Yes. Read this if you want to teach in Korea.
Teaching January 6th. 2009, 10:00pm1. Don’t say “Assa!” anymore, because you sound like an idiot when you do.
2. Don’t take a ddongchim (finger playfully thrust up your ass) lying down. (Or standing up for that matter!)
3. Don’t let your kids give you dumb nicknames.
4. Don’t let anybody call you crazy in Korea.
5. Don’t call kids crazy and try to stand on some lame principle that “They should know how English is really spoken.” It only makes you sound like a pompous idiot.
6. If you’re bald, don’t let your kids touch your head.
7. If you’re fat, don’t let your kids touch your belly.
8. If you’re hairy, don’t let your kids rub your forearms.
9. Don’t tell your kids stupid lies about your home country. Don’t tell them that you’re an alien, even though it may be hilarious to them.
10. Never, ever hand over the power to punish your students to a Korean, whether it be your co-teacher or the owner of the school. You will soon find yourself completely powerless. (Which explains why I was furious about this)
Brian in Jeollanamdo (Oh, and I missed his attribution to The Joshing Gnome for the list, sorry) hits it out of the park with this essay about how Foreign teachers need to interact with students. He gives you some time tested tips about what you need to do to correct bad student behavior that has been ingrained in previous student/teacher interactions. The whole “I’m your teacher, not your friend” thing is a huge barrier to first year Foreign teachers.
It is easy to sympathize with children when you first arrive in Korea because their whole education system seems so cruel and time consuming. Teachers aren’t doing the students any favors by being a “friend” instead of a teacher. Korean kids are going to study if you are here or not, and not getting anything done only wastes their time. If they wouldn’t do the same thing to a Korean teacher, don’t tolerate it in your class either.
You don’t need to lack compassion, but being an English Teaching monkey isn’t good. When students, or even worse, adults, do the attention getting “HELLO!” thing on the street for laughs at your expense, meeting it with anything but distain and pity is the wrong reaction. Don’t feed the monkey. It makes us all look bad and gives people outside the business the impression you shouldn’t be treated seriously. Seriously. Look at this guy:
Prime Example of An English Teaching Monkey
Don’t be that guy.
5 Responses to “Yes. Read this if you want to teach in Korea.”
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January 7th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
actually, not to be a jerk or anything, but I’m pretty sure brian was quoting that top ten list from The Joshing Gnome’s post.
You should check out The Joshing Gnome if you haven’t already: it’s one of my favorites. I’d link it here, but I’m traveling in china and wordpress seems to be locked out here.
I DO agree with every point on the list, though.
January 8th, 2009 at 9:00 am
I agree with all but #10. My boss knows that I “will” walk if the problem kids aren’t dealt with quickly and to my satisfaction. This is my one “line in the sand” point, and I think more people should think about it when signing a contract. However, I do believe in second chances, so after the talk with the boss, they will get one more chance before being booted out of the institute.
In my 2-plus years here, I’ve only had one kid booted for his obnoxious behavior in class and in regards to his fellow students. It actually brought me closer to my fellow co-teachers who were having the same problems, or worse, with him, but they couldn’t do anything about it because of their societal relationship with the boss or worry about losing their jobs if they couldn’t control this uncontrollable bully. It also really helps out that they current kids still remember this, and they know if I send anyone to the office it won’t be a pleasant experience for those sent.
January 8th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Your situation seems to be the exception to the rule in most schools. Kicking out a student is direct revenue down the toilet for them. Most parents also have contacts with other parents and don’t take kindly to the embarrassment of having a student kicked out of school on behavior grounds. With the whole “direct confrontation is never possible” stance of Korean manners, just telling people that there is something wrong with their children is a breech of the social contract.
Bored Korean housewives are exceptionally petty when it comes to things like that, and I imagine that even though the net benefits to classes were tenable and a large net positive (ideally involving your happiness and the growth of a positive learning atmosphere that increases attendance in the long run), you probably lost other students in the process as parents tried to sabotage your school through negative word of mouth.
It’s almost a foregone conclusion that the student you kicked out had no younger siblings that would consider enrolling in the school. Kicking out a brat is hard, kicking out a brat with younger brothers or sisters is nearly IMPOSSIBLE because all those kids represent revenue streams that the academies bank on to keep business up year over year.
It’s a delicate balancing act.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
You are very right about revenue streams and the balancing act when dealing with Korean housewives. It takes a lot to get me that upset though, and our “school” is very unique in this poor neighborhood. We actually care about our kids, and the majority have been here for many years. Even the older kids, who have gone on to high school or grew upset at some of the teachers and left, still have younger, or older, siblings enrolled. They’ve been to other institutes, and they know ours is unique.
The only reason I left in the first place (after somehow finding the strength to finish my contract) was because of the accidental death of one of our students being run over by the school van. It didn’t get ugly until the police ruled it an accident attributed it to the student on account of several adult eyewitnesses, and the child’s parents (and numerous family members) went totally berserk in the school demanding a payout. The concept of “face” allowed these suffering, but greedy, people to come into our school and cuss out, and spit on, the students and yell at the teachers for continuing to work at such a place as well as destroy whatever they could get their hands and feet on. On this particular day, our DESPICABLE franchise officials cowered in the back as my boss was nearly beaten to death and refused to call the police. Luckily, some concerned parents did call the police. I later found out that had I been attacked and fought back to protect myself or the children, I would have gone to jail since I am a foreigner here.
Some of the relatives would come back weekly over the following several months to try and cause us to lose students until the franchise finally convinced my boss to cave in and pay them a percentage of what the insurance paid out. These family members had actually taken to following me around to try and catch me doing something illegal to get me deported. We ended up losing a large percentage of kids over this constant harassment, but over time many have returned. In the end, the police were absolutely useless in this matter.
To say I despise the franchise is an understatement, but the owners are like family to me and the other teachers (one is a teacher as well), and a majority of the kids are like our own. Yet, my teaching boss even kicked out a problem student with a younger sibling (I had no problem with him, but he was demon with the other teachers) because we have cameras in the rooms to document everything (This is why the family didn’t destroy the computers or hit the teachers during their rampaging, but they did destroy everything where there wasn’t a camera, and they beat the owner in the stairwell). She showed the mother the evidence of her child’s poor behavior and made note of it that the video is stored off-site and indefinitely. The really odd thing was that she didn’t remove her younger child from our school.
A by-product of the cameras is that they also documented a teacher losing their cool with the kids and saying some pretty awful stuff to them. The teacher was fired, and we lost one student in that class and her two siblings left as well because of the teacher’s vulgar explosion in class.
I also really feel for those kids who are suffering from mental problems or physical abuse at home or in school, and it tears me up that I can’t help them. I’ve taken a couple of these issues to my bosses, who definitely know about them as well, but they say that there is nothing they can do because of this is just the way it is in South Korea. This really hit home over this past Christmas as two former students killed themselves. One was distraught over letting her parents down by not getting into the right high school, and the other was tired of it all and couldn’t continue on with it anymore (the seemingly never-ending constant studying and classes). One of the girls was only in our school for a very short time, so I didn’t know her well, but the second one was here for all of my first year, and it hit those of us who knew her really hard. Then, having a few moronic kids making light of this tragic loss during the classes in the following days compounded this rough stretch of time.
But today was awesome, and it made me happy to realize that I’m actually back. I’m pretty sure tomorrow will be even better as I have a lighter load and my best classes.
Thanks for letting me take up a good chunk of your space.
John
January 8th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Holy crap! Two suicides and an accidental death in the first year of the school? Oh my. I’ve been unfortunate enough to lose a student as well to stress related suicide, but it wasn’t someone I was close to having only taught her for a month during my first summer intensive class session. Still, I know I had a hard time dealing with it. If you know those kids and have a connection with them, that’s rough.
I absolutely believe your story about harassment from family members and the police being complete bumbling Keystone cops here. You know how incompetent and worthless the judicial branch of the government is, so the poor feel they have no legal recourse. It sounds like they hired some gangsters to take your school down. I can’t believe you’d have returned to that sort of situation. I would have been gone. You make my minor complaints sound like nothing but annoyances in comparison.