Teaching and Living in Korea, Gangwon-do Public School and Busan Hagwon

After a year of teaching EFL in a Hagwon and a semester of teaching English in a public school in Gangwon-do, here are my thoughts on teaching English in Korea in general, and about the differences between the public school gig and the hagwon gig. I hope it will be helpful to those that are thinking about coming to Korea to teach English.

Before I get into it, I want to preface this by saying that real culture shock, in my experience and the experience of my friends that have lived in Korea and other foreign cultures, sets in around the three to four month mark. It is characterized by disdain for the local culture, frustration with other aspects of one's life, and a strong desire to escape the “shocking” culture. For more on culture shock, check out this post from about a month ago. I have been here about four and a half months, and I feel like I'm on the tail end of what has been a fairly severe culture shock. Just wanted to throw that in for completeness, for those readers contemplating coming to Korea, or to Gangwon-do to teach for EPIK in a public school.

Living in Korea

Korea is not particularly hospitable to foreigners. There is a lot of kindness in the Korean people as a whole, but there is more xenophobia (fear of foreigners). There is a historical reason for this: the Korean people have, throughout their history, had to fight off invading forces – Japanese, Mongol, Chinese, etc. The result is a people that are very insular and distrusting if not downright disrespectful toward foreigners. Of course there are exceptions – I've had friends (male and female) marry into Korean families and be, to varying degrees, accepted by the culture. There are also some teachers that come here for a year and enjoy the time they spend with Korean people. But the vast majority of foreigners I've talked to and emailed with feel isolated and disliked by Koreans and look forward to the day they get to go home or to another culture.

What is the difference between those who have a great time here and those who can't wait to leave? I've thought about this a lot, and I think I have some insight into the personalities that fit best and worst here.

Those that have the hardest time here are typically:

- Female – sorry ladies, but this is a culture of and for men. I've known a lot of strong women who have had a very hard time here. The disrespect I experience is multiplied several times over for women. I suspect beautiful women have it easier than others, with blond hair and thinness being primary qualities of beauty here. Also women that are okay with being less involved in conversations, decision making and the like will do better.

Those who have the best time here are typically:

- Drinkers/Smokers/Red Meat Eaters – I am none of these things, and that has proved hard. Had I come here just out of college, I would have been going to the bars and cook-your-own-meat-at-the-table restaurants with other teachers from my school three times a week, getting drunk and smoking cigarettes with them and building social bonds through that. This seems to be the primary social opportunity here. Of the people I've met that are happy in Korea and plan to stay, nearly 100% have enjoyed regularly consuming at least 2 of these 3 things.

The other big difference I see between those who are happy here and those who are not is sensitivity. Korea is not a place for sensitive westerners. Expressions of appreciation are few and far between and ostricization – most often expressed non-verbally – is constant. On the streets, smells of sewage hit you like a truck every couple of minutes. Buildings are aesthetically devoid and covered in advertisements, and loud noises are constant. Those who set their own emotional state, or who are relatively constant in their feelings, regardless of their surroundings, can do very well here, but this is not the place for those who are sensitive to their environment and the way they are received by the people they work with.

Teaching English in Korea

Public Schools

In public schools, foreigners are hired as assistant teachers, and we are more assistant than teacher. For the fall semester, which we've just finished, I had three co-teachers that I worked with at my primary school. With one of them, I taught eight hours a week (actually eight, forty minute classes) of sixth grade, for which I prepared one, forty minute lesson and usually got to deliver it to both sixth grade classes. Sometimes my lesson plans ended up in the trash because something took precedence – a special event or falling behind schedule or the children misbehaving and the teacher needing to take thirty minutes to yell at them (no kidding, that happened several times). With my two fifth grade teachers, with each of whom I taught four hours a week, I simply sat next to the desk while they taught. Sometimes I would be asked to speak words or phrases for the students to mimic the correct pronunciation; sometimes I would sit silently and do nothing for the entire class. Of the three teachers, one would consistently offer me his comfy teacher's chair; for the other two, I would sit in a fifth-grade-student-sized wooden chair.

That was the bulk of the semester. For winter vacation the students and most of the teachers get six weeks off. We get three (I'm leaving for Thailand tomorrow!), and run “winter camps” for the other three. Winter camps were hard, but rewarding. For one week, we had a budget, two Korean teachers who actually helped us and seven hours a day to do whatever we wanted with the kids. That was great, but very demanding. For the other two weeks, we had three hours a day with the kids, with no budget and no Korean teacher to translate or help us control the students. That was more difficult, but we got to go home at 12:30 everyday, which is nice. Summer vacation will probably be similar, except that it's a bit longer, and our vacation is shorter (two weeks), so there will probably be more camp and special education activities.

Our situation here isn't exceptional, but it isn't universal either. Some teachers have much better rapport with their schools. I think this is mostly just a crap shoot. One couple hasn't had to go into school at all over vacation and is teaching a winter camp after the spring semester starts. Lucky them. Where we are (in Samcheok County), situations like ours seem more common, but I think this county might be particularly tough on its foreign teachers.

Hagwons

In 2005 – 2006, I taught in a hagwon (a private after-school academy) in Busan. That teaching was very different than what I'm doing now. Much has been written on the internet about the hagwon-teaching experience, so I'll be brief. It was extremely tiring to teach without a Korean to translate for me, but on the other hand, I got to design my lessons and could teach anything I wanted. I taught six, fifty-minute classes a day, as opposed to four, forty-minute classes a day in my public school. Every day I would step outside between classes and think, “I can't do this any more, I've got to get out of here.” But I did do it, and so do lots of other people. I was always scared that my boss was going to cheat me out of money, but in the end he ended up paying me all I was owed, within a couple hundred dollars anyway. I suspect if he had sensed he could have pushed me around more, he would have. There were two big upsides to the hagwon gig: the hours – 3:30 to 10:30pm with an hour to go home for dinner beats the pants off 9-5 with lunch in the school cafeteria in my book. The other biggie is that you know exactly where you're going before you get on that plane. With the public schools, you typically know only the province you're going to before you leave home. We got massively unlucky in this regard, as we came to Gangwon-do, the mountainous, rural province the northeast corner of South Korea and ended up in one of the last remaining coal mining towns in the country. With a hagwon, not only do you know where you're going, but you can find out the details of who you'll be working with, how far your apartment is from your school (in my hagwon, I was a three minute walk away, in our public school we were initially placed a $3, forty-minute bus ride away), and even what your apartment looks like. Here as everywhere, the devil is in the details, and before you sign up with a hagwon, you can know a lot more of the details than with the public schools.

Conclusions

I would recommend teaching English in Korea primarily to guys strait out of college. If you want to do something interesting for a year or two, save a ton of money and put an interesting item on your resume, this can be a very good gig. If you want to go to the bars most nights, and would enjoy cooking beef at your table, you might even fit in with some of the people you work with. And of course there's travel – most people experience major personal growth while living here, and the opportunities for travel (either on vacations if you go with Gangwon-do public schools, or afterward if you don't have as much vacation) are second to none.

If I were doing it again, I would go with the public school over the hagwon – it's a ton less stress, but I would try to come at an off time (not 3/1 or 9/1), and I would want to know exactly where I was going to be placed before I signed anything. I would also make a huge effort to build report with the teachers and administrators in my school in the first weeks.

If you're interested in teaching in the public schools, we came with a recruiter, Jen, who did an excellent job of answering our questions before we came, and of representing us through our battle with the authorities to move closer to our school. If you'd like to get in tough with her, send me an email – mlevy79 (at) gmail (dot) com, and I'll put you in touch with her.

Whatever you decide to do, good luck, and if you do come to Korea, let me know how it goes.



***Edit***

Be sure to check out the comments below -- there is a lot of insight there from other westerners that are teaching here.

Dwarf School!

I just got home from my first day teaching at my secondary school - Shin Dong (prodigy child), which I go to each Tuesday.

There are thirteen students in the school! Some grades have one single student! There are three teachers, no less than four administrators, a cook, and today there was construction going on all around the place. The building is two stories with a field and court and playground. I can't believe the resources that are going into educating these kids! The school I teach at the rest of the week is 20 minutes down the road. Why not have a bus take those thirteen kids to that school?

Anyway, it's a nice break in the week for me. The school is located in a gorgeous part of the valley - beautiful, thick foliage covered hills interrupted by big limestone cliffs. Today there were low clouds covering the peak and mist in the afternoon; I should carry a camera with me always. The kids are also really nice. It seems the further away from civilization one gets the nicer, if odder, the people get, especially the young ones.

Teaching in Gangwondo (EPIK) vs. Hagwon

I noticed that this blog is coming up in the first page of results for a google search for [gangwon EPIK], so if people are interested in my experience teaching in public schools, I thought I'd run through some thoughts from my first month participating in EPIK in Gangwondo and compare that experience to the one I had in a hagwon in Busan a couple of years ago.

With regard to the actual work, teaching in a public school is easier, by a long shot. There are a number of reasons for this, but the biggest is that I'm teaching four, forty-minute classes a day now (in an elementary school... middle and high school classes are a few minutes longer). In the hagwon, I taught six, fifty minute classes a day. So that's 160 classroom minutes a day for EPIK as opposed to 300 classroom minutes a day for the hagwon. And I rarely even teach the full 160 minutes in a day here, as classes frequently let out early.

Just as important, there's always a Korean teacher in the classroom with me. I see two big positives from this, and one negative. The positives are having a Korean teacher in the room means Korean etiquette and standards for respect and behavior are still in play. My biggest complaint in the hagwon was getting no respect from and being unable to control students in the classroom. The other positive is being able to give complex instructions to low-level students. For games and more involved activities, that's huge. On the downside, I don't have the freedom to plan lessons as I like. I am, as my contract states, an Assistant Teacher. The reality of this is determined by the co-teacher one works with. But all classes follow a (less than great) textbook. Some teachers say “teach” and sit down behind the class; others run the class almost as if I weren't there and just ask me to do the repeat-after-me's and walk around the class having brief conversations with each student. In my hagwon, I was provided a great textbook called Interchange, and told to teach. My classroom activities were never interfered with, but I also got no support or advice on how to teach EFL and couldn't do much with the lower half of my classes because they couldn't understand my instructions. I spent between 10 minutes and an hour planning each day's activities in the hagwon (and could have taught better if I had committed more time to planning). For the public school, for the entire week, I spent about ten minutes planning activities to supplement the textbook's. That could change with number of different classes one teaches and the approach of the co-teacher to co-teaching, but I think the pressure to plan is probably always less in public schools. There's also just less pressure as no one is as fervent about educating children as hagwon bosses are about making money.

At my hagwon there was no community, and it was tough to find help with things like getting a cell phone. Here there are plenty of people that are willing, if not happy, to help us with the business stuff that is hard without speaking Korean, and there is plenty of community (weekly after school sports, monthly outings, opportunities for friendships). One of the bigger challenges here is that there is very little English competency. We're in a rural town in a rural province, so EPIK participants in different provinces may have different experiences in this regard, but it's hard for us to know what's going on. We are often told of meetings and appointments and trips minutes before they begin, which can be quite challenging. At my hagwon, the director spoke English nearly fluently, so at least I always knew what was expected of me, what would be happening the next day, etc.

Of course the biggest benefit to teaching in Gangwondo's EPIK program, as opposed to other provinces and private schools, is the five week vacation allowance. I got ten days at my hagwon and managed to take seven of them, and taking even that many was tough. We also get some bonus holiday-days, like Monday two weeks ago was a national holiday and we got Tuesday off, some friends got Wednesday, and one got Friday too for a six-day weekend! In a hagwon there's no way you get more than Monday. Sick days should be much easier to take in the public school (and we have 15 of them), since there won't be any substitutions needed to cover my classes; in a hagwon calling in sick means a Korean teacher that already works many hours more than you everyday, plus Saturdays, will have to cover your classes, which breeds resentment fast. Also, in addition to the five weeks paid vacation, if we renew our contract, we get an extra two weeks vacation at the end of the first year, along with an airfare paid ticket to home or anywhere closer.

The pay for Gangwon-do EPIK is decent. I'll say that pay for EPIK elsewhere is sub-par. We get our first paychecks in a couple days, and I think mine will be about 2.3M won. I'll save about 60k won on income taxes (two year exemption from income tax for everyone but Canadians, though it's only ~3.3% at foreign teachers' salaries - super-progressive tax structure in Korea). My base salary (as a level 2 EPIK teacher, since I have one year experience) is 2.0M, then I get .1M for being in a province (as opposed to one of the seven major Korean cities or Gyeonggi Province surrounding Seoul), then an additional .1M for being in a rural location (ie., not in Chuncheon, Gangneung, Wonju, Taebaek or Seorak... which means you could get that bonus and still live and teach in some places that definitely feel like small cities, like Samcheok and Donghae, for example), and an additional something, maybe .1M for teaching at multiple schools. I don't understand why I'm paid more for that, as I simply go to a different school (that's closer to my apartment than my normal school) on Tuesdays, but I won't complain. At my hagwon, I was paid 2M. That was three years ago though, I suspect that would be 2.2-ish now.

Of course, here, I know my paycheck is coming – there's no motivation for anyone to withhold it. At my hagwon I was always nervous, especially coming up on the end of my contract. The director of my hagwon was clearly money hungry (and with relaxed morals, I suspected), and I had serious doubts about whether I would receive the 4.7 million won I was owed as of my last day (2M for salary, 2M for severance, 700k for airfare). That's a lot of money (over $5,000 at the time) to be worried about losing. I was lucky -- I did always get paid, but plenty of people don't. I had to fight to get on the national health care plan, and I was always scared about not getting paid. I suspect if I hadn't shown such fortitude in standing up to my boss on other matters, he may have tried to jerk me around toward the end of my contract.

The housing has been similar for me in EPIK and in the hagwon. I think I got extremely lucky with the hagwon – they provided my girlfriend (who was working at another hagwon) and I a large three-bedroom apartment, albeit far from the subway or city centers. Here, every couple I've talked to has been given a nice three-bedroom place (probably a Gangwon-do benefit, since property values here must be considerably less than in the more populated parts of the country). However, our apartment is a 40 minute drive from our school. And without a car it's nearly an hour and a half each way (25 minute walk to the bus station, 40 minutes on the bus, 15 minute walk to school). We're fighting to get that fixed. It is an anomaly, it is something we asked about before we came and were told we wouldn't have to worry about, and both our recruiter (Jen at ESL Job Network) and assistant coordinator (a foreign teacher that acts as a liaison between the county's teachers and administration) think it should be remedied. I'll update this to let you know how that battle turns out.

The length of the workday is my biggest complaint so far about EPIK. We leave our house at 7:40 and get home around 5:45 (we've been given rides almost every day on the way home, otherwise, that would be 6:30 or 7:00), and have to be at school from 9-5. In contrast, at my hagwon, I lived a three minute walk from the school. So I left my apartment at 3:20 and got home at 10:30. A weird schedule, but it left me tons of free time, and free time during the day to get out in the sun and hike or beach, or do business with banks and other offices that work the same hours as public school teachers. All that free time was a huge plus. If we can manage to get our apartment moved from Samcheok, where we are now, to Dogye, where we're teaching, that we be only a minor plus for the hagwon; as it stands now, we got unlucky and it's a big bummer.

As for the facilities.... Regarding office space, at the hagwon I had a desk in an office with the three other teachers, and I spent very little time in there since I wasn't required to be at the school beyond my teaching hours. At the public school, my “office” is a place in the huge horseshoe ring of tables in the teacher's room, which is headed by two big desks occupied by the Vice Principal and #3. So for the many hours each day I'm not teaching, I'm basically being watched by two Korean administrators, which is extremely uncomfortable. I should add, though, that it hasn't stopped me from doing my thing in my off time, as I'm writing this on my laptop, sitting in that room now. The classroom facilities are far superior in the public school, despite Dogye being on the poor end of the country and my neighborhood in Busan on the rich end – there are internet-connected computers hooked up to big screen TV's in each classroom, along with scissors, markers, paper and just about anything else you'd want. In the hagwon, I was lucky if I had a dry erase marker that worked consistently... Again, profit motivation at the hagwons makes for lots of trouble. There's none of that in EPIK.

Finally, there's a five-day orientation at the beginning of the Gangwondo EPIK program. Consider the 300k won settlement allowance payment for this. I thought it was boring and restrictive, but mostly because I've lived and taught in Korea before. If this were my first time, I imagine it would make for a much softer landing than being thrown into an apartment and classes strait away.

All and all, there's no way I'd trade this job for the hagwon. I'm not sure I'd even trade it for a uni gig. I feel secure here, well paid, involved in a community, and the teaching itself is really very easy. If I could get two more things – an apartment in the town I teach in and a private-ish office – it would be nearly perfect.

The Teachers Begin to Teach (Two Weeks In)

We've started teaching this week. Melanie and I have very different teaching routines. I'm working with three Korean teachers for 5th and 6th grade and will be spending four hours a week with each class; Melanie is working with eleven Korean teachers for 1st through 4th grade, plus an after school class for the "fool students" and spends one hour a week with each class. And I go to a different, very rural school on Tuesdays, where I'll have classes with students numbering in the mid-single-digits, as opposed to the classes of 37 I have here.

Right now, I'm feeling frustrated that every day I finish my classes by lunch, at 12:30, and must stay at school until 5. What I wouldn't give for a private office! On the other hand, I am sitting in the teachers' room now, blogging, so I suppose I don't have it too bad.

As much as I'd like to generalize, the range of personalities is huge - with with students, with teachers and with other foreigners. Students from yelling-over-me-introducing-myself to the cutest, sweetest kids I've ever met; teachers from bossy (in Korean) to sitting-aside-videotaping-Melanie-teaching to actual constructive co-teaching that may even evolve into co-lesson planning in the coming months; foreigners from strait-as-an-arrow, why-did-you-leave-your-corporate-job to oh-my, do-you-always-sweat-so-profusely, I-see-why-you-married-a-Philipino, I-doubt-you-could-function-in-US-society.

Well, having now set a personal best for concentration of hyphens in a paragraph, I'm going to get back to the only book left from those I brought, The Bible in Modern English. It's a slow read.