Korean Job Discussion Forums

[donnie_m]

For those of you with experience,

What can you tell about a school from the quality of the grammar found on the contract they send you? Any correlation between the amount of care that seems to have been put into the language of a contract and the dependability of the associated school in your experience?

I was under the assumption that any contract I would receive from a school would be written in carefully composed, precise, and ironclad wording and language, given all the contract disputes that arise. Or is that precisely the reason why so many contract disputes occur?

I would have thought that it's in the best interest of the school to issue at least semi-professional contracts with language that bears some "weight" to it. Or has the ESL industry degenerated to the point where, for any number of reasons, the written contract has been relegated to being treated as a mere formality, and the integrity of the employer-employee relationship now operates pretty much solely on "soft" intangibles, such as in "you show us some goodwill, and we'll show you some on a quid pro quo basis".

Sorry I digressed a bit there, but much thanks if you could respond to my initial question at least.

Thanks!

[Aussiekimchi]

I would imagine there were about 3 different contracts for English teachers when the ESL industry started booming here. Schools, I suspect have simply downloaded these from somewhere or copied them or whatever. I read about 10 contracts a week from different schools on average. There seems to be only about 4 or 5 different ones going around. And these consistenly ignore the working conditions advertised by the school.
They are usually horribly biased in favour of the employer and many times devoid of any grammatical structure. Those which do have grammatical correctness, babble on about crap that all starts sounding like longwinded and pointless mumbo jumbo.
I am not sure if Koreans do not see the importance of a professional contract or if any schools seeks out a lawyer or even an English speaker to write a contract for their particular school, but most I read need to changed before signing takes place.
I think if your contract is really bad in grammar, you should consider this:
most Koreans can read and write much better than they can speak. If the contract is so poorly worded, maybe the staff at this school will be worse verbally.
Maybe they are great speakers, but just do not give a tinker's cuss about such petty things as contracts.
Any time I read horribly worded contracts the warning bells go off. Do your research thoroughly.

[Hater Depot]

On the other hand, the Gyeonggi-do contract is quite professionally worded and has side-by-side Korean and English. So there is really no such thing as a guarantee. You just have to check out the school for what it is.