Korean Job Discussion Forums

[phaedrus]

Regardless of whether children or adults are being taught, I think that hagwons need to be thought of as existing in two separate categories with separate standards regarding work expected.

Just as there are universities that require professors do research, and then lesser universities or colleges that are solely teaching, hagwons should be thought of as having two categories: those which have small numbers of teaching hours with the expectation the teacher create new ideas, innovate methods, and nurture his students, and then those which have very high teaching hours with little or no related work for the teacher. In the second type there should be a support staff which creates curriculum and lessons, talks with parents or students, and takes care of the non classroom teaching duties.

This does exist somewhat. Certain franchises have their teachers doing 30+ teaching hours per week, and they often have academic coordinators doing lesson planning, at least mine did. The problem was that the boss thought she was getting a good deal being able to guarantee that we taught 30 hours per week, and ever so slowly more and more duties started to be placed on the teachers as her support staff failed to expand at the same rate as the school. I attribute this cheapness to the hatred I have for this particular hagwon.

In Korean public schools often the teachers do no more than twenty-two 40min classes per week. This equates to 880 minutes. At my hagwon I taught 1800 minutes per week. You can imagine my disgust when my hagwon boss said "Why aren't you teachers preparing more materials, do you think public school principals prepare materials for the teachers?" This was a lazy statement by a lazy owner. I think hagwon owners need realistic expectations about how much work to expect from a teacher. No one should expect a vague clause such as "other duties" to translate into 40+ hours of actual work. If they do they should not expect good work or a teacher to stay longer than a year. In any event they should not expect good results from their business.

[Mr. Pink]

[phaedrus]