Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Chris2007]

I have an opportunity to work at an adult school but it involves split shifts. It would be working from 7-noon and then 6:30 to 9:30. I would only have to be there during class hours.
I prefer to teach adults, but I'm wondering if split shifts are the sort of thing that suck the life out of you after a few weeks. Does anyone have experience with split shifts, and how much does it really suck?
Thanks very much!

[iggyb]

I can understand if some people can't put up with split shifts. I didn't mind them.

The only thing I had a problem with, and something I would put a stop to now that I know more about the industry, is when my "off time" was broken up by having a class here and a class there - with time in between - thus taking up the whole day.

I never negotiated this in a contract. Maybe some have who can tell us how it went. But, I'd want to get something in the contract that said classes must be on a block schedule --- classes must be consecutive ---- probably spelling out the times as they and/or their ad says ------ and that I must agree to accept a new schedule before it goes into effect.

That wording is crappy. Maybe someone can come up with a better one. I just got up...

I'm going for an adult hakwon too, and I'll probably have to work out the wording like that myself...

[gaffe]

It won't suck the life out of you in a couple of weeks, but it will after a couple of months. If you live close and can pop home for a power nap, that might delay the effects. but it eventually was the deal killer in my adult job. Bring some ear plugs. Be a morning person. Don't drink too much.

[iggyb]

I wasn't a morning person, but I wasn't a bar hopper either. I went out with adult students fairly often, but I rarely got much drunk. I had left the college thing behind in the US...

For me, as long as the time between the shifts wasn't taken up with other classes spread out all day, I was fine.

It gave me some nap time or I could do my shopping, laundry, banking, whatever.

In the kids hakwon, I would work from something like 10-5 and found it harder to get things down, because I am not a natural morning person and found it hard to force myself to get up early if I didn't have to work until 10. But finishing at 5 or 6 or 7 at night meant I often couldn't get down what was needed.

[PRagic]

I've been here since 1993 and worked at hakwons, companies, and small and large universities. We've had a great run of it. The ONLY regret that I have is that when I first came over I worked splits. Back then, just about everyone was working splits. There weren't as many employment options as there are now.

The upside is that the schedules sucked so bad that they motivated me to shoot for higher goals and to get as far away from hakwons as humanly possible. The only thing that made them remotely tolerable was the people I worked with. If you get unlucky and work with a band of losers, you'll be hating life.

[halfmanhalfbiscuit]

Bad. Expect life to be at 80% (ie never truly awake, harried for time, being at work twice per day etc.).

Brighter points-adult students.

If you work with morons-like NTs (actually French-Canadian...) wearing wheelie shoes it gets old real quick.

[cdninkorea]

You don't have to do splits at all adult schools; Wall Street Institute, for example, never has splits. I'm sure there are other schools too.

[iggyb]

I want to repeat my lone voice again:

If you can get it into the contract that you work two full blocks and must OK any change in the schedule that puts a class or classes between morning and evening shift, and you stick to it if the boss tries to change it anyway, I had no problems with split shift.

If you want to be able to go out with friends to the bars and other things at night during the work week, it probably wouldn't work for you because you'd have to get up very early and stay at the school late into the evening.

But, if that isn't the case, working two block shifts isn't that bad. 6-10 and 6-10 or similar gives you more than enough time to get some extra sleep or get chores done that need doing or to head out some place to relax or just go home and watch some DVDs or hit a PC Bang or whatever.

The key, to me, is not to allow the school to give you one schedule for your first month like I noted above and then rearrange it with classes spread out through the day...

...With the new visa rules I've heard about since looking to return to Korea -- that you can give your boss and the labor board 30 days notice that you want to find a different school and that they have to let you go after that time - It seems to me if my future adult-hakwon boss tries to change the schedule like that, I'd have either a fair exit ramp to use or to bring up to get him to back off and adhere to the schedule we agreed on...

[big_fella1]

Split shifts for me weren't the problem but having less than 12 hours off was a big problem. I finished at 10pm and started at 7 am. It was a year of hell.

You will be tired, all the time. The upside of this is it can help you save money. In 1 year I paid the parents back, got key money for my own apartment , furnished it and had a great vacation when I finished. This was because I was too tired to go out, or have friends.

The institutes will tell you of the person who goes to gym or goes shopping in their break during the day, I didn't meet them. Even the fittest of people have to sleep in the afternoon.

My blood pressure dropped by 20 the week after I finished.

As was stated WSI doesn't make teachers do splits. The other hagwons need to change, but they won't at the moment, as they are getting plenty of fresh meat from the US.

I would recommend only doing split shifts if you don't require an airfare, have your own key money, and sign a lease in your name, as these are used as leverage, or a way to screw you if cannot handle splits.

The plus as I said are the ability to save money, and the fact that the 2 biggest chains directly operate the institutes, so you will be paid. This is about to become a big problem for a lot of teachers here.

[iggyb]

Perhaps one thing about myself that helped me adjust to splits is that I have odd sleeping habits always. I don't need to be on a regular clock. Back at that time especially after leaving grad school in the US to go to Korea. I could go from staying up all night and going to sleep when the sun came up to going to sleep at noon for three hours and the teaching the night shift.

I don't need 7 or 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep.

If I started getting too drained in the split shifts, I'd just crash a whole weekend or a whole Saturday to fuel up.

[Chris2007]

Thanks for the advice and experiences you all have had. I would like to have adult teaching on my resume, but I could see how split shifts would get really old. Like the one poster said, you get home at 10 and you have to go back again at 7am. Also, the danger of them randomly spreading your classes throughout the day and evening is a possibility.

The only good thing I can see is that you a) teach adults and b) you can use your time off in the day to do errands like banking.
Maybe I will look into Wall Street Institute - but not sure if they're hiring now.

[lifeinkorea]

If the split shift was near a station on the green line in Seoul, I would consider it. That in itself is a large area, but the point would be to be centrally located so you could go places in between classes. If the school didn't allow me to do that, I wouldn't accept that offer.

There are 2 kinds of split shifts. I think most of the people here are referring to the morning to night split shifts. If you take this, try to get 2 blocks of teaching so you aren't teaching in the afternoon.

The other split shift doesn't seem so bad. You teach children before noon or a little later. You stop at around 3 or 4, and maybe another teacher comes in. Then you come back and teach adult classes.

In both cases, I highly recommend you DO NOT take a job that requires you to do 3 blocks (example: 9-11, 2-4, 7-9). If the school picks two, stick to it or trade one for the other throughout the year. This will give you a block of time away from the school.

Some hagwons will schedule a busy mon-thu schedule, and you can get your Fridays off. These 3 day weekends are very nice.

[iggyb]

If you are new to Korea, and you want to learn about Korean society, adults are great to teach. I particularly like the ajumma classes - where the only students were women between the ages of roughly 28-38.

Without any men in the room, they opened up the floor for a discussion of everything. They dropped the, "Don't want to give the foreigner a bad impression about Korea by what I say" and would talk about everything straight forward. It was refreshing...

(This is one of the reasons I want to teach adults-only again. It's been about 6 or 7 years since I was in Korea for a long stretch. It's been about 12 since I taught mostly adults. I want to hear what they have to say these days....)

[pkang0202]

[PRagic]

Your soul will wilt. During the day, you'll be tired; many people where I worked crashed under a table in the 'teachers' lounge' after lunch.

Plus, you'll be going back in to the classroom when most of the city is fixing to call it a day.

You'll be leaving at 9 or 10 when most people who worked a normal day are on the way home after a light night out.

You'll be getting home around 10 or 11, and then getting back up at 5 to get ready to make it back into the crapwon by 6 or 6:30, unless you like to go right from the street to the classroom.

If at all possible, simply just avoid splits, ANY splits, no matter the set-up, and no matter the proximity of your residence. Why take the chance?

Yes, people need to get here, get the lay of the land, and then try to make a go of it. I'm a firm believer in that. There should be seniority, and nothing ticks me off more than people wanting to get off the plane making as much or more as people who have put their time and effort into getting a grip on the local market.

Having said this, the one topic that raises the hair on my shackles is split shifts. Koreans can and do do them, and can maintain these worst-of-the-worst schedules because Korean-style teaching is highly UNinteractive, and they don't burn much energy or effort during classes. Most western teachers, especially new, inexperienced teachers, buy into the 'you are a professional teacher now' mantra fed them by crapwon owners and try to hard to please and impress their classes. They burn up a lot of energy and get stressed out during the process. Add to this a foreign living and work environment, and you get a less than enjoyable term of employment. In a nut shell, splits should be avoided at all costs.

If people take these jobs because they don't know better, then they didn't do their research into the market well enough before they headed out. Too bad, because it's the crapwon that wins in the end.

End rant....