Avalon English – Osan (Elementary/Middle/IVY Campus): Won-dong, Gyeonggi-do

This is the first place I have taught at in Korea, so I don’t have much to compare it with, but I thought I should write something up about my experience here. First of all, and while this may be true anywhere you go, but if you have not taught in Korea before you should be warned that the students can be incredibly challenging at times. Some of the students are very bright and so much fun to teach, but unfortunately some are quite the opposite. The children are overschooled in Korea. They are overworked and stressed out. They wake up around 6:30 am, go to school until 2:00pm, and then go to private academies (Hagwons) until 9 or 10 at night. Then they come home, study some more and do homework until midnight, then go to sleep, and the process repeats the next day. Some even go to Hagwons on saturday and sunday as well. So, when they get to my classroom, especially the middle school students, they are NOT as bright and cheery and ready to learn English as I might have hoped/expected. Anyway, the students can be really fun though and we have our good times.
I guess I should say something about Avalon and this particular location. When I signed up, my recruiter told me that I would be in a “suburb” of Seoul about 30 minutes away from the city center. It actually takes an hour or longer to get to Seoul from Osan. The recruiters would have you believe that the entire country of South Korea is a “suburb” of Seoul if Seoul is what you want. The pay is generally on time, but it has been late, up to a week late, on a few occasions. What bothers me more is that the management expects miracles out of their teachers. They rarely praise us when things go well, and are quick to offer criticism when things do not go well (like when students drop out after a brand new brightly lit Hagwon that charges less has just opened right across the street, but of course that isnt the reason we are losing students. They will just say we are losing students because of how poorly the foreign teachers are doing, without explaining why exactly).
There is an extremely strict, rigidly enforced policy of “following the syllabus”. If/when I try to adapt the text books assigned to my classes according to the needs of the students, I am quickly put in my place and told to go back to the book I was given. Of course, the director of Avalon, who is a business man and not a teacher, couldnt care less what I do in the classroom; and as far as he is concerned the goal is to make the parents and students happy. So when I try an inventive new technique that I think is fun and great for learning English at the same time, the parents, who of course are not teachers as well, complain because these activities are not from the expensive books that they bought for the class. The parents also complain when their children get disciplined, which always has me confused and dismayed, and I wonder if the parents have ANY system of discipline and control at home, because some of these kids definitely need some boundaries in place to keep their behavior from going out of control. But then I remember that the parents don’t need to worry about it much at home, because the only time their children are at home is when they sleep. Other than that they are at school or after-school academies. All in all I probably would not recommend teaching English in South Korea unless you have the patience of a thousand saints.