Korean Job Discussion Forums

[jajdude]

Well....? A lot of apparently clueless directors and owners, and a lot of not quite top-notch teachers. (Don't the top-notch ones stay home?) What does "average" mean in this field?

[phaedrus]

Mostly? ....... I would say yes.

Althought the benefits are good, the average benefits are not good enough to lure normal highly experienced people away from their home country to halfway around the world.

Average means seven months experience, no qualifications.

[sadsac]

To me average means what we all are when we first arrive. Professional teachers, the experienced ones do stay at home and the younger ones come over for the experience. Looks good on a aresume back home.

[mindmetoo]

Hagwons remind me a lot of working for dot.coms back during the internet boom. It was all a gold rush and no one had any plans. It was a total shotgun approach. Get your .com registered with the internic, retain a patent lawyer to patent the idea of putting a red button on a web page that does nothing, get a VC, and get a brokerage firm that will take you public in 6 months. Don't worry that even your employees have no idea what your product actually is. Oh yeah. Employees. First you need 14 VPs and C-level staff (CEO, CFO, CTO, CMO, COO, CMP, CRC). And then you need underlings to boss. So hire anyone and everyone.

As an employee, you got paid well to do little work, you were given no direction, you had no idea if any of the work you did had end results. Sound familiar? But they were so desperate for bodies if you at least knew a mouse was a computer peripheral and not something you roasted on a stick over an oil drum full of burning tires, well, here's a $50K a year job and stock options.

Hagwons are pretty much the same story. Sure no stock options but you're getting what basically amounts to a $40K a year job that's part time. And you're at times a warm body. But if you're a fresh history grad and you have a $30K student loan, you could do much much worse in North America for your first job.

You're probably not going to be a stellar teacher from the get go, but if you have an earnest desire to teach and half a brain, you begin to see results, in the kids and your own performance. You just have to have patience and a thick skin . Some, I'm sure, are here to simply cash a pay check to spend it on booze and meet girls. That's not so good in the long run. It's good too if you have some real world North American work experience and can see the lack of planning and stupidity inherent in hakwons is actually pretty common in most North American companies. Nuthin' personal.

Whatever your training, however, my take is my kids are my clients. It's a balance between giving them what they want (hangman, simon says, cross words) and selling them on what they need.

[Falstaff]

[JennyJJ]

Stated above: "l thought the benefits are good, the average benefits are not good enough to lure normal highly experienced people away from their home country to halfway around the world."

Not true.

Some people in this business forget that there is more than just hogwans and Korea in the TEFL world. A good proportion of the well-qualified and experienced teachers (professionals, you might call them) work in the Middle East and other areas where wages and benefits are significantly greater than they could get in the English-speaking world. Most people in the ME earn upwards of US$40k plus a year, plus plane tickets, free housing, no taxes etc - packages that would be hard to beat for double the wages "back home" and you still wouldn't get as much vacation time.
A good friend of mine earns a $60k a year package working five weeks on, five weeks off. Middle East, yeah, but I'd take that job any time!

And many of us love exploring a world different from our home base. Not everyone wants a secure cocoon.

There are quite a few skilled professionals in Korea as well - and many of them have spent time in a variety of countries. Some of us end up here because we like the long university vacations and the ability to still be able to save, others don't care for the weather or culture (or hostility) of the Middle East, or don't wish to do the international school circuit with the spoiled kids of the wealthy.

What you see in Korea and Thailand and some other countries, are yes - a lot of amateurs - but then we were all amateurs at one time. Put in a little time, develop your skills, further your education, and you may begin - at some point - to see yourself as a professional.

[jajdude]

Good post Jenny. I have to admit I would be very reluctant to even visit the middle east. OK, I'd visit. But signing on for a year in a place that one hears so much bad about doesn't sound like fun.

[PEIGUY]

it would depend on where in the middle east you were looking to teach. Some countries are good, Syria and the UAE (United Arab Emirates) are good, especially UAE. They are prob some of hte more stable ( i use that term loosely of course) but the UAE is fairly good as a lot of foreigners in that country. All in all, it would come down to location, i don't care if htey payed me 100,000 there would be no way i would teach in a place like Iraq (even if they had a new gov't) a big white boy in Iraq=nice shooting target.
Like it has been mentioned, everyone is an amateur when they come to korea (for the most part) i have a bit of teaching experience and actually want to do that for a career. I want to come to Korea to take a break from school( I don't have any student loans) and do something different that is applicable to what i want to do in the future and have fun.

[phaedrus]

[iiicalypso]

I don't want to generalize, but most of the foreign teachers I have met are what I would consider to be professionals. There is a difference between being inexperienced and unprofessional. Since what most of us teach is already natural to us, it seems like the difference between professionals and others is a matter of attitude. All the pedagogical classes I took didn't really amount to much at all when I entered a classroom for the first time, so I am not sure that uncredentialed means unprofessional. After all, most jobs in the world require some degree of teaching skill. (I learned a lot about teaching when I used to manage a liquor store.)

As for what goes on in our home countries, well, I think that is a completely different issue. Obviously most American teachers will stay in America, and most Australians stay in Australia, but the same is true of American engineers and Australian computer programmers. Most people are just more comfortable where they are. It is not a reflection of professional status.

Don't forget that there are lots of intangibles that go into the decision as well. I taught in American high schools with some absolutely terrible veteran teachers who were counting down the years until retirement. That was certainly a morale booster. I had to go through the cycle of layoffs and rehires every year. Many of my students came from difficult backgrounds and were far below grade level. I spent more time filling out paperwork, and any time that I wasn't working I felt guilty that I wasn't doing more. Here in Korea my lifestyle is much healthier. I live close enough to my hogwan to walk every day, my coworkers are a close knit bunch, my students are high performing middle schoolers who are respectful, I get to teach instead of filing forms, and the people around my home are generally more pleasant than where I lived before.

Even if I hadn't been able to save more money in six months than I did in the previous three years I would still consider this a good professional choice. I work hard to help my kids, and I feel that I am rewarded, both financially and emotionally.

Sorry about the little rant... I just get a little defensive sometimes when people suggest that hogwans are a haven for slackers and failures. The teachers here that I know work as hard or harder than teachers I have known in the US, and isn't that what really makes a person a professional?

[VanIslander]

[iiicalypso]

[VanIslander]