Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Summer Wine]

Today in the morning my co-teacher came in and started trying to ask me a question about afterschool class. Or at least thats how it came out, as her english is not that good.

Well I was expecting a full day today and tomorrow of afterschool classes and yet when I went to my classroom. They explained that as tomorrow is the exam day, I have no classes today or tomorrow.

Today is relax day and tomorrow I have been told.

Its these great surprises that really make working in a public school so great. In a hagwon, its the same slog everyday, there aren't many if any pleasant surprises.

Man, its like I have been just told, you have an extra days holiday. Its cool.

[8 years down]

Happens at hagwons too if you teach middle-school and up. I've even had a full week off while students prepared for finals at the end of the year.

Would be better if they just let you stay home :p

[T-J]

I have always taken that the wrong way.

"Exams are coming and so we want to focus on the important stuff until then. We can get back to your fun class after the exams. Now kindly go sit at your desk and play on Dave's while we get to work."

I admire your ability to look at the glass and see it half full!

[T-J]

[Summer Wine]

[pikachun1]

i would actually take a pub school job than a hakwon job in hindsight because of this

[SW]

[Sergio Stefanuto]

I always loved exam time. In my final year in Korea, I had a total of 18 weeks of vacation: 10 weeks in winter, 6 weeks in summer, and exam periods must have been a total of 2-3 weeks. The school I worked at in Seoul for 3 years prior wasn�t quite as generous, but I would always take off after lunch during exam weeks.

Public school in Korea is certainly a golden chance for lazy people to earn a comfortable living.

[Chucky]

Working for a public school is better than a hagwon in almost every way.

I am sticking with public school for sure. It's so awesome.

I just got back from an awesome field trip where I traveled to a bunch of awesome spots. Awesome bro.

[.38 Special]

I used to make paper plates, which is a really crappy way to squander trees. Before working there I avoided them on principal.

Before that I made $800 fabric window blinds. We made hundreds per hour, slapping crappy dollar-store quality fabrics and flimsy junk metal parts, held together with plastic and pop-rivets. Basically, I was an unwilling agent of the trail of tears of American industry from the Rustbelt to Mexico. Literally, 5:05 every morning the supervisor would read off the previous day's production and the production of the Tijuana branch that was built to replace us years ago. As long as we out performed them we kept our jobs... It was a miserable place.

Before that I made pop-tarts. The ingredients read like the inventory of a chemistry lab. Meanwhile, the Canadian products were made with natural ingredients -- par their manufacturing laws. The American products, meanwhile, were infused with all kinds of stuff. Tampering with food is destroying our health.

Before that I worked at a British Petroleum station. That was all right. Then their rig explodes and oozes oil all over the damn Loisiana coast! Mother$%#&#@%!

What I'm trying to say... Being a foreign language teacher, while perhaps not viewed as important as other subjects -- even as "playtime" -- is much more interesting and productive than filling landfills with "convenience," selling garbage as "luxury," filling children with "nutritious" chemicals, and selling cigarettes and gasoline to John Q. Public. The last one isn't that big of a deal, but who looks fondly back at pumping gas part-time? That job sucked.

So cheer up! You have a great job now, lots of cool perks, and you get to catch up on your reading! Huzzah!

[Chucky]

[.38 Special]

Eh. I was just trying to say that life is good even if your job gets you down sometimes, and it could always be worse in the job satisfaction department.

I just bring the cheer, baby

[AsiaESLbound]

Yep, it's much better than being under high pressure in a corporate boiler room cubicle doing accounts receivables on an almost impossible to use black screen Unix system or working a store. While I haven't gotten canceled classes yet, it's a steady job. One of my classes was canceled this morning, but I have to teach it during one of my free periods later this week. I wouldn't call it an easy job, because it's very busy and exhausting, but at least we have more breaks than corporate offices have such as a 10 day Summer vacation and the occassional field trip. Too bad they won't call a field trip now, because the weather is awesome while it's the meat and potatoes grind of the semester.

After college, I worked in a large corporate office for only $8.50 an hour with no benefits, no recognition of any sort, inconsiderate rude spoiled executives using you as a punching bag with a floor manager listening in on the calls who support the abuse due to it coming from valued customers, not allowed to go out for lunch for security reasons as to control and oppress us, only allowed crappy unhealthy over priced food for sale in the lunch room, living with the daily verbal antagonistic threats that you can be easily replaced with one of 20 applicants waiting in line to replace you, and a hostile toxic work culture of a minus 99 negativity rating.

[World Traveler]

[SW]

After having the best work experience of my life at a hogwan and the worst at a PS, I came to wonder how so many people could love PS so much. Threads like this help me to understand why. My theory:

NSETs don't get to spend much time with each class in a PS - at my school, it's somewhere around 40 hours per year with each class, or as much as I saw my main hogwan kids in six weeks.

There's only so much that can be done with this time. If you have staff/co-teachers who realize this, and make you work (or NOT work) accordingly, you should be golden.

If, on the other hand, your school believes they can now accomplish what a hogwan can just because they've gotten one foreign teacher, then you're in for a rough ride. This is the boat I'm in.

My middle-aged ajumma co-teachers devote a large chunk of the weekly teacher's meetings to nit-picking my lesson plans (think CELTA course from hell). Then come class time, the kids just play around (and the co-teachers aid and encourage this behavior). A double standard is at work: my paperwork must be perfect to a tee, but my class is just play time.

As if that weren't bad enough, there's a lot of unnecessary busy-work given to me to fill in the open time I do have, as well as bureaucratic nonsense that shouldn't even be my responsibility.

It's why I feel I really got screwed when I read about these people who don't even submit lesson plans, and have co-teachers who don't even show up.

With the applicant pool growing larger, and the MOE coming down harder, I do think the cushier PS jobs are going to be harder to come by. I, for one, will not walk this gauntlet again with GEPIK or EPIK. I'm going to go for a full schedule with a hogwan, because if there's one thing I've learned working for government organizations, it's that they reserve the right to fill in that time you spend doing nothing with anything.