GDA Junior – Seocho: Seocho-dong, Seoul

I spent two years working at this hogwan from 2006 to 2008. It was probably my best two years in Korea.

The location of the school is fantastic. The school is about a 5 to 10 minute walk from Gangnam Station. It is a great place in terms of restaurants, food, nightlife and transportation. It is also about a 10-minute cab ride from Itaewon.

The school itself is fairly large for a hogwan. It has about 10 foreign teachers and about 10 Korean teachers. The director and supervisor were both Korean-American (although I think that has changed) and they spoke fluent English. There were never any communication difficulties.

GDA honours all of its contract commitments and there are never any arguments about the contract. You will always get paid on time and you get all of the mandatory things like pension, medical insurance. They even give you tax refunds, which many schools do not do.

The main focus of this school is on kindergarten, but there are also many afternoon classes. Some of the afternoon classes had very high level students who were either completely fluent or close to fluent.

The apartment was about a ten minute walk away. Almost all of the teachers lived in the same building. I had a lot of problems with mold in my apartment, but I understand that the school has now moved the teachers to a new building because of the mold. The apartments are very small, but that is because the rent is very expensive in that area.

For the most part, my classes went smoothly at GDA but there were frustrations that were usually the result of a lack of organization or competence on the part of the administration. Some classes had great books and others had horrible books. Toward the end of my stay there it seemed that there was more and more administrative paperwork that was expected of the teachers, but certainly not as much as what might be expected at other hogwans (for example, report cards are only every three months).

I would highly recommend GDA as a good place to work for a year or two.