My Job

I don't think I'll be doing anything worth writing about in the next week or two, so I'll write about my job. I work at an academy (hagwon), which is a private after school academy. Mine is an English academy, but there is a math program at my academy as well. They have all types of academies; music, math, korean, and I'm sure there's more. I know for sure some of my students go to multiple academies. I'm not sure how I feel about academies and the whole hagwon system in general. On the one hand, it certainly helps Korea get consistently high scores on international academic tests. On the other hand, the students don't have much free time, and Korea has a lot of stressed out people and leads the world in suicides, or is at least top 3.

Academies are a lot different depending on who runs them and whether they are a local academy or a chain. It is much more expensive to send a kid to kindergarten hagwons for instance. I have a friend who works at another hagwon in town, and he mostly hands out coloring pages to his students, and they barely speak English. Where I work is a lot more rigorous. Excluding the lowest level class, all the English students have class two days a week. In addition to that, they also have a lot of computer work to do every day. Many of them are still there when I go home at night.

I work late; I go to work in the late afternoon and leave fairly late at night. I personally love it, because I'm a night owl and this allows me to stay up pretty late and sleep all day. However, the other teachers around here work a normal roughly 9-5 schedule, and a lot of times they're not up for going out when I get off work. Plus it sucks if I want to go somewhere for the weekend, because leaving on Friday is kind of pointless. I work about 35 hours a week, but I only teach for about 12 hours every week. The rest of the time I am doing prep, helping the low level kids, or walking around telling students in the computer room to be quiet and study. Lately I've been studying Korean with my free time.

I've worked here for about 4 months, and I have taught six different classes, and had 3 different schedules. My boss has shuffled around some of the classes, some because she merged them with others, and now because the new semester will start soon, and some of the students are leaving or going to middle school. There are no high schoolers at my academy. I like most of the students I teach. They are really obedient and generally don't cause too much trouble. However, my academy is really disciplined. There is a kind of points system, where if a student is good or bad I can give them points so they can get prizes later. Plus my boss is always yelling at them and stuff which helps. She'll just come by the class, yell something in Korean, and a kid will sit up straight really fast.

As far as teaching goes, I don't have to make my own lesson plans. Everything I teach is from a series of books. The schedule is the same every month, and we finish one book every two months. So one day is listening, one day is reading, one day is speaking. Really, it's a pretty easy job. My classes are all an hour and a half. For the younger kids, it gets a little hard trying to stretch out the lesson, but for the older kids it's hard to actually include everything sometimes. My coworker teaches more classes than me, but even so I know people at other schools who teach way more classes. I also do some TOEFL (a national English test) prep with some of the advanced classes. As far as English skills go, my classes range from elementary students who can string together a sentence or two to middle schoolers who I can carry on a conversation with. While they are all pretty good with a few exceptions, some of them are really smart, and it makes me feel good to see students getting better.

I'd say I like my job. It's the first job I've had that I've genuinely liked. With that being said, I could not make ESL a career. It's just kind of a joke really and I don't think I have a professional job. I could see myself doing this for some time, but no way could I be 40 years old doing ESL.