Yes Youngdo English School – Gangdong: Myeongil-dong, Seoul

Regarding the school, the place has a preset curriculum and there is no variation allowed. They require cookie cutter teachers. That is, they show you how to teach and you must teach their way. You teach on live camera which plays to a desk of Korean counselors. They constantly are reviewing you as you teach and if you stray or teach in a way they don’t like, they will call you on the carpet immediately, in front of the students. And, there is some animosity between Korean teachers and native teachers, in that, we are governed and paid by Western standards, while the Korean teachers are governed by lower pay and poorer working hours. (They work 12 hour shifts for very little money). It never happened to me, but it did to a colleague. If you lose too many students or teach in a way that the counselors dislike, they will not watch you on camera, but sit in the class with you and audit you. If you lose a large number of students they may change classes on you or fire you. It’s true that you automatically lose students just by virtue of teacher turnover, so beware, you will not only be teaching, but playing politics, and the students know well how to play this card with their parents and the counselors. On the up side, if you can play this game well, they will give you a bonus for low turnover.

There are two types of teaching seasons each year, normal and intensive. You are required by contract to teach two months of intensive courses. Normal classes run anywhere from two hours to three hours long, with two hour prep times. Prep times consist of writing a minute by minute lesson plan, although they will relax this requirement if they sense you have their routine mastered. Teachers arrive at 2 pm to look at their syllabi, find books and copy tests and write lesson plans as the case may be.. Monday, Wednesday and Friday there are three, two hour classes, with three eight minute breaks in between, and a literal 3 minute bathroom break at the halfway mark. On Tuesday and Thursday, there are two, three hour classes with eight minutes in between and a literally 3 minute bathroom break at the halfway mark. During intensive season, you will come in at 8 in the morning, have two hours prep, one hour lunch and teach three, three hour stretches. The day ends at 8 pm. You will be paid a lot of overtime for doing this. The nine hour stretches are grueling. There is no creativity involved in teaching here and there is no space for designing activities that appeal to multiple intelligences or learning styles. Sink or swim, understand or don’t, assembly line, bottom-line teaching. Collect the cash and keep the classes full.

Socially, you are allowed no contact with the Korean parents as they come in to speak with the counselors. They will most likely ignore you as if you weren’t there. In between classes, in your 8 minute break, you are required to happily greet and see the children off. You are then literally herded to a small area and fed snacks and then herded back to class after wolfing them down. In such a high pressure environment, tensions can run high between co-workers, Korean and Native speakers alike.

As far as hagwons go, I wouldn’t say this is the worst there is. There are a lot of good points to teaching here compared to other places. Curriculum is well laid out and prepared. The children are well leveled and they are just terrific kids. The high pressure environment is what kills the experience. My poorly furnished apartment may have been the exception rather than the rule, however, the distance issue was quite common, two in ten I’d say. Also the manager of the location was very kind in helping me sort out an immigration issue and he didn’t have to do that at all. He went way above and beyond the call on helping me with that. The school also paid for some really high quality soirees after work and on weekends there were trips to theme parks and such on the company’s dime. There were many good points to this experience. I am however still waiting on a pay summary for income tax purposes. I had emailed asking for this a few times as well as texting the manager. Never got the form. Can’t do the taxes without it.