The frustration of teaching in South Korea

While living in a foreign country can sometimes be fascinating, sometimes the job gets in the way of the adventure. For the last month or so, I've been in Korea teaching at a hagwan, which is just the Korean name for a private academy where little, rich kids are sent to learn better English and other skills. I'm a debate instructor who also teaches a ton of English classes. I'll probably be teaching a lot of SAT level literature classes in the near future as well.

One of the problems with being a teacher here is the mentality towards teachers. We're often treated as hourly workers rather than professional teachers, which means if you have no classes to teach, they want you to hang around and do absolutely nothing but busy work for hours and hours that have nothing to do with teaching duties. It completely devalues the station of being a professional teacher, because you're treated no different than a fry cook, punching a clock and doing whatever the shift supervisor tells him to do, although he spends most of his time cooking fries. But when there are no fries, the shift suervisor tells him to sweep the floor. Teaching here is a lot like that. It gets really frustrating because people didn't go to school for the years they did to be told to do busy work when their real functions have been completed. It's probably a major reason why so many quit and go to work for better jobs. It's just not worth it.

The second problem, and this is more hagwan related, is that the mothers of these students have absolutely no respect for the teachers whatsoever. As a matter of fact, they will call to complain if little jonny's workbook hasn't been "corrected" by the teacher to the mother's satifaction. I teach an essay writing class that mainly uses a textbook that requires the students to come up with their own observations to build upon until they have enough information to start creating an essay. It's one of those things that really has no "correct" way of doing it other than to just do it. This was the subject of a complaint of two mothers who didn't feel that little jonny was getting enough correction in his workbook. In the class, the student reads out loud what he or she has, and then verbal comments are given as to how to improve the note taking. There's no way to correct this stuff as even the instructions say the student shouldn't use correct sentences or anything other than jot down thoughts based on the question. Yet, they complain. And complain. And complain. No one survives a job long when someone keeps questioning whether or not they are doing the job right. Either the person blows a gasket and quits, has a heart attack (the most likely option in my case these days) or gets fired for incompetence (because of continued complaints). For the record, the Korean supervisor doesn't really back me up. She brings in the complaints and even after I explain why my method actually produces learning, she'll respond with: "Yes, but the mothers think...." So, basically, it's a never ending cycle that only succeeds if I give in and stop using teaching skills and start teaching classes at the whim of Korean mothers who have zero experience teaching, but think they know better.

The other problem I've had since being here is that the curriculum changes on me on an almost daily basis. It gets really, really frustrating. You'll spend hours preparing for a class, because you really want to get it right, and then you'll be about to leave for a class, and some Korean teacher or supervisor will then interject that the curriculum has completely changed ("You need to teach the novel today instead of writing") or for some reason the class today has been canceled. I can't even count the number of classes that have been canceled, only to have that class show back up again the next day, after you figured you didn't need to prepare for that class anymore. It's like playing Calvin Ball, and even more confusing. Now, we're preparing a huge lesson plan for next month, and I'm fearing that after all of that preparation work, it will go the way of the dodo again.

So far, I don't think I would ever repeat this exercise again. On a cost-benefit analysis, the advantages so favor not have coming here as they do coming here. I'm sure many things can change over the course of my time here, but while I'm chalking most of this up to a learning experience, I'm not sure I'd want to learn it a second time.

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