My Life as a Foreign Fossil
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Living in Korea
Readers of this journal may see my caustic comments on different subjects and ask: "Well OK, so he's teaching in South Korea. But what does this mean, exactly?" :confused:
Good question. People are attracted to a job like this for many reasons – they may be fresh out of university and wanting to try something new; they may already have had a job or three and become disillusioned (myself included in this category, I think). One would think that going to another country and financing one's experiences there by working is entirely logical. But some homework is required before even approaching an advertiser who wants a new foreign teacher. This field is rife with all kinds of abuse, simply because of the profit motive. So what I read on the Internet about jobs in South Korea seemed promising, but the place is simply alive with "horror stories" of one type or another. :eyes:
Basically, you can earn the equivalent of UKP1000.00 or more per month, with no extra cost for accommodation other than utilities, by being a consenting foreigner working at a private academy or "hakwon" in South Korea. As I sit here writing this, I have entered into my third year here with the same Boss and to tell the truth, despite any problems I may have, it is a moderately comfortable existence, although just how "comfortable" varies from employer to employer. :rolleyes:
During the economic crisis of the late 1990s, many well-established language schools went under (and you meet their sad remnants all the time, although one can admire them for their persistence), so according to the rules of evolution, what we have now are a combination of the tough survivors and the new upstarts and again, as I write this, the various hagwons are engaged in a turf war, the outcome of which is far from certain. The economies of East Asian countries have been dodgy for a while and with a limited amount of money available from the parents, inevitably there will be losers and in a society where success as a "professional" is closely linked to the concept of "face", of course, no-one wants to be a loser. :alien:
Warning signs are never difficult to see but according to many accounts, the first sign that the school is in financial difficulties is the repeated deferment of salary payments. I myself have experienced this only once, whilst working at the boss's other branch here, when they were waiting for the utility bills to arrive, and my employer is really quite excellent in this regard. But a soon-to-be-unsuccessful hagwon owner abuses his staff in as many ways as you can imagine, is often drunk on spirits and is also often unavailable, at least if previous accounts are anything to go by. :drunk:
How, then, would people (by which I mean foreigners, of course) end up in a situation like this? There is a thriving trade in East Asian countries for third parties who "introduce" foreigners to prospective employers – in other words, recruiters. Not all of these are bad (I came to Korea thanks to one of them, for example) but there seems to be little legal regulation of the trade. Huge sums of money may change hands in a single transaction, in which of course the foreigner is not involved. Estimates of the number of foreigners involved in teaching in South Korea annually render a figure of 15,000(ish) but I am sure the actual number is much higher, and wherever there is money, graft and corruption are usually never far behind. According to the EFL-Law web site, hagwon owners also have regional "associations" with whom they have regular meetings to discuss how to get around any potential legal problems they may have. Into this morass of dubious legality plunges the often unwary (and linguistically-challenged) foreigner. :yikes:
Then there is the question of the actual "academies" themselves. They are private entities and as such are able to sponsor work visas for foreign residents; the absolute minimal qualifications for eligibility are at least a first (undergraduate) Degree and you cannot get an E-2 (foreign teacher) visa for entry into Korea without it; simply having, say, RSA/CELTA or a similar qualification is not enough (this applies across East Asia and is not uniquely the case in Korea). Often these places are quite small but on the other hand, some of them are huge. All of the places where I have worked in Korea have been on an upper floor in a building shared between a number of businesses, and this was much the same in Taiwan too.
Where many employers fall flat on their faces is a combination of the owner not speaking good enough English and also not realising that the person they accepted for employment may know absolutely nothing either about teaching or the Korean language; a guaranteed recipe for disaster, or at least an ineffective breakdown of communication. Many are the tales you hear from China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan about the foreigner(s) being the last in the communication loop and frequently excluded completely. If communication is the lifeblood of business, Korean businesses are woefully anaemic. :yuck:
It is not uncommon for these places to be part of a larger franchise chain, and a consequence of this is that they use the franchisor's licenced materials as well as their own choices of teaching materials. But again, it is not a uniform thing for the employers to ensure that new employees are properly versed in how they are expected to perform their duties, as all of these things cost money. East Asian employers generally are often accused by their native employees of being "stingy" and the knock-on effect of this is poor quality of service.
Part of the quality problem is another common East Asian syndrome, that of preferentially purchasing locally-produced learning materials which are often of dubious quality. One thing which your Korean coworkers may discover quite quickly is that these texts are full of errors which they themselves may have difficulty seeing; some Korean-produced materials are truly execrable, but then, you will find the same problem in Taiwan, China and Japan, too. Try to be helpful and your well-intentioned suggestions will simply be dismissed. You're only a foreigner; what do you know??? :down:
One e-mail friend in Tokyo told me that many years ago, she went to London for three months to study English, and of course, when she returned to school in Japan, she could see all the errors, because she had been taught correct "English" English. Her teacher, of course, would not accept the idea that the book was incorrect, largely because many teachers of English in East Asian countries (and elsewhere) are fearful of having their notional authority in the classroom undermined by someone with better knowledge or – even worse – an actual native speaker. Students had to accept what was in the book. :zip:
The worst case I have heard of so far in this regard was from a group of Canadians and Americans I met in Joyce's Irish Bar in Masan. They had been in China for about six months and the place was great, food was sumptuous etc., but pay is usually low and their "employer" (read: agent) insisted upon keeping their passports, which is an illegal practice. The texts they had to use were full of errors. Why? Because the exams were also full of errors and therefore, to pass successfully and well, you had to replicate all of those errors in what you learn as a student in China. :clown:
One might be led to ask just how many hagwons an individual student is required to go to in the course of their pre-university education, and the answer is startling (and I know that all of this is true, because I have to call my students each night): some children may just go to the one hagwon, whereas many go to four four, five or six each week, often two or more each night. Of course, this also includes schools where they do things that they enjoy like hapkido or taekwondo, but it all costs money, a lot of money, and of course the parents have to work long hours (albeit predictably not very effectively) to pay for all this.
In the so-called "Confucian" countries, education came to be prized in antiquity as a means for poor people to rise socially. In China, there was a popular notion that when this attempt was successful, the family would rise in three generations and then decline in the following three, a dynamic situation. Japan and Korea were heavily "Sinicised" to the extent of using Old Chinese characters in their writings, and as a vassal state, Korea instituted a system based upon the Chinese civil service of old, a sort of "Mandarinism with Korean Characteristics", as the Chinese themselves might say. But the notion of education as a means for social advancement and escape from poverty is so firmly entrenched even today that parents are obsessed with getting their kids more education than their neighbours' kids. And this is where all of the private "academies" fill a gap which cannot be filled by the day-schools.
It is where the Koreans' social ultracompetitiveness synergises with the parents' desire to be prescriptive abut their offsprings' various futures. But the consequence of this, which had already become manifest in Japan, was the "Collapse of the Classroom" – the kids are not interested in study because they get it rammed down their throats most hours of the day and even at weekends, they go home and their parents give them everything they want, so they are often spoilt and demotivated, and even impossible for the foreigner to control. Many are the classes I have had where I stood there like an idiot talking to myself, because the kids just would not talk. Now I discover that they are like that with the Korean teachers, too! :sherlock:
Somewhere in the gap between the desire for social advancement and the desire to make money, the Korean educational system has become strangely "fossilised" and ineffective. As entities geared towards profit in the name of education, the enterprises have lost sight of the prime objective – which, in the case of learning languages, is communication – and the avoidance of the types of informational-exchange problems which have always dogged East Asia's relationships with foreign countries, which are often important trading partners. Inward investment into Korea by foreign firms has declined because the latter feel that the Korean business environment is too aggressive for them. Korea is often held up as a post-World War II "economic miracle" but the country still has problems, and this fossilised educational system is one of them. :faint:
Why, then, do the various private schools desire so much to have foreigners working for them, when they cannot communicate properly what they want, do not give proper "orientation" to the newcomers and often use cheap and nasty materials? The answer is that in Confucian societies, foreigners are a sign of prestige; the more successful the hagwon (and therefore the more money it earns), the more foreigners it can afford on its payroll, and a single foreign teacher costs the business a lot more than the locals, which is why the relationship between them and the foreigners can be quite strained. The parents see that they have more foreigners than their competitors and see this as a sign of quality, and ask the hagwon to take on their (often stroppy) kids. The hagwons also perform a "creche" function in that they help to keep the kids out of mischief. So although the final effect may not quite be as desired, there is some learning involved and the kids are in a safe place; the foreigners get a succession of interesting experiences and the kids experience a range of different English speaker accents, albeit at the price of varying levels of skill on the part of the foreigners. :ko:
Prospective "teachers" looking at East Asia as a potentially interesting and enjoyable experience need to make sure they are clued-up before they go. Korea differs from places like Taiwan or China in that you get your proper entry visa and Alien Registration in short order, an experience which I unfortunately never had in Taiwan. But you as a foreigner will run into all sorts of problems on a daily basis, particularly as a foreign national with limited or zero local language skills. The Koreans could do much better when it comes to teaching foreigners their language. But that's another story . . . . :jester:
fukudasan
