Korean Job Discussion Forums

[nasigoreng]

Hi,
I work at an Ewha school and the conditions are pretty dire so I wanted to check with other teachers to see if the whole corp. is screwed up or did I just get lucky and sign on to work at the craziest school .

Every class has four subjects: reading, writing, grammar, and speaking listening. This means that the students have four times as many books and four times as much homework .

I teach speaking and listening and so I'm lucky enough to have 2 books to teach... both books must be finished within 8 weeks. the only way to accomplish this is, of course, to spend the whole class writing the answers on the white board for the students to copy. half the studetnts don't do their homework. Those who have studied at the school for over two years can't put together a sentence to save their lives. not that it matters, the discipline is so bad I hear more korean than English in the class. Punishment is absent because the director can't afford to lose students(I wonder if she can afford to lose me?).

Attendence is down... way down.

Does this sound like your ewha school?

[stephenl]

I worked at two EWHA schools, one in Daejon and the other in Daegu. The whole chain is screwed up. You work Saturdays even though your contract says no Saturdays. The one in Daejon lost 200 students between the summer session and the fall enrollment because the parents didn't like the way their children were taught. They had to get rid of three foreign teachers, myself included. They sent me to Daegu on a supposedly permanent job, only to find out that I was filling in until a Canadian couple came. They then sold me (slave) toa completely different school in Anyang where the owner was friends with the owner of the Daejon school. I woul;dn't work for an EWHA school if my life depended on it!!!

[eamo]

[Ilsanman]

Yeah, a lot of that is true. They were great to work for at the beginning but near the end of my contract, I wanted out of there so badly.

10 months into my contract, they basically said I had to work at a different school, and commute with no extra pay because business is bad. More like they should have downsized when a teacher left, but didn't.

Yes, the courseload is super hard for the students, and I was always encouraged to work them to the bone, call their mothers when they weren't doing their homework (too much!!), give them midterm and final exams that I had to make myself, and other BS.

On the bright side, the working hours were easy. I didnt have to prep, or come in too early. They always paid me on time, and the atmosphere was pretty relaxed until near the end of my contract.

I forsee the company going bust quite soon.

[pdog]

Same same same...

We have the same shit at our school. We are making up exams by copying the stuff out of the books that the students use but can't understand. We have to pass them by a high percent so there isn't much point in counting exam marks. The level of the students don't increase too much because a lot of the content is at too high of a level. Notice all the toos so far??? We work late on Christmas and New Years Eve. We cannot get mad at children who repeatedly do not do their homework, there is no staff room harmony, we have to phone teach in the few breaks we have, we are never thanked for all the work we put into their business, we have to mark essays, create speaking tests, form writing tests, and blah blah blah... Oh yeah, we are never thanked. Ideas that we might have about improvements are considered without consideration. Not considered at all. We are supposed to teach the kids for the solid 40 minutes, but we are expected to play games with them to make it fun, but we are not supposed to play games with them because that takes away from learning time. We are supposed to mark down attendance with cirlces, squares, and x's. We are supposed to check homework, mark homework individually, and write down who has not done their homework before we start teaching: those that are not done their homework are supposed to have their parents called but of course they are not and they continuously do not do their homework, and we find ourselves circling back to that problem of not being able to punish them because that will make them not happy. Us happy, who cares? We are only the reason that there are English schools in the end. So, yeah there is a lot of things pissing me off about my school. EWAH has no consideration for the teachers or the students. Only the parents and their bottom of the barrel dollar. Well I have to go and prepare a lesson plan, or a midterm test, or a final, or a reading test, or a speaking test. One problem, I have to get my phone teaching done and I only have three breaks in the weak week.

Working for a company thats worth complaining about.

Pdog