Kid’s College – Gimpo: Sau-dong, Gyeonggi-do

While the previous commenter may have some noble intentions, it is not fair to anyone going into a situation where they are completely out of their element, to be so thoroughly misinformed. I worked at Kid’s College (Sawoo Dong) for a year and was told upon the completion of my contract what a wonderful teacher I had been. So I feel that I can fully disclose the experience I had while employed at Kid’s college.
Management, exclusive of one genuinely concerned party, makes no pretention of honoring contracts. Mrs. Gibson’s contention that there are bonuses for “teachers that perform well” is misleading. The “bonus” is the standard end of the year severance pay that foreign English teacher gets upon completion of their contract, and the raise she mention is the contractual adjustment to pay that everyone gets, across the board, should they remain after the period of a year. The vacation time is almost non-existent, with Saturdays and Sundays counted into the five days afforded you in the summer and winter. So although the school is not opened on the weekend, your vacation days will include Saturday and Sunday. Vacations are not paid despite this stipulation in the contract.
Despite a good report with my students and their parents, at no time did I feel I had achieved job security. This was due in part to the repetition of management during our weekly, unpaid meetings, that any one of us teachers “can be replaced in fifteen days.” In addition to being a poor management approach, statements like these are morale killers. And that is precisely what happened to several teachers who were singled out time after time for incomprehensible “violations”. Several teachers were fired with little or no warning, and had to come up with airplane fares exceeding one thousand dollars. Another teacher was sent home because the school failed to renew immigration documents. And two teachers fled in the middle of the night after being verbally accosted in front of their students and half of the staff. Curse words and insults were yelled, by a manager, in the presence of the students during these altercations.
When I asked why one of these teachers had been called out as a potential fire-ee, the explanation was “she doesn’t smile enough”. The reason given was not that she had been a poor teacher or had been unaffectionate towards her students, rather during the fifteen seconds someone peered into her window, which is a standard method of observation at Kid’s College, she was deemed perpetually unhappy, and that reason alone had substantiated her potential unemployment.
The schools infrastructure is highly unorganized and its top-down authoritarian management style prevents improvements. A number of staff members, were immediately shot down during or after offering constructive criticisms or suggestions. There were many times when teachers were intentionally uninformed about important things. For example hoof-and mouth disease was found in a few students and teachers were not made aware of the existence in school. Field trips were planned weeks in advance and if we were lucky we found out the day before the scheduled outing. Oftentimes we found out about school-wide events from the children themselves; they had been notified via letters sent home in their back packs (in Korean) or their parents received a phone call.
Before coming to work for Kid’s College, I asked about it’s location, it is not 20 minutes from Seoul like I was told. It is a twenty minute bus ride to the train that will take you into Seoul. All major points of interests are at least twenty minutes from that point. This is not a major cause for concern because Korea has an excellent public transportation system, but I felt this was a poor cause to lie. The concept of honor is just not a part of the work culture at Kid’s College.
My main goal in writing this comment is not to undermine the fulfillment of purpose that teaching brings, but simply to inform. People need to know what they are getting into. Maybe you’ll come anyway, but it should be your choice. You should be presented with a full and honest picture, and allowed to make a sound judgment based on that picture. I felt, like so many of my co-workers, that I had been tricked. Perhaps I wouldn’t have felt that way if someone had given me straightforward answers.
I don’t want to discourage anyone from experiencing teaching abroad, or missing out on the richness of Korean culture and life. But I would suggest doing it somewhere else. There are schools in Korea that compensate you for your time and commitment to the students and the institution. Kid’s College at Sawoo Dong is not one of those institutions.