Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Radius]

I understand not many working here in Korea are Licensed teachers in their home countries, but for those of you that are--don't you wish you can get a teaching job back home instead? It's like casting pearls before swines trying to teach these kids and im about drained after one year here. I'd give anything to have a job offer back in the States and teach there. Being able to use words that have more than 4 letters while trying to explain something would be nice, too. I never had my first real teaching job yet out of college so I'm still longing for that first time...
To have a normal "working" life... I just feel like a second-class, failed teacher here. Wow I sound depressed.

[minos]

[Stalin84]

I had a dream of doing a BEd and teaching in my home country. I no longer have that dream after doing some research in my home country and talking to some people.

You might get paid a little bit more but the cost of living makes it out to be less. The work is much harder, the students are much worse, you will never be respected and parents will be breathing down your neck and threatening to sue on a regular basis. Just... no.

[Mr. Pink]

[robot]

[alistaircandlin]

Radius, I think it depends what you want from your job. Also, once you have more experience here I'm sure you will be able to shop around and get something that suits you better.

When I originally taught in Korea I felt the same as you - frustrated at teaching beginners basic sentence structures over and over. I imagined qualifying back in England and teaching in a sixth-form college. I honestly had this picture of myself wearing some kind of tweed jacket, sipping tea from a china cup and smiling as my students made perceptive comments about Blake or Shakespeare.

Sadly, the reality wasn't quite like that. I found that at that age ( 16-18 ) most of the students had never even read anything outside of school. Admittedly, this would depend on the demographic of the school you taught at. But I worked at three schools in England and found that students who were really motivated were definitely a minority.

Actually, a lot of energy and effort just goes into managing behaviour. The school in Cambridgeshire where I worked had at least ten full-time non-teaching staff dedicated to managing behavioural problems. This was at a school with 1500 students. Some classes would just be manic - you'd have like ten students with behavioural difficulties, low literacy etc and you have to get them to sit down and write or, worse still analyse a piece of poetry. Parents wouldn't know how to handle their children, which was where the problem generally stemmed from, the kids would be struggling to focus in class and would just go off on one. It's not like in Korea either, where you tell a student to stop talking and he goes, 'okay, sorry.' You get students in the U.K. who are just disruptive to every class for years and years. You see the same names coming up again and again after two years time, in all classes not just your own. And yet these kids are still in the classroom.

The workload is massively greater too. You have to plan twenty-two lessons a week in the UK, Twenty-two different lessons. You've got to mark your books, exams and coursework, contact parents, liase with colleagues, manage a tutor group. ad. nauseum. From what I've heard America is much like this, or worse in certain places. Also I think UK teachers are better paid and schools are better funded than in the U.S.

Oh yeah I forgot: you take the job home with you. Evenings and weekends are pretty much gone on planning, marking and admin.

So although the job had a lot more to it in England, I spent the last two years looking back on my time in Korea thinking: my god, I had an easy life back then! We decided to come back to Korea because: we wanted to save money, which I couldn't do in England, we were falling into debt; because my wife could find employment over here more easily, in the UK she had to volunteer for a year as a teaching assistant just to get school experience; and also so I could have free time in which to write.

So I work at a decent boys middle school over here now. I plan three lessons a week, one for each grade. Sure it gets repetitive but I look at it as an opportunity I would never get elsewhere to refine one lesson - I can try it out with one class, make improvements for the next, adapt something here and there, differentiate it for lower, middle and high - and so on. I've got to manage behaviour here too, the same as anywhere but the students are not defiant or argumentative - you set out your stall, lay down the rules, have a seating plan do all the usual stuff and they are basically fine.

So, in a nutshell: more free time, less stress, saving money, happy colleagues instead of stressed-out, over-worked neurotics, gifts from students' parents, dinner paid for by the school seven or eight times a year, a monthly allowance for resources that I've been spending on teaching methodology books to develop my practice, nice students who bow at me. Hmm, I'm not unhappy. Honestly coming back has been a good decision.

I would say that having the experience teaching in the UK has made things massively easier for me over here - otherwise I would never have known how to manage big classes. Also that my thoughts are all based on UK teaching, whereas you're asking about working in the states, which might be a whole lot different. One of my colleagues in England was an American trained teacher and she found the English system too formulaic and stiffling. It's all about setting targets, grading, leveling and meeting target grades these days, although that will change. Also she mentioned that in the states part of the final grade is based on attitude and behaviour, which we don't do - hence the problems.

[eamo]

[notinKS]

I taught 5-12 music for four years before this. I would frequently work 12-14 hour days, which included 90 minutes of driving time because I was working in two different school districts. There would be some days where I would leave at 7 AM and return at 11 PM or later. Now, I work 8:30-4:30. I have actual planning time to get all of my work done, which I didn't have when I taught in the States. My weekends and evenings are wholly my own, which was not the case in the States. I enjoy being able to come up with creative lessons here and I DO NOT miss all of the extra paperwork, rudeness from students and parents, and just general hassle. I will not return to teaching in the States after this, it's just not worth it to me.

[littlelisa]

I have a teaching license in both elementary and secondary for teaching ESL. I'm from Montreal, and they also DO need TESL teachers there. It would be relatively easy for me to get a job teaching ESL. However, there's a lot less respect for teachers there, the openings are mostly at schools in lower income areas, and the kids really don't want to learn English.

Doing my student teaching there was the most depressing thing, and I never ever want to work in schools like that again. I love teaching, but I don't miss dealing with some of the crazy teachers who work at public schools, the disrespectful students, parents who really don't care much about their kids, and other depressing things (kids whose life plan in ELEMENTARY school is to drop out of school and live on welfare, high school kids who already live in a rehab centre for drugs, kids telling you they don't need to learn English because their daddy says they live in Quebec and everyone should speak French, etc). There were some good points, but overall I enjoy it here more. The biggest thing for me is that my students here WANT to learn, and since I have my own homeroom class here, I get a lot more respect than I did as a specialist back home.

I know there are good schools, and I probably just got bad luck with my student teaching placement, but usually the better schools are much harder to get a job at because they're full of older teachers with more experience.

[swashbuckler]

[Subtitle]

Yes, I have a MAEd, and I couldn't get a job back in the states. I ran into a couple of problems. First there are fewer job openings. The economic meltdown meant that teacher who were planning on retiring got hit in their 401k's. They're hanging onto their jobs. Secondly I got suck into a trap. Every state has temporary certification for teachers who move. Unfortunately temp certification is a red herring. You can't teach in title one schools (the only ones who are now hiring first year teacher) unless you're "highly qualified," which mean you have to take that particular state's teacher certification exams, despite the fact that those exams are near duplicates of the Praxis exams, which I have passed.
I then looked for work to earn the money to pay for the certification exams, but I was overlooked because I have a masters degree. They knew I would quit as soon as I found something in my field.
Korea's a pretty good option. I will teach at my friend's hogwan for a year, go home for a battery of teacher cert exams, return to teach at a university for my resume, then give it another go in 2013.

[Tundra_Creature]

[curlygirl]

[nzbradly78]

I'm a certified primary teacher. I had to leave an amazing job (crying a little as I type this) due to debts that I couldn't dream of paying off in 10 years or more. So we came to Korea, paid off our debts in 18 months.

My teacher training has been pretty useful here. Classroom management is way different, but that's a culture thing. However, lesson planning, student evaluation and assessment and working within a big plan has made things easy here.

Teaching in an ESL environment definitely has its perks. No 70+ hour work weeks, lost weekends and endless paperwork are a big plus. I just don't have the job satisfaction though of teaching real maths and science and art. I teach in a kindergarten isn't quite the same. Students are stuck behind desks and plowing through workbooks and testing and all that crap. That and the psychotic parents who expect way too much from their little ones and put too much pressure on them. Kind of sad.

Anyhow, rant over.

[stephorama]

I am a credentialed American teacher and have taught in three different public schools. Two of those schools were teaching 95% English Learners. Communication with parents was all but impossible. Teach for America teachers were coming in droves and were treated like royalty while those of us who actually had training to be teachers picked up their slack. They got their student loans paid off by the gov't working in the hood. I worked there because I wanted to "make a difference". Riiiiighhhhhttttt.

The one school I worked in where I had all English speaking students was in Texas where the EL students were with Spanish speaking teachers all day in "bilingual" classes. I had the lowest of the low English speaking American students and it was the least rewarding of any job I've ever had.

Teaching English Learners brings so many small victories; you just have to recognize them and cherish the moments. Never let your students see your disappointment with their progress (or lack there of). Always celebrate achievement, no matter how small.

The grass definitely isn't any greener as a U.S. school teacher.