Aug 26, 2009
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I want to post some stuff as "mini-blogs" more often, since many little issues slip my mind when I'm writing up my big "what I did this week" entries. These won't have pictures but will be more like discussions than a list of things that I did with my friends.
Orientation for Seoul's public school foreign teachers started this week. During this time, several hundred foreign English teachers are flown over and spend seven days at a training center in the middle of nowhere, where they are given a crash course in Korean customs, school life, class management, cultural differences, and lesson planning. In the past, the government has always paid for these flights in advance, which has been a pretty sweet deal. Just this year, they changed the policy so that the coming teachers would pay for their ticket and would then be reimbursed up to $1.3 million won (about a thousand USD). It still doesn't sound like a bad deal, right?
So about five or six hundred teachers have spent the past month or two gathering their necessary documents (health checks, background checks, college transcripts, recommendations) and have been in touch with their nearest Korean embassy to obtain the E-2 visa, which is specifically for teaching in Korea. It's not easy work, since you send your applications to your recruiter, who sends them to the government office, which approves it, sends you back copies, one of which you sign and send back to Korea and the other, which gets sent to the Korean embassy for proof that you have indeed been offered a teaching contract in their country. At the finish line, you've got your passport stamped with a visa, the Korean government has your contract signed, you're ticket is bought, and you're ready to go.
Unfortunately, for a large chunk of would-be-teachers, this is where their journey has stopped. For the first time, the Seoul government has made a pretty massive mistake in regards to their hiring process. Apparently to compensate for the number of people that drop out right before their departure, the government hired about 100 people EXTRA. Unlike in previous years, the dropout numbers were not high, forcing them to cut these teachers within 24 hours of their departures. These are people that had sold their apartments, quit their jobs, said "goodbye" to their regular lives and had been set to start a life in a new country. Depressing, right?
Scrambling to gain some sort of control over the issue, the government is trying to place teachers in the EPIK program, which consists of more rural areas in Korea. That means no Seoul, no Busan, or no Gyeonggi-do (the packed suburb that surrounds Seoul). I'd be so pissed. I went through Seoul's government-run program 1) so I wouldn't have to deal with the crap that hagwon teachers have gone through and 2) because I ONLY wanted to come if I could live in Seoul. These people got screwed out of $1,000+ and have 3 choices: try to get placed in another city, get deferred until February, or quit. As of now, only 10 out of the 100 have been placed in the EPIK program.
It's a pretty crap situation for all involved and just further shows the poor cycle of ESL teaching here:
Recruiters have low standards for teachers ---> people who make terrible teachers come here, act like idiots, and "make foreigners look bad" ---> Koreans lose respect for English teachers and treat them worse off, running tv programs about how foreigners are only here to molest/rape/steal their women and sell drugs to their children ---> ESL veterns complain about the terrible treatment to their family, friends, and internet strangers, thus scaring off possible good teachers with good qualifications --> Recruiters can't find people with good qualifications, thus they have low standards for their teachers...and repeat.
The story has hit the ex-pat community here pretty hard. It's made the English version of the Korea Times and is a topic of conversation among ESL teachers. But...none of my Korean co-workers had heard about it. When I told them about it, they were appalled and embarrassed, saying, "This can't possibly make Korea look good...that our government made this kind of mistake and is causing so much trouble for people that we tried to recruit." But it doesn't appear to be anywhere in the regular Korean papers.
Many foreigners are pretty angry at this, and that the government seems to be pointing a finger at foreigners, citing us as the reason why they had to cancel so many jobs. According to them, if--in the past--we'd had our papers organized at the right time or if we had not dropped out all of a sudden, they wouldn't have had to do this to the new wave of teachers. The Korea Times article said nothing about the government receiving huge budget cuts, which has been a huge source of gossip and talk amongst the Korean teacher community. Schools and districts receive a certain amount of money for a foreign teacher, but we're like an extra bonus--if a school or district can't afford it, we're the thing to drop.
Another thing that's angering the canceled teachers is the way the government went about handeling it. Rather than giving a voluntary withdraw option or rather than give priority to those with actual teaching experience, the government admitted that it just made 100 random cuts. People with years of ESL teaching experience IN KOREA got cut while others who were fresh out of college with no experience were accepted. Groups that had originally been told they could be placed together were cut. One girl signed up with her friend, but when the girl came to Korea, she was told that her best friend had been cut. Um, I'd be crazy pissed if I'd made plans to come here with a friend and then they suddenly couldn't come.
This isn't the first time the government's program has been disorganized (last year, they screwed up the contracts for about 100 teachers, causing them to miss the entire week of orientation...which meant dumping them at their schools on the first day of classes with absolutely no expecations, training, or information), but it's definitely the largest. I've always recommended Seoul's public school program since it seemed like the most organized of the lot (but that's still not saying much). I'll definitely think twice about it now, since it was handled so poorly and has screwed over so many people.
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10 Comments
Having said that, higher qualification and/or more teaching exp doesn't also necessarily mean better teaching. I just did the celta course and there were actual teachers doing the course with me but their teaching style was boring & ineffective. I guess it really depends on teacher personality...
but Yeah, this is a pretty disorganized situation... glad i didn't apply for the august round! Do you think they might have the same problem with the jan/feb recruiting? and those who defer to feb, doesn't that cut down the take-in for that period... ? >< oh gosh not looking goood =\
it's a breach of contract.....anybody who know someone in this situation....tell them to look at their contract and Korean contract law about Promissory Estoppel and consequential damages
Great post though, very informative