J.M. English School: Seokchon-dong, Seoul

I worked at this school for over a year and was asked to stay on longer, but it was a difficult place to work. Don’t get me wrong – some of the things are difficult simply because you are in South Korea – and attitudes about work are very different there. For instance, ANY school will ask you to come in on your day off and be surprised that you ask to be paid for it. Or that you feel you can refuse to come in if they don’t pay you. Employees do not refuse their employers in South Korea. This is where the Western vs Eastern thinking clashes. Also, if your boss has a problem with you or has to correct you, they tell your co-worker, who then tells you. Needless to say, this does not go over very well with Westerners!
The difficulty that I and my fellow teachers found with the headmistress, I’d say, mainly fell into the category of “She is not open to ideas beyond her own” She is an educated woman who has her methods of doing things and that is how you must do it. If you are OK with that, you’ll probably get along fine. As a person, not as a headmistress, I found her to be very pleasant and had many nice conversations with her – but as a headmistress – she is not a good manager of people, she gave us paperwork to do solely for the sake of keeping us busy and she had cameras in the classrooms to watch the teachers, not the students. Other teachers at other schools said they could have been teaching the kids witchcraft and the headmaster didn’t care, but at JM, the headmistress is very much involved in the classroom.
I will say, a nice thing about working at JM was the location was fabulous. Our apartments were a 5 minute walk from the school, we were right in the middle of the city, with shopping, subway, an amusement park and both Korean and American food very close. And according to other teachers who worked in other schools, our one-room furnished apartments were very nice in comparison.
Also, the headmistress did make sure that our winter break was at Christmas. Other schools scheduled their winter break in January or February, so their teachers could not go home for Christmas, but we did.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about this hagwon. I was treated very well for the first six months of my stay in Korea. My apartment appeared clean, I was told how to go places, and always paid on time. Lunch was always provided, but only if you enjoy Korean food all day everyday, as the others have said.

About nine months into my contract the administrative team began playing games with me. They told me I was “getting sloppy” with my lesson plans and general teaching duties. No real evidence, it was just an intimidation technique, I think. I was not allowed to go home when I was actually sick.

I taught many classes with bronchitis and a high fever simply because there are no substitutes here. After insisting on taking a half day to recover, I never quite recovered my “reputation” and the staff was always looking for reasons I wasn’t doing my job.

11 months in I was asked to leave. The school cited that I was “emotionally unstable” but couldn’t really back up this claim with evidence.

I fought for my bonus and pension, and did receive both, fortunately.

I must say that I feel I am very hard-working by American standards. A lot of this is simply standard practice in South Korean English hagwons, I realize, but there were basic tenants of human decency and respect that I felt were ignored here, and it made working there during the last four months nearly unbearable. I would not work there again.

At the end of my stay, my apartment was falling apart, partly due to the cheap nature of the furniture. I was asked to pay 400,000 won (taken from my bonus) to cover apartment costs.

A lot of teaching materials were stated to be provided, and simply were not delivered. Most of my lesson plans were busywork, and not actually necessary in the actual teaching of classes.

If you are considering working here, you MUST be a very self-directed, independent individual and open to criticism at all times. You will be told how to do things, and you must take them at face value.