around badly by a hagwon there (USA Kid's Club, which I hope has gone under by now).

They still have statues of giant ginseng men there?

[rutan668]