LCI Academy/Kids Club – Seo Gwangju: Chipyeong-dong, Gwangju

I worked at this hagwon and had a different experience than Star. I can’t comment on other jobs in Korea because I don’t know…I’m sure if you are reading this you can do that research yourself. I also can’t comment on the pension or insurance issues. I never went to the hospital, but I was told those that did were reimbursed. I know I didn’t get pension, but if that is against Korean law, I don’t know.

I never heard of our housing area called “Hooker Hood.” True, it was full of economy one-room apartments, which I had been told were populated with teachers, college students and hookers. But by no means did I feel like I was in a slum. The area actually boasts an exciting nightlife with a few bars and many restaurants. More than anything, it has countless clothing boutiques. My apartment was small, but not dirty or loud. The only noise I heard was from a coworker who would sing in the shower every morning. I do remember a case of a teacher having mold in his apartment, but I always thought the mold that made him sick was from his bed. This was also our Lead Teacher, and he had picked this apartment himself (and bought the bed, if it was indeed the culprit). If there was another case of mold, I don’t know.

Overtime. It was explained to me before I started that some teachers may want OT and not get it and others may not want it but have to do it. It is in the contract. If that is a problem, don’t sign your name. I personally didn’t mind the one extra class per day considering the money it put on my check. I was paid 22,000 Won my second year for an hour of OT, and it ended up being almost 500,000 Won a month extra. Speaking of pay, I never once was paid late. If the 10th fell on the weekend, I was paid the Friday before. Every time. The only time my paycheck was wrong was on the first month of my second contract when they didn’t adjust for my new pay scale, which I showed them and it was immediately remedied.

The bosses speak English. I have never once had to slow my speech or explain my meaning. They both attended a university in America. I am not a woman, so I cannot refute Star’s claim that they are rude to females. I can say I have not seen it, and they have always been more that courteous to me. They are busy people, so disorganized…maybe. But they are the first to admit it and simply ask for you to remind them of a request. Trust me, it’s not a problem. I’m not sure about what changes to which Star refers, so I’ll skip it.

Working hours, like OT, are stated in the contract. 9:30-5:50, or up until 7:20 with OT. This time includes a full hour lunch, a half-hour free break, ten minute intervals between class and at least 30 minutes of prep (9:30-10:00 is prep, but most teachers have an additional 40 min prep once or twice a week). If these hours are too long, don’t sign the contract.

We only worked three Saturdays a year: one for Graduation and two Parent-Teacher Conferences. There were additional Saturdays that they requested help, but they offered alternatives if you couldn’t. For example, they had an open house and they wanted the teachers to come and play games with prospective families on a Saturday. As an incentive, they closed the hagwon on an upcoming Friday for a weekend when we had Monday off as a national holiday, giving us a five day weekend. If you couldn’t come or didn’t want to come to the open house, they made work available on that Friday, going through reading books and creating vocabulary lists. Boring, I know, but by no means a mandatory Saturday.

Graduation is a lot of work, but my most cherished souvenir is the edited DVD of the classes singing and dancing and speaking English they present to the parents and teachers at the end of the year.

If you have an offer from this school, try to email or speak with as many teachers there as possible. Of the twenty teachers I worked with, I would estimate 75% having an equally or more favorable review that me.

AND READ YOUR CONTRACT!
Good luck!

I agree with Star and Batman’s views on LCI. My own time there was not pleasant.

The owners of the location are underhanded and manipulative. I can confirm that they were not only late with my paycheck 4 times, but on several occasions there was a discrepancy between what I should have been paid based on hours clocked and what I was actually paid: I only brought this up to the owners once because when I did they said, “Oh, we made a mistake”–and then they charged me some random fee of 40,000 more won to punish me and I didn’t get paid for the hours anyway.

Batman mentions the issues of tax returns and Star mentions issues of pension and health care. Both of their assessments are correct. When I was at LCI, when the tax returns came around, only the owners’ favored teachers received anything. Not only is this against the law, but you are losing out on so much money! LCI does not fulfill the law for the pension or tax payments, and they register most of their teachers as part-time even though all of LCI’s teachers work way more than most other hagwons. There is no pension at all, which is illegal. They say this saves you money, but really, all it does is save them money because the school is required to match the payments you make into the pension fund–and the teacher gets the entire amount back when they leave Korea!

Health care was a joke–the owner would pay off the hack doctors at the sketchy hospital down the street. I knew people who went into the hospital because of injuries, and the care they received was substandard. When a complaint was made, the owner said, “I wash my hands of you.” When you are sick or injured in a foreign country, where you don’t speak the language well, you want to have things explained to you. No attempt was made to do this. That friend had to figure things out on her own and attempt to get adequate medical care somewhere else.

The owners also foster a sense of division in their teachers. They actively discourage interaction between the Korean and foreign teachers, to the point that some of the Korean teachers were told they would be fired if they talked to us about anything other than work-related issues. They also try to adopt naive or easily manipulated foreigners like “I Liked It” so that they have someone to toady to them. The owners love to flex their power and feel in control. If they don’t like you, they also do things like schedule you on the longest possible flight out of the country (even though there were openings on a direct flight from Incheon for the same cost) or come up with erroneous charges for your last set of bills. I’m still curious why my final bills were expected to be double their usual cost, or in the case of my flight (I was leaving from a location other than Incheon by request) my ticket was $200 more expensive (even though I looked up the cost for that flight online and it was the same cost as a flight from Incheon).

As far as “hooker hood” is concerned, “I Liked It” is flat out lying. He knows full well what his neighborhood is called among the foreign community. The apartments are small, they are dirty, and LCI is very slow on fixing anything that goes wrong. I was without hot water for two weeks. Eventually, I told the owners I wasn’t shaving until they fixed my water. That didn’t go over well and they ignored me. So I didn’t shave. When they saw I was serious, they eventually did fix the hot water, although not without rearranging my teaching schedule so that I lost my favorite afternoon classes (it was, unfortunately, near the term change when this happened). I didn’t have much of a problem with noise at my location, but I did hear the hostess girls and hookers come up the stairs about 4am every morning in their high heels. I eventually got used to that part. Other teachers were not so lucky and had constant traffic noise. I saw the mopeds swoosh by with a scantily clad girl sitting side-saddle on the back, or the cars pull up driven by a Korean gangster and four or five girls pile out and vanish for an hour before returning to the car and driving off. We used to make it a game of watching them from the GS Mart on the corner while we drank beer. “I Liked It” sat there with us, watching on more than a dozen occasions!

OT was mandatory. You “got a preference” but if they suddenly had extra classes and no one wanted them, then you got it anyway. In other ways, they would sometimes cut classes (affecting your monthly “salary”). This happened to me, as at that point I had stood up to them more than once and they had begun to not like me. They definitely try to play favorites. As for Saturdays, when I worked there, all teachers had to attend the two parent-teacher conferences (one per term). However, I know that after I left, there was an additional Saturday added that was required for their second attempt at “English Village” (like a school fair)–in the sense that if you didn’t do it, the owners would do everything they could to make your life a living hell.

The graduation day is another day we worked on Saturday while I was at LCI (this is stipulated in the contract). Practice for the graduation play takes up most of January and February’s teaching time. The owners are viciously cruel to children who aren’t as coordinated or as talented as the others, belittling them. On the day itself, they stick 200 or so little kids (4-6 years old) in one of two cramped rooms with little water, and force them into uncomfortable costumes for 10 hours. It is pure torture for those kids, who spend most of the day waiting for their two dance/play performances to occur.

The owners of LCI Gwangju are extremely racist as well. They are a husband and wife team, the man is Korean and the woman is Thai. The man is worse than the women here (he hates pretty much all non-Koreans as far as I can tell). We had several African-American teachers working with us when I was there, and they treated them as second-class people. In addition, they were extremely culturally and racially insensitive. While some of this is simply Korean’s lack of perception of these things (they are in a very homogenous ethnic and cultural group, after all) the owners have been working with foreigners for over 10 years and should know better. They both even lived in the USA! But when things were pointed out as offensive (like asking the African-American and the Indian-Canadian teacher to do a “tribal dance” to represent Africa in the English Village event), they didn’t care.

LCI is also extremely disorganized. The owners say one thing, then immediately change the rule and say something else. While this isn’t exclusive to LCI, it is much worse there than many other hagwons.

As far as the bosses speaking English, they don’t do it well. Part of it is a thick accent, but other parts are simple lack of interest in keeping their English up to par. They don’t care about speaking English. Odd notion for owners of an English academy. Much of the time, the owners pretend not to understand English well so it suits their purposes, sort of a “Oh, I don’t understand your complaint,” when it really is “I don’t care about your problem.” This willful lack of communication is unacceptable.

LCI is not a good place to work. The franchise in general has a bad reputation, and LCI Gwangju is worse than most. The pay is only average, and the lack of consistency in the pay times/amounts brings that below average. The vacation days, a week in summer and a week in winter, are typical but not the best of any hagwon. The lack of law-required pension, health, and tax benefits are an issue. These cause you to loose the equivalent of several months’ pay at the completion of your contract. The owners are shady and lack integrity–as do the head teachers. These people are toadies, selected not to be your advocate with the bosses (as they should be) but to make sure the status quo is maintained and no one complains too much. I think it is funny that “I Liked It” mentions reading your contract; the head teacher of LCI Gwangju told me “a contract in English isn’t binding in Korea.” That, by the way, is a lie. Your contract is as legally binding in English as it is in Korean, don’t let them cheat you. When I worked there (and “I Liked It” was there too) over 50% of the teachers hated the school.

Dress code. LCI has one. Fine. But it is a ridiculous dress code for teaching kindergarten. Men must wear slacks and collared shirt. While we finger paint and children puke on things. Not smart. I ruined several pairs of slacks and a couple of shirts while working at LCI. The women’s dress code was less clear to me, so you’d have to get that from Star or someone else.

They play the foreign and Korean teachers off each other to create a workplace filled with distrust. The hours are very long for a hagwon, with required days and OT that other hagwons do not. They house you in what amounts to a slum in Korea (which, mind you, is very different from a slum elsewhere, everything is relative; even so, this wouldn’t be a nice neighborhood no matter how you present it, filled with bars and hookers).

Don’t work here. There are better opportunities in Korea. I moved to a different hagwon after I left LCI, and I’m glad I did. It has renewed my opinion of the country. My pay and hours are considerably better, I get vacation when I want to take it (and over 3 weeks of it), and I am always paid by direct deposit the second to last day of the month. Also, all of my Korean coworkers speak wonderful English and are encouraged to talk with us. There is no dress code beyond “don’t wear things too revealing.” I wear shorts and a t-shirt to work when it’s hot. I can have a beard. I can wear sweaters and jeans or cargo pants when it’s cold. Do some research and find a better job than LCI.

The bit about the tax return card is very amusing, considering I’m not talking about sales tax. Income tax. I’m talking about income tax. Foreigners are supposed to get most of that back.

Everything I wrote about, unless otherwise specified, either happened to me or I witnessed it first hand. Korea is different than America or Canada–or anywhere else. But that’s not what we are talking about here; I’ve seen good and bad hospitals, apartments, and people in Korea. LCI has a habit of being involved in the bad ones. I’m glad I changed schools, because at my new job I am experiencing how wonderful this country can actually be when I’m dealing with people who are not shady.