My Job

I’ve finally decided to take on the monumentally boring task of explaining my teaching job and the education system of South Korea. If you enjoy learning random facts about other countries/cultures, read on. If you are hoping to be wildly entertained, I advise you to skip this post altogether.

In a broad sense, there are two types of schools in South Korea: public schools, and hagwans (a.k.a. private language schools). The public schools are run by the government while hagwans are run by private owners in more of a business model. English is taught in both public schools and hagwans, but a very high percentage of parents send their kids to a hagwan after school in the hope that they get a better grip of the English language. Therefore, the public schools run during normal school hours while most hagwans run from late afternoon until about 10:00 at night. As a foreigner coming to Korea to teach, I have the option of teaching in either model. If I were to teach in a public school, I would teach alongside a Korean co-teacher, I would likely have at least 30 students in a class, I would be the only native English speaker in the school, and I would probably be paid less, although I would get more vacation time. If I were to teach in a hagwan, I would teach my own classes (usually with a pre-determined curriculum and materials), I would rarely have more than 12 students in a classroom, I would most likely be teaching with co-workers from all over the English-speaking world, and I would probably get paid more. If you weren’t able to pick up on the obvious bias in the previous two sentences, I will be teaching in a hagwan.

Trying to find a hagwan I trusted, however, proved to be an interesting challenge. In order to get a job, you can either apply to a recruiter who will take your information directly to the schools, or you can apply to the actual school itself. Originally, it was my intention to find a school through a recruiting agency, my thought process being that if there was some discrepancy with my contract, I would have a middleman to help me sort things out. I quickly realized, however, that most recruiters work strictly for the motive of making money and don’t particularly care what happens to you once you are placed with a position. Additionally, after speaking to one recruiter who actually sounded less informed about the jobs I was seeking than I was, I decided to exclusively apply directly to the schools. After applying to a half dozen schools or so, I received three job offers. I didn’t take the first because I thought the salary and benefits were less than what they should be, and the interviewer sounded more interested in selling the school to me than I was in selling myself to the school. I didn’t take the second because they were clearly desperate. I sent them my résumé; they sent me a contract. The third school was the school that I was holding out for. Unlike the other schools that I applied to, I didn’t receive this job by answering a Help Wanted ad. The only reason that I even knew about this school to begin with was because my friend Charles, who taught in Daegu for over a year, told me that I should try to get a job with them because they are an ideal school to work for. Upon investigating, I found myself agreeing with Charles. MoonKkang (the name of the school, located in Daegu; population: 3-4 million) offers a higher salary for working fewer hours, offers more vacation time, and uses a structured curriculum, meaning that I won’t have to slave away for hours creating materials in my spare time. They also seem to go to greater lengths to ensure that teachers are adapting to the culture and the school…they offer free Korean language classes and, if the pictures on the website are in any way accurate, they evidently host a lot of parties that may or may not involve wrestling in the mud, dressing up like a Rubik’s cube, and drinking lots and lots of beer and soju (a Korean liquor that apparently tastes like vodka). If you’re interested in looking at the school itself, you can visit the website: www.mkeslteaching.com There are also some YouTube videos put out by my school that talk about culture/food/communication, etc. If you want to check them out, go to YouTube and type in “Moonkkang.”

I finally leave in a week and a half! Despite the fact that I’ve known for almost six months that I was going to do this, I’m somehow not prepared. The good news is that my almost complete lack of preparedness should make for much more interesting blog posts in the upcoming weeks.