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1. Do not get too excited at an offer — if you have a pulse and degree, you’ll get an offer.
2. Do apply for several jobs that look interesting.
3. Do ask for contact information for previous or current foreign teachers at the school. If it’s refused, walk away.
4. Do understand that most hagwons (private schools) are run in what you may perceive to be an unprofessional, haphazard manner. Part of it is cultural — leaving things to the last minute and then PANICing is a time-honoured Korean tradition. How much of this you think you can endure is up to you.
5. Do be wary of agents and recruiters. They don’t have their spotty reputation for nothing. You will be better off in many (if not most) cases by being in contact with your potential employers directly.
6. Do make sure you get a contract to look over before you agree to anything.
7. Do ask old hands to look over your contract at Eslcafe or Koreabridge.
8. Do your research. Forums like Eslcafe and Koreabridge can help you prepare and answer a lot of your questions.
9. Do read the forums and try and triangulate what a standard contract looks like.
10. Do be aware that forums like the ones linked above are chock full of negativity and resentment.
11. Do be aware that many of the other foreigner short-timers you meet are also full of negativity and resentment.
12. Do be professional and firm in your dealings with your potential employer. Know what you want, but know also what is standard
13. Do not get involved with drugs. Just don’t. Develop a love for booze.
14. Don’t show up at work drunk or disheveled.
15. Do dress the part of a teacher, even if you don’t feel like one. It will be noticed and appreciated.
16. Do get a feeling for some of the concepts that underpin Korean culture and you’ll be miles ahead of most new arrivals.
17. Do make sure that your employer is meeting regulations in terms of pension and national health deductions.
18. Don’t worry about teaching. If it’s kids you’ll be wrangling, you’ll be doing more wrangling that teaching.
19. Do teach as much as you can, even if you feel like a babysitter.
20. Don’t make the rest of us look bad.
21. Don’t worry about getting food and stuff from home. These days there are box stores in most places where you can buy imports even if you’re outside the mjor cities, and websites where you can order them.
22. Do bring shoes if you have big feet. Outside of the major centres it can still be hard to find size 11s or 12s, and any bigger is effectively impossible.
23. Do plan ahead for the possibility that things don’t work out. Do be aware of the consequences of a midnight run. If you can’t bear it, give notice, get a release letter (you can find one at Koreabridge to print out), and keep your options for the future open.
24. Do make sure you are willing to accept the terms of the contract as written. Be aware that you will be held to them, even if your boss may feel that he or she is not similarly beholden. Be aware that emphasis on personal relationship as overriding contract paper is a part of Korean culture, but that this can be used against you in a Catch-22.
25. Do not teach private lessons on an E2 (teaching) visa. It’s against immigration law.
26. Don’t try to sneak a fake degree past the authorities. It’s a major cause celebre these days with both famous Koreans being outed and scam-artist ‘teachers’ being deported. You will almost certainly get caught.
27. Do make sure you have multiple original copies of your documents when possible.
28. Don’t go out and get drunk and disorderly in Itaewon. Don’t be that guy.
29. If your primary reasons for coming to Korea are any two of women, beer, and money: go somewhere else. The expat community has too many of you already.
30. Do make an effort to learn some Korean, even a few phrases at the beginning. Koreans have problems with nonstandard pronunciation of their language (there have traditionally been very few non-native speakers), so work hard on that.
31. Do learn to read the alphabet. It’s only a matter of a few hours, and is quite elegant both orthographically and philosophically.
32. Do be aware that when people laugh at you, it’s almost always out of embarassment on their part, not maliciousness.
33. Don’t get overly offended at what seems like excessively blunt comments (’It must be hard to be fat’) or personal questions (’Why aren’t you married?’). Despite the way it seems, they are actually efforts to become closer, rather than the opposite.
34. Don’t overpack. Especially if you’re in any of the cities, you’ll be able to buy most everything you need (bar clothes, perhaps, if you’re XX-large).
35. Don’t take promises that you will receive training on arrival too seriously. Chances are it will involve a tour of the classrooms and then a drinking session (if you’re lucky).
36. Be aware that Korea, even with its burgeoning Protestant Christian communities, is a drinking culture. If you are asked to socialize with your coworkers (and there is every chance that you won’t, but if you’re lucky) it will almost certainly involve food and drink. If you are puritanical in this regard, you may not be asked out again.
37. Don’t criticize Korea in front of Koreans, at least until you are certain that you are friends, and probably not even then. It achieves nothing but bad blood, and Korean people are fiercely proud, even as they are as aware as you are of all the problems. Do as they do — if you can’t say anything nice, say ‘well…’ and change the subject, and say something positive. If you feel compelled, match your criticism with some similar failing of your home country. I can’t emphasize this enough: be gracious and civilized, even if you don’t think the people around you are.
38. Don’t argue in public with your boss. If you disagree, fine, but be firm and professional, and take any disagreement to a private location. Do not make him or her look bad in front of others, or they will bear you a grudge.
39. Do be aware that no matter what you’re going through, other people have lived through it too. Reach out, either online or off-, to other expats if you feel like you’re going to lose it. Everybody feels that way sometime.
40. Don’t give in to culture-shock inspired despair. If it’s your first time overseas, it’s going to bite you hard after a few months. It passes, but never goes entirely away.
41. Do learn a little history of Korea — a little goes a very long way with Koreans, who will be pleased and surprised at any effort in that direction.
42. Do some reading around the Korean expat blogosphere. Personally, I come away angry and depressed every time I do it, but if you’re still keen on coming to Korea after a few hours of reading the K-blogs, you’ll be just fine.
43. Do travel around Korea a little — it’s not easy, but outside of the cities, it’s really quite a lovely place.
44. Korea’s still a pretty hard place for expats, but it’s nothing like it was a decade ago, so don’t whine. Seriously. Just don’t.

I’ve known literally hundreds of people here in Korea over the years from stressed-out newbies to multi-year old hands whose distress and grief could have been avoided by following some of these simple tips.

Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

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A bane of the ESL teacher’s existence is the undeniable fact that there are, to put it bluntly, a lot of textbooks for adult learners that are, to varying degrees, crap. The reasons for this state of affairs are many and varied, of course. Many of them are weighed down under more than one layer of the old language guano. You’re waist-deep before you even get started, digging through the stink to find something useful. But I’m here to help.

A few of the most common problems:

• You Vill Follow Zee Instructions: scrupulous adherence to outmoded ‘methods’
• The Horrors of Clipart: design that is user-unfriendly, or just plain ugly. (Much could be learned from good web site design, here)
• Siloed Syllabi: chunks of grammar (or language functions) are attacked (I choose that word with care), worried at like a terrier with a rat, then forgotten in the next section
• The Random Walk Theory of Textbook Structure: throw slips of paper labelled with verb tenses and grammar patterns into hat, shake it and turn it out on your desk. Voila! There is your outline for your textbook. (Korean-language textbooks for English speakers are the purest example of this kind of thing, for the most part)
• Formulaic Fundamentalism: Begin with stilted dialogue, then vocabulary list, follow up with humiliatingly banal ‘activity’, ancient, inauthentic reading and comprehension questions: lather, rinse, repeat.
• More Words, More Better: Business English is all about reading interminable articles, parsing spreadsheets and boring the tits off anybody in the blast radius.
• Be Free, Little Butterflies: Speaking skill is what the students want, amirite? Structural knowledge is soooo 10 minutes ago, dude. They can’t form the present tense yet? No worries — toss ‘em into the pool, get ‘em babbling away with this randomly constructed list of fascinating questions about eating noodles! Right.

These are, of course, just a sampling of the sins against the teacher and insults to the student committed by textbook publishers, of course.

The three biggest producers of lines of ESL textbooks for adults are Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, and Pearson/Longman (Oxford and Cambridge Presses both have poorly organized, confusing, slow websites. Prepare to be frustrated if you visit them). There are others, of course, but most of the series I’ve encountered in decades of teaching have been from these publishers, for better (sometimes) or worse (often).

Variation in quality between different titles, even within a single publisher’s catalogue, is a bit shocking, even to an unshockable old duffer like me. They range from superb (American Headway) to merely adequate (like New Person to Person, by Jack Richards, whose essay ‘30 Years of TEFL/TESL: A Personal Reflection‘ is a must-read if you’re in the field) to slightly embarrassing (New Interchange sucks in more ways than I care to think about).

The same problems and the same wild variation in quality exists in the Business English space as well. Cambridge’s New International Business English is one of the worst books I’ve ever seen along several of the axes of awful I mentioned above. A real stinker. Global Links from Longman is slightly better (while making the idiotic and all-too-common (and bewilderingly stupid) mistake of using readings that start with things like ‘Carly Fiorina is CEO of HP…’), and Communicating In Business, also from Cambridge, is actually pretty damn good, if demandingly difficult.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably looking for a recommendation or two.

These are mine: if you’re teaching English to adults (and you can group them more or less into levels from False Beginner to Advanced), you can’t do better (as of this year) than the American Headway series. They are well-designed and engaging, and structured in such a way that it is clear that they were written from a deep understanding of the way people approach and learn language. They have great depth for the dedicated teacher, and plenty of material that will make the novice look good, merely by following along. They eschew most of the cliche content that makes so many ESL textbooks tedious exercises in repetition. They have excellent companion teachers’ guides. I can find very little to complain about (other than Oxford’s tendency to use the same small stable of voice actors for all the recordings in a book, and even across different books) — I’ve used them for a few years now, and am happy to revisit them with each new class. Each time through, I find new ways in which links between concepts and structures have been embedded in the books’ structures, and ways to extend and enrich the material.

If you’re teaching Business English, I recommend Cambridge’s Communicating in Business. It’s intended for Intermediate to Advanced students, and demands business knowledge on the part of the teacher, but it rewards effort, and is directly applicable to the requirements of students wanting to increase their skills in and understanding of the language of international business.

Got some recommendations of your own? Post them in the comments, below, with my thanks. There are a lot of books I haven’t seen (for which, if experience is any guide, I can count my blessings).

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There is one reason for this, and one only, despite the acrimony and scattershot accusations that fly around in waves whenever the Korean media decides once again — something happening at the moment, but I’ve promised myself that I won’t let this site go topical and start talking about news ephemera, so I’ll leave the able chest-beating to others — that some more ad units can be sold if they haul out the dead horse ‘foreign teacher as parasite’ strawman to give it another few whacks. The root of the problems is obvious, and it’s fixable, but the gordian knot of money and politics and attitudes towards education in Korea continues to keep it from being fixed.

You see, almost anyone can legally come to Korea to teach. We can omit the word ‘almost’ if we choose from a pool of native speakers of English who have graduated from a university, in any faculty at all. We can omit both the words ‘legally’ and ‘almost’ if we choose from a pool of native speakers of English who are willing to falsify their documents.

This is, to speak plainly, ridiculous.

Now, like I said, of the hundreds (thousands?) of foreign teachers (so called because of the jobs they’ve held, rather than any consistent set of qualifications or experience) that I’ve met here over the years, more than 99% had received either no formal training, or perhaps had attended a two-week TESL training course (special sale this week only at Bob’s TESL Hut™!). Of those, there were some who actually were adequate teachers, despite the absence of formal training. Some combination of dedicated, enthusiastic, articulate, language-aware, empathetic, smart. Most, however, were not.

And that isn’t to say that each and every teacher I met who had the heavy qualifications and experience was a great educator. Most teachers, when it comes down to it, just aren’t that good. But most of the paperholders I’ve met were at least better than adequate. There just aren’t many of them on the ground here.

Why on earth would this be the case? Why would a nation so obsessed with education and the perceived status that scholastic achievement confers allow a situation to develop where the overwhelming majority of foreign language teachers were unqualified, inexperienced, and often utterly disinterested in the actual profession of teaching?

Well, because the government said it was OK. Proof of graduation from a four year university, in any field, along with a job offer (which is, thanks to the unscrupulousness of most recruiters and the cluelessness, to be blunt, of most hogwan (private institute) owners) is enough to get you an E-2 (English teacher) visa.

Now this is good news for the thousands upon thousands (latest figures put the total number of foreign English teachers in Korea at 15000) of young recent graduates desperate for a little travel and some money to pay off their student loans. Great news, in fact. Nothing could be easier than to pop over to Korea for a year or two and babysit some cute Korean kids.

But it’s absolutely heart-breakingly bad news for students of English, whether they be kids forced to study after hours by their parents, university students looking towards a global future, or adults studying for their work or personal improvement or retirement or whatever. If they’re savvy, or lucky, they may be able to find a school that hires actual teachers, or find one themselves, through word of mouth or connections. But if my experiences in the last decade have been any guide, they’ve got about 1 chance in 100 of finding someone who’s both capable and qualified.

Editorials in newspapers like The Korea Herald have been suggesting recently that parents actually ask teachers at the private institutes their children attend for proof of their qualifications. Well, sure, but that conveniently ignores the lack of filtering assumed to have been done upstream, not to mention the fact that even if the parents could speak English, they might reasonably be assumed to be less than qualified to evaluate the veracity of any documents produced (assuming the teacher in question was not so offended that they refused to produce said documents, digging themselves in turn a deeper hole of mistrust). It’s tacit acknowledgement that the system is so badly broken that there’s nothing to be done but arm yourself, stockpile textbooks and pencils, and get ready for the education apocalypse.

But there’s an smarter, less ad-hoctastic way to fix it, and it would be win-win-win for everyone involved, except of course for the cowboys, the forgers, the sex-tourists, and the ‘native speaker teachers’ who are incapable of properly forming the simple past tense, let alone teaching it.

Raise the standards for E-2 visas. Raise them high. Qualified teachers only, with experience. Nothing less than a CELTA/DELTA or equivalent if the candidate is not university-educated to be a teacher. Interviews for those candidates, performed by people who understand English, understand western mannerisms and culture, and who can (as few Koreans seem able) winnow out the scam artists and freaks (hell, hire native-speakers for the job!) Interviews that actually ask them to do a quick spontaneous demo lesson, if you can imagine that.

What happens under the new regime? The quality of language education rises. Happy government, happy students, happy parents. Demand continues to outstrip supply for teachers, and the imbalance increases, but the pool of vetted candidates are quality, and their cachet and remuneration increases to a level similar to those of full-time Korean professional employees. Happy teachers. The (perceived or actual) number of ‘freaks and refugees’ decreases, leading to a decrease in lurid tabloid exposés, which might make the media unhappy, but to hell with them. Private institutes close in droves, of course, but there are far too many of them, and far too many solely concerned with turning a profit, anyway. On the hagwon-owner upside, they can guarantee quality instruction, and can charge more for it. Quality over quantity permeates the education system. It’s a Brand New Day!

I’m being facetious, a bit, as is my wont, and I leave details of implementation to people more energetic than I, but I’m serious about this. There is one easy way to fix most of what is wrong with foreign language education in Korea, and English education in particular, and the filthy cloud of confrontation, mutual wariness, distrust and resentment and angst that hovers over the language landscape: raise the bar. Go upmarket, and do the right thing, rather than the short-term economically expedient thing.

Because attacking symptoms rather than causes is a fool’s game.

[Update : Welcome, Joongang Daily readers. Nice of you to drop by.]

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If you’re a national of any of a wide variety of countries, you can enter Korea for up to 90 days without a visa, simply by showing up. If you’re Canadian, you can enter visa-free for up to a six month stay. Longer stays require that you get a visa before you arrive, and of course, working while on a tourist visa is illegal.

For the vast majority of people entering Korea to work as teachers, the E-2 is what they will be applying for. If you are offered a job, you can either apply for and get the E-2 before you leave your home country, or come to Korea without a visa and do The Visa Run later. The most common destinations for visa runs are Fukuoka and Osaka, in Japan. Both Korean embassies are well-used to the constant, endless stream of E-2 applicants trooping through, and are quite efficient. Like most embassies and consulates, they do tend to have odd opening hours, but if you time things right, you can leave Korea one day and be back the next, E-2 in hand.

Working during that period after you arrive under the visa waiver program and before you do your visa run (if necessary) is illegal, no matter what your new boss might tell you. Many people do it anyway.

The E-2 is tied to your workplace — if you quit your job or are fired, you lose your visa, and must exit (and re-enter, if you wish) within a relatively short time. Other restrictions include a prohibition from working anywhere besides the company or institution who hired you, without permission from your employer, or teaching privately. This restriction is widely ignored, but can potentially get you deported if you break it. I’ve never personally known this to happen to anyone, though.

There are a wide array of other visas, but the only other ones that potential fresh meat (that’d be you, if you’re reading this) might be interested in are probably the H1, the F-2 (and F-2-1, which is, as far as I can tell, identical to the F-2), and the C4.

The F-2 (which I hold) is a spousal visa, for those married to a Korean national. It allows you to work where you like, at as many jobs as you like, and to enter and leave Korea freely, among other things. Recent changes to the visa (I believe as a result of the massive increase in international marriages, to a great extent driven by the unwillingness of young Korean women to marry farmers and their consequent importation of brides, mainly from SE Asian countries (a topic I will do some talking about at a later date, I promise)) have given us foreign spouses some great new latitude, including a provision that allows you to apply for permanent residency in Korea after 5 years holding an F-2.

The H1 is the working holiday visa, for young citizens of countries with which Korea has reciprocal arrangements. I don’t know if teaching is a job permitted under this visa — there’s very little else in the way of work if you don’t speak Korean — but I worked under similar visas in New Zealand and Australia back in the day, and they are great for the young, poor traveller.

The C4 is a temporary employment visa. I suspect that the chainsmoking, emaciated, leotard-clad Russian girls I invariably used to see at immigration offices back in the day — entertainers, don’t you know — were applying for these visas, or the E-6 entertainter visa.

On the fringe are the cowboys. I’ve personally met a few people over the years — usually Canadians, thanks to that 6 months entry visa-free — who had spent several years in Korea, teaching private lessons, always on a tourist visa, always working illegally. They’d simply hop out for a holiday in Thailand or somewhere twice a year, then come back and get another tourist visa on entry, and carry on. All of the ones I’ve met have claimed to make anywhere from five to eight thousand dollars a month doing this, tax-free cash in hand. I don’t recommend it, of course, because I do not advocate breaking immigration law, but I include it for completeness.

If anyone has questions, feel free to add a comment below.

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1. Jobsee.kr — the new hotness I haven't written any articles for OutsideInKorea in a good...

Truth : I have been working on (OK, thinking about) writing a book, one digging into the topics whose merest surface I scratch here, and one that also answers some of the million questions of general survival (”Oh sweet lord, where do I get real cheese?” “When my male adult student just told me he loves me, what did he mean, exactly?”) that loom large in the minds of new arrivals to Korea. A few thousand people a year show up here to teach, at a minimum — there’s gotta be a market for a book like that.

So here’s a taste, hot off the keyboard, so that in the future I can answer questions about teaching in Korea with a hyperlink rather than repeating myself all the damn time :

The Skinny

It’s pretty often the case that Teaching English in Korea involves very little teaching and not a whole lot of English. This is perhaps the most important thing about all this that nobody ever tells the newbies. In other words, for a very large proportion of people coming to Korea thinking they’ll be teaching the English language, the reality is that they probably won’t, really. If they have been hired by a kiddie hakwon (variously romanized, a ‘hakwon’ is a private cram school, and every city, town, village, hamlet and roadside rest stop has 2 or more in any given building), they may well end up in reality as a babysitter, thrown like human chum into the toothy screeching kindy shark pool with no guidance whatsoever from management and no means of self-defense. The actual English teaching that gets done in this situation may be minimal, while the neophyte teacher is busy struggling for survival. These teachers, with no training and no idea of what’s expected, end up relegated to the position of entertainers. Many, having had no experience teaching, are completely OK with this.

Some do end up actually teaching, and teaching older children, or university students (who, in Korea, have for the most part an emotional age of about 13, from the western perspective, except that the boys are required to interrupt their schooling to do military service for more than two years, which bumps them up to the level of, say, extremely sullen abused 16 year olds, perhaps, on their return), or even adults. Whatever the age, these students are for the most part veterans of the hakwon churn, and if they’ve studied English for any length of time, have seen a rotating cast of wide-eyed foreigners go through the Korea Newbie Cycle :

1. Wide-eyed wonder
2. Blissful confusion, pleasant buzzy disorientation
3. The three-month barrier : missing home, missing food, missing easy conversation
4. Unblissful confusion, culture shock, isolation
5. Resentment of Korea as personified by one’s boss, xenophobia, alcohol abuse, ranting
6. …

The next stages depend on the person.

Not a few freak out entirely, experience a psychotic break, and go wobbly. This is sometimes a permanent condition. Many of those who flip their noodles leave Korea, either suddenly or at the end of their contract, broken and dull-eyed or raving and newly-racist. Of that group, many nonetheless return, finding themselves unable to function properly back home. A self-perpetuating cycle of odd activity (which finds little to no censure in Korea, as most Koreans expect foreign devils to behave in inexplicable and aberrant ways anyway, and most expats tend to have a degree of quirkiness already, and are unwilling to criticize others in their small groups as there are so few around) begins, the end result of which is Freaky Waeguk-in (”way-goog-in” – Korean for “foreigner”) Syndrome. This is epidemic.

Some, after going a bit loopy temporarily, settle down, get a grip, and fall into one of two general patterns. They go native, learn the language, marry a Korean, and in a range of different ways further their isolation (or not, and try to maintain a balance) from their countrymen and mothertongue siblings, or they shrug, accept, and learn to enjoy the chaos, ferment, stares and prejudices and insults, and take it all with a sense of humour. Some of these stay for a while, some go elsewhere, or back home, after a year, or two, or three. If they’ve been cautious, they’ve been able to pay off their student loans, if they had them, and more. It is commonplace, although illegal (if caught, you will be at least fined and at most fined and deported), to teach private lessons at rates ranging from $30 an hour on up. I do not personally do this, but most people I know do, and you can double your income quite easily this way. I’ve known some people who have left Korea after 5 years with enough cash to buy a house back home. How they dealt with issues of taxation on their return was their business.

But that may not be what most people are reading this for, especially if they’ve arrived on the wings of Google. You probably want to know what the deal is with working in Korea, in one handy, pre-packaged essay. The dirt, the skinny, the Good Oil. You’re probably in your 20’s, and you probably have student loans to pay off. You might be looking a first adventure overseas, or you may be an old hand at the backpacker trail, and need some ready cash.

OK, here’s the story, in a very very small nutshell.

You will be offered the following, with some variations.

Anywhere from a bottom end of 2,000,000 won per month to a high end of 2,500,000 or more (this being winter 2008), usually for a contact-time workload of 25-35 hours per week. If you have any teaching qualifications, you should be able to negotiate your way towards the upper end of that salary range, but there is no guarantee. Some people make more than this without qualifications, and some less, I am aware. University positions, for which the required qualifications are sometimes MA degrees, but more frequently BA/BSc degrees with 3 or more years experience (in Korea), usually pay at the low end of the scale, but often have very generous holidays (12-16 weeks per year) and low contact hours (12 – 18 hours) per week. There are growing numbers of exceptions to this rule of thumb as Korean universities become ‘hakwonized’ and cash-flow oriented. Many university teachers are asked to ‘teach’ children these days, and are working as hard for their salaries as hakwon teachers.

Although some teachers will fly into a foaming frenzy of resentment if it is suggested, it is nonetheless true (again as a generalization) that there is a hierarchy of job desireability in Korea, which may be different for different individuals, depending on factors like how much they like children, how important free time is to them, how much money they want to make, or how professional a teacher they consider themselves. It does exist, in general terms, nonetheless. Remember, success and relationships in Korea are all about hierarchy, and assessing hierarchy requires assignment of status. You may not like it, but it is the reality of the situation.

At the bottom of the scrum are the kiddie hakwons, and the elementary/middle-schooler hakwons. These make up the vast bulk of teaching opportunities in Korea, and as a newbie, chances are this will be the kind of job you are offered. There are good schools and bad, and good bosses and (very, very) bad. Whether you get a good one or a bad one is often a matter of sheer, dumb luck. If you get a personal recommendation about a school, that makes all the difference, although it is not unknown for people to talk up a school in order to find their own replacement, nor is it unknown for people to keep the names of good schools to themselves and their circle of friends incountry. The best jobs are frequently not advertised, as in many industries.

Next up are the more reputable chain schools (which often have individual branches that are hellholes, so being part of a chain is no guarantee of quality), where you may teach kids, university students, and/or adults. Adult classes almost invariably mean an early start (before they go to work) or a late finish (after they finish work) or, in the most horripilating of cases, both. Split shifts — where you work from, say, 6:30 am to 9 am and then again from 6 pm to 9 pm — are less common than they once were, but still almost the rule in adult hakwons. This kind of schedule may well drive you insane, even if you are allowed to go home and sleep during the day, if you do it for any length of time. Some of these hakwon jobs are good, and some lucky new srrivals find great bosses or great salaries, or truly love teaching kids, and stay at the hakwons for many years. Some.

For many, the next step up the food chain is getting a university position. The workload is easy, the students are, if not motivated, at least generally quite pleasant, and although the money isn’t great, such a position leaves plenty of time for travel, writing, study, drinking, or whatever. At my last university position I worked four hour days four days a week, with four months paid holiday (plus national holidays etc), and made in the lower mid-range of the salaries quoted above.

Top of the heap for many is corporate jobs, teaching, editing, proofreading, developing curricula, and so on. These positions are few and far between, and unless you’ve been incountry for a number of years and have a great deal of experience with teaching Koreans and knowledge of Korean cultural norms, you might not even get an interview. There are exceptions, but they are few. Your alma mater means almost as much in this situation, as it does for Koreans, as anything else.

You will pay tax, healthcare and pension from this. For Americans and Canadians, it is law that your employer must deduct 4.5% of your salary for pension, and kick in an additional 4.5%. This money will be refunded (but you must apply) on departure from Korea. After a year, it will be somewhat more than a month’s salary. Antipodeans may not be able to reclaim their pension — the law may be changing there. Some universities use a private pension plan, so your contribution may vary.

Income tax will be deducted, at a rate that should not exceed 5%. Healthcare should be provided through the employer, and deductions will be on the order of 50,000 won per month, perhaps less. You will receive a paper healthcare booklet with a plastic sheath that you must take to clinics and hospitals to receive coverage.

You will often be promised training when you are offered a hakwon job, but there is a 90-100% chance you will not receive any. This is a cruel joke, but every time someone new to Korea complains about it, I am compelled to laugh nastily, mostly because I’m a complete bastard. Buy a book or two before you come, is my best advice, if you’ve never taught.

You will be offered accommodation, and you will in almost all situations be required to pay utilities for your apartment. Gas, water and electricity can be very expensive here. If you consume them to the same degree you’re used to in North America or Australia (or…) you will probably be paying between 100,000 and 200,000 won per month. Your accommodation may be single or shared, and this is something you should verify up-front. Many schools, understanding the preference of many for single housing, are offering it these days. Asking for pictures of your housing may be a good idea – it will in many cases be incredibly tiny, old and dingy. This is by no means always the case – it is increasingly common for good schools and universities to offer quite attractive, modern housing – but it is something to look out for. Nothing will depress you faster than a dim, mildewy closet to go back home to after an exhausting day of teaching.

Most schools offer airfare, either upfront or on a reimbursement basis. None will pay your return airfare if you break your contract, and if you notify them that you are quitting early, rather than just disappearing (as many do, which makes the level of trust for the rest of us grind down another notch), the school may well try to deduct the inbound airfare from your salary. Some school have begun withholding a portion of the first few months’ pay as a kind of insurance policy, usually because they’ve had teachers to a Midnight Run before. This is technically illegal, but if you sign a contract that mentions it, you really can’t complain too much. Read your contract carefully before you sign it, is the lesson here.

Most schools offer a contract completion bonus, usually equivalent to one month’s salary. This is sometimes finessed by claiming that the bonus was built in to the salary, and paid in installments. This is a scam, but a common one, and needs to be verified up front.

Bosses

Korean hakwon owners are almost universally reviled, and with good reason. The vast majority are entirely unconcerned with education per se, and obsessed with making (and scrimping to save) money. That’s why they got into the business, in almost all cases, and it is a lucrative one, if they play their cards right. There are horror-stories galore available around the net, and many of them are true, so I won’t bother getting lurid here, but a warning : caution is advisable. Treat your boss with deference and respect, and never disagree with him (chances approach 100% that it will be a ‘him’) in public. Don’t trust him until you’re sure you can, but not in a negative way, until you’re given reason. Just be sensibly cautious. Buy a book like ‘Ugly Americans, Ugly Koreans’ to learn about some norms of behaviour and how accidental offense happens in both directions, before you come. It is better to err on the side of overcaution and over-solicitiousness than to give offense, because once you do it, you may well be cast into the ‘waeguk-in who will never understand Korea’ bin, never to be recycled. Koreans love to label others, as do most folks, but their labels can be very sticky indeed.

That said, your Korean boss may just be a total psycho. It really isn’t that uncommon.

Do not assume that your director is cheating you by default, but have a clear understanding of what your mutual responsibilities are, and be vigilant (in a polite and professional way) to ensure that if you are upholding yours, he is similarly upholding his. Never accuse him of anything to the contrary in public, unless you have gotten to the bridge-burning stage. Try and remain calm in the face of apoplectic bluster, rather than giving back as good as you get. Korean men are brought up to believe that temper tantrums are an effective and acceptable means of dealing with confrontation and frustration, particularly with those who they perceive to be beneath them in the social, Confucian strata.

Confucian ideas are an important substrate to dealing with people here, particularly older males. Understand (even if you don’t agree), and try to leverage the fact that your only hook into the hierarchy (especially if you are young, female, and foreign, or any combination of the three) is that you are a teacher, and teachers are to be given respect. At least when they behave in a manner deserving of respect, where people can see ‘em.

Paperwork

You will be asked for originals of your qualifications and other paperwork, if you get to the contract signing stage. This paperwork is sometimes lost. Korean immigration recently lost my original university diploma. Yeah, I know. It happens, but these things can be replaced, although it generally does cost. Once immigration approves you and you have signed a contract, one of two things will happen — you will either be sent a document which authorizes the local Korean consulate to issue you an E-2 Teacher visa, good for one year, or you will be told to fly to Korea (no visa is required for most nationalities to enter as a tourist) and, once here, be sent to Japan to get the visa. The school should pay for both trips, although many schools try to refuse, often successfully. Be aware that if you teach after arrival in Korea and before you have that E-2 in your passport, you are breaking the law, and can be fined or deported.

To start a job at a new employer, you must receive your E-2 outside of Korea. Signing a new contract with the same employer only requires a trip to the local immigration office.

Recruiters

The Dave’s ESL Cafe Korean Jobs list, which is probably the single best resource for finding a job for people both outside Korea and already incountry, has been swamped in the last year or so with recruiter ads. “We have best jobs! All wonderful happy time fun! Beautiful city most good living in Korea!” and so on. The community is divided on recruiters – some have had positive experiences, and experienced no problems in finding jobs through them. My first job in Korea was through a recruiter, although I did not realize it at the time, and in many ways the job was a good one. But there are many who will tell you to never, ever use a recruiter, just because of the sheer number of unscrupulous, unprofessional agencies out there. I tend to agree, but if you take care, you may get lucky.

I recommend dealing with a school directly. The fewer intermediaries there are between you and the person you’re actually going to be working for, the better. Recruiters receive a payout for every warm body they deliver to a school, and sometimes a cut of the salary paid, which inclines them to push candidates toward positions regardless of the quality of that position, which is not a situation that should inspire trust. Using a recruiter may make your job search easier, but that is not necessarily a good thing.

Contracts and their importance (or lack thereof)

Contracts are a mixed bag in Korea. Some are stuffed with pages and pages of badly-written minutiae, all inserted, in most cases, because some previous employee behaved badly or performed poorly or drank too much or something of the kind, and the school is trying to close loopholes that might allow such things. Some contracts will have clauses that are outright illegal in Canada or America (or…), and these can be argued against but will rarely be changed. They are for the most part left unenforced, anyway, but when it is in the school’s interest, your director will not hesitate to point out the letter of the contract, and demand compliance. In no uncertain terms.

The other side of this is that with most Korean employers, the relationship between the parties to a contract is more important than the agreement on paper. This happens not only at the level we’re talking about, but manifests itself in the frustration that many western business people experience when negotiating with their Korean counterparts – Koreans frequently want to revisit language and conditions of an agreement long after, from the perspective of the westerner, all pertinent discussion has been finished, and the agreement has been ‘put to bed’.

This puts the employee into a difficult situation : when making a complaint about conditions of employment that appear to breach the agreement signed, many Korean directors will explain that ‘that’s not way do in Korea,’ and attempt to get out of their responsibilities, which the teacher assumes, rightly, are legally binding. On the other hand, when a teacher does or requests something that is outside the contract language, the director may turn around and say that ’sorry, not in contract’ as a reason to refuse the request or censure the activity. It can be maddening.

The EFL-law website is a good resource of last resort in this situation, but it must be said that in 9 cases out of 10 pushing a dispute to the point where legal or human rights recourse is necessary will mean that the foreigner loses. Not that you can’t win, but that you probably won’t. You should be aware that the system is strongly weighted in favour of your boss, and chances of prevailing are not good.

Which means that you should do everything possible to avoid getting to the point where conflict is inevitable. Flexibility, sensitivity to the concept of ‘face’, reasonable and professional behaviour in the workplace, and care to develop a positive relationship with your employer, on their terms, will help this. It’s a cultural minefield, but if you learn the rules of the game upfront, almost all conflict can be avoided before it occurs.

Your job

The failings of the Korean education system are manifold, but with regard to language teaching, they are quite specific. In the past, and to a large degree in the present as well, many people studied English with people who couldn’t speak it. They studied in the ‘traditional’ Korean style, which is firmly in the model of ‘teacher as source of knowledge and wisdom’, lecturing. They studied grammar, translated passages with dictionaries, were taught incorrect pronunciation and in many cases incorrect idioms and grammatical constructs (older Koreans without fail use ‘as possible as’ when they mean ‘as much as possible’ as a result of the former being nominated as the correct formation and taught as such in the all-important university entrance exams for years, for example), by Korean teachers of English.

As a result, most students, at most levels, need practice speaking, and listening to a lesser degree. Getting Koreans to speak in class, though, is frequently an exercise in frustration, as the learning style they have had beaten into them over years or decades is in complete opposition to the idea of speaking up in class. Asking questions of one’s teacher is considered, traditionally, as a challenge and a sign of disrespect.

New teachers believe their students to be taciturn and sullen — in fact, in most cases, they’re just showing respect in the only way they’ve been taught to do so in the educational context, by attentive silence.

So strategies must be devised to overcome the pedagogical catch-22. Each teacher approaches it different ways, and those ways vary with different student ages, but providing structure and clear examples to model expectations so that the student’s chances of failure are minimized is a good start, and is a wise strategy at all levels of language teaching. It’s all the more important in the Korean context.

People

Although many teachers in Korea — most, perhaps — make an avocation of complaining bitterly about the country and the people, and some leave with anger and a sense of relief at having ‘escaped’, a lot of those same people miss the Korean people and their nation, and inevitably return. Some others just settle in, bitching all the while, broken expat records, and they can be annoying to have a beer with, and are best avoided. Others choose their targets a bit better.

It seems to be the lot of foreigners living here to have a love-hate relationship with Korea, and with Korean people, who can be so xenophobic and yet so hospitable and kind, so abrasive and impolite yet so conscious and careful of the niceties and minutiae of feeling and mood, so puritanical but so boozy and sexy and free, so group-focussed yet so individualistic, so backwards but so modern. The contradictions never cease to fascinate, and for a foreigner who makes even a cursory attempt to understand the old, odd, and ornate monoculture he or she is leaping into, and to read and understand a modicum of the nation’s history, and to make an attempt to learn a little of the language, the rewards are great.

I won’t lie — it’s hard as hell to live in Korea, perhaps harder than anywhere else in the world with a similarly high standard of living, for the westerner. But it’s equally hard, once you’ve gotten under the surface a bit, to leave it behind. And if you’re young, and looking at a Nametag Nation job back home, the money, once you’ve added in all the benefits, is undeniably great.

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