Working Conditions

If you work with Korean teachers at the hogwan, be nice to them. They are often more qualified than you are and are paid less, treated worse, and given more paperwork because they are not native speakers. Realize that discrimination which works in your favor can be just as unfair. Some pleasantness might smooth over the resentment Korean teachers can have over working with alcoholic packpacker teachers in the past who have shown up late and then hit on them. Oddly, at my first hogwan job the foreigner teachers were not very sociable and I was closer to some of the Koreans.

If you are an EPIK or SMOE teacher, which refers to government-run programs which place you in a public school with a co-teacher, again, don't expect the worst, but they can vary widely. You may get a principal and co-teacher who are supportive, and you may get a school which grudgingly accepted you and has a lazy co-teacher who muddles through the textbook and undermines your efforts. What else can I say except that teaching here is a bit of a gamble?

Big Things

Maybe it is a good idea right from the start to think about whether you have the right disposition to be an ESL teacher in Korea. I think this is almost as important as academic qualifications. Think about my little analogy:

A foreman hires a team to dig a ditch to lay a pipe in. On the first morning, everyone shows up and is given teaspoons to dig. One group of workers tells the foreman, "This is absurd—why don't we use shovels? This will never get done!" The foreman answers, "Thank you for your opinion. This is the rule. Go dig the ditch as we asked you." The group protests and complains until all are either fired or quit in frustration. The second group shrugs and says, "As long as I get paid, I'll dig with a toothpick if they want me to. What the hell do I care if the ditch is ever finished?" This group can last a long time, but at times they feel a little bitter for having prostituted themselves in this way. A third group says, "I am paid to dig a ditch with a spoon. Maybe I can try a tablespoon or a soup spoon without causing problems. It will not be perfect, but at least I feel like I'm making things better."

Teaching ESL in Korea can be like this. You need to use the soup spoon. You may be given crappy, cheap textbooks; you may have pointless meetings; you might have rules for the sake of rules. If you are the sort of Type-B person who can roll with it and make the best of things, you can get through bad days. If you imagine yourself organizing everyone to demand shovels, spare yourself an ulcer and do not choose this career.

This is my experience, and others are free to disagree. My experience is that hogwan directors will give you considerable freedom in your teaching practises. My schools gave me a curriculum schedule, a textbook, a box of activities, and sent me out to go do it. Maybe because the directors often aren't teachers and want to preserve the distance between the two roles, they are more willing to leave you alone. It's a good thing.

Where most hogwan directors will give you little or no freedom is in making suggestions about the curricula, students, resources, or other practises of the school. In the west, meetings are often sessions where ideas are shared and discussed freely. In Korean meetings, the bosses talk and everyone nods, and then everyone goes out to eat roasted pork and get drunk. It is a Confucian society, and you will have to get used to this reality: you are not the boss; thus your opinion doesn't matter. In a way, Korea can be like imperial Rome. Getting permission to do anything at work will be impossible, but if you just go and do it and it makes things work better and doesn't create difficulties for the bosses or embarrass them, forgiveness is easier.

The most common problem with the ESL industry in Korea can be reduced to a simple self-fulfilling syllogism:

1. Foreign teachers are assumed to be drunken, incompetent losers who are only after the local women.
2. Serious and qualified teachers get frustrated after being treated with disrespect and contempt, and leave.
3. The remaining ESL teachers tend to be drunken, incompetent losers who are only after the local women, justifying the prejudices of the media and school administrators.

I've been teaching in a hogwan and in a university long enough to almost predict who can last and who will burn out. Type A people— the ambitious, those who feel strongly about improving education, women's status, getting ahead, etc.— they don't last. Type B people— the type who are willing to, within limits, tolerate arbitrary policies which sometimes hinder their work, and can laugh about it and be content to do their best and work around things— they can last. Simply put, neither Korea nor your employer cares about your culture or your personal philosophies. They care about you being on time, doing your job, and producing satisfied students and / or parents.

I'm sorry to say this, but it's true. Keep a little idealism, but accept that the system is not going to change quickly. Why do I have to attend a special meeting which is held in Korean when I can't understand it? How does my having office hours, arranging paper clips for two hours, help anyone? Why is this person my superior because he's a man and he has three degrees in an unrelated discipline, when he has no classroom experience in his life? How can the grammar memorization method of teaching English be better when it hasn't worked since World War I? If your blood pressure is already rising, maybe you should rethink ESL.

Little Things

You don't need a suit and tie every moment, but dress well. Appearances are important here and you will notice that the Korean teachers generally dress well and conservatively. If your goatee, snake tattoo, and blue punk hair are important to you, fine, but expect to be treated accordingly. Yes, you have the freedom to dress like a biker or a slut. But expect people to stare at you for it, and for the school to treat you badly for it. You can wear what you want after work.

Take the time to plan your lessons and have back-up activities; improvisation doesn't go over well here. Try to read at home. Real reading, not just internet chat sites about anime. Try to keep your mind active. Your ability to speak English will actually deteriorate over time without immersion in (or vacations in) an English society. Learn to be flexible and not to whine when the directors make changes without telling you, or at the last minute, which they always will.

When I first came to Korea, I tried to teach as I would in Canada or Mexico. Koreans want to learn English, but they don't necessarily want to learn about English society or English ways of learning (though some do very much). The Korean mode of teaching is also top-down. If you give students a lot of choices or run the class like a democracy, they will be confused, or complain that the class is disorganized to the directors. Be sensitive to the fact that younger adult students will defer to older adults, and often women will defer to men. Many students will find the English class somewhat liberating from those social expectations, but they are persistently ingrained in the culture.

Lesson planning usually isn't difficult at a hogwan because you can usually just follow the text, but that can get a little dull and so you should be working on building activities and handouts to augment it, or at least working on picking out parts of the textbook that will be more useful or interesting in class. Koreans tend to learn English the way western students learn Latin or French. They know the grammar intimately but have little feel for informal conversation. If you try to teach grammar you might find your students know more than you do, and my advice is that you find yourself a book or site on usage so that you won't be embarrassed when you're asked whether something is a gerund or a participle.

Go with your strengths as a native speaker, which is your knowledge of cultural semantics and expressions— that is, saying natural-sounding things appropriate to the situation. For example, Korean has levels of respect built into the statement and English doesn't, so beginner Koreans don't understand the difference between "Give me a hamburger" and "I would like a hamburger." They don't know the meaning or significance of current expressions like you do and this is a more productive area to discuss. The culture makes very little use of sarcasm and Koreans often need help understanding western humor. If you personally have a dry or sarcastic sense of humor you need to check this around students as they will often have no idea when you are being serious or not. You can also check my site for handouts and more on issues of teaching language.

To me, freely discussing issues or encouraging creative, non-linear thinking are good things in class, but you have to introduce these classroom styles gently as it hasn't been a large part of Korean education. Older Koreans are sometimes odd in that they are so very uncreative and by-the-book, but they do respect creativity in those who have it. Sometimes art or music goes over well in a class if it's not too unconventional. Again, I stress; if you're teaching children you can have more games and be more freewheeling, but for older students or adults keep classes fairly predictable and organized. The style of Koreans in the workplace is bali, bali, bali! (Hurry up!). Classes don't need to have long periods of reflection and calm; have lots to do and move on, and don't let people get bored.

When Things Go Bad

Much is made on Korean discussion boards about dismissals and contract violations. I've had pretty good luck myself, but it can happen. ESL contracts simply aren't enforced well here, and there are occasionally dishonest directors. If you're paid fully and on time, you're doing pretty good. Here are things that typically happen when things aren't going well.

• We have to let you go because you're a bad teacher. Well, maybe it's true. But maybe it's not, and the director just wants to get rid of you eleven months into your twelve-month contract, usually to avoid paying you the one-month salary bonus that employers must pay after a one-year contract is finished. That cannot be negotiated away; it's the law.
• Times are tough, and we have to reduce your salary / have you teach 'special classes' of Russian chemical engineers on Saturdays / tie salaries to student levels / be late with the pay.
• Oops! Your employer forget to contribute to your government-mandated pension plan, but still deducted pension contributions from your paycheque. Funny how that happened!
• Worst case scenario; the director just won't pay, period, and refuses to pay your airplane ticket or one-month bonus (severence).

What can I say? I don't have experience with these nightmare scenarios. Don't let fear of these events stop you from coming to Korea, but be aware that sometimes the worst happens. If so, try to reason with the directors— they generally respect a polite but firm business negotiation. If you can get partial payment when leaving, maybe it's better to be satisfied with that than to tilt at windmills. If not, there are somewhat effective legal solutions open to you, but be realistic; you're a foreigner in the legal system, and even for Koreans justice moves slowly. Koreans also have less patience for litigious North Americans who run whining to courts without exhausting other options, such as diplomacy.

Do not assume that because it's a university job you will be treated like a professor. At some unigwons or 'institutes' teachers are just as expendable as anywhere else. The university program I worked for at KNUE is run by the ministry of education, but I was still occasionally cheated out of wages (in my case it was disputes over vacation pay) just like I might be anywhere else. My workplace also exploited a legal loophole to avoid paying instructors on sick days. These things are going to happen.

I don't encourage teachers to do the infamous midnight run— simply packing up and sneaking out of the country, forever—as it makes things harder for everyone else. But sometimes people feel they don't have a lot of choice, and so I won't judge them. Just don't do it over something petty; if you want to return to Korea someday it could come back to you.

And— I keep qualifying everything in this website— don't start out being antagonistic and expecting the worst. Your bosses are human beings (most of them). My first boss picked me up at the airport, got me on my feet, and even though he forced me out of the job he was pretty fatherly sometimes and helped me get a better position with his contacts. Over time I've realized that he was a person too and was worried about his business and the other teachers. The separation between work and home life is less here. Be pleasant and realize that building a friendly and respectful workplace relationship means a great deal here. It may happen that if the hogwan owners say they're having a rough time with the finances that they're telling the truth. Maybe you want to find out what kind of car they're driving.