Life in Korea

So here's a paradox: despite the fact that there is no shortage of foreigners who desire to learn the local language not just for themselves but also for better communication when at work, out shopping etc., there are no suitable institutes like the "hagwons" to cater for this real need. Yet I know of at least two language institutes in the town here who cater for people who want to speak Japanese. This is a case of reverse logistics; there is plenty of demand for a particular product, but supply is virtually zero.

Nor is this the case just with people who want to learn Korean. The PC vendor, Dell, recently held a poll at their web site, and two facts became manifest: firstly, their customers, existing or potential, are fed-up with buying Microsoft-installed machines which come complete with all sorts of undesirable "crapware", but which in fact (and unfortunately for Dell, perhaps) is an important source of revenue for the company, Dell, itself. Customers want Dell to sell them reliable machines running some form of Linux. Secondly, they also seem not to want a lot of MS's own wares, for example its well-known Office suite, but rather Open Source products like OpenOffice, which is based upon StarOffice by Sun Microsystems. The problem? Michael Dell built his little empire flogging economical custom Microsoft machines. And unlike the very restricted choice of MS OSes which would otherwise be sold, the customers might prefer any one of a range of very good, stable and virus free variants of Linux such as Mandriva (my own), SuSE, Red Hat, PCLinuxOS, Debian or maybe even the one chosen for Nicholas Negroponte's well-known "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) project, Ubuntu. Decisions, decisions!

These two cases share one thing in common; reverse logistics. Professor Jeong could be offering more lessons to foreigners, but although he has the time and a reputable university behind him, as well as a string of very useful books which he himself has written, his potential customers have not the free time to make use of his services. Similarly with Dell; their customers are signalling that they want an actual change of OS at the point of sale but whichever way he turns, Dell won't satisfy everyone. Experienced Linux users will by this time have decided what they like and may be disappointed with what he offers; and sales must reach a certain volume in order to justify the expenditure not only upon optimised systems but also training and essential maintenance and support. It's a business, after all. It has a cash flow to maintain and if there is any Linux in there, it must justify itself by turning a consistent profit - the people who work for Dell can't live on air.

And so we come to this vexed question of recruiting foreigners to work in Korea. Go to any one of a number of major ESL sites like Dave's ESL Cafe, ESLEmployment, or TEFL.com and there is never a shortage of potential jobs for someone who has at least an undergraduate Degree and wants a change of lifestyle. It even differs from other places like Taiwan (where I have also worked) and Japan (where I wanted to work) in that accommodation comes free as part of the contractual arrangements; the inhabitant therein just pays for utilities, cable TV, phone line etc., and the bills are all generally small.

OK, so the kids can be objectionable at times and the job is often stressful, but the point is that anyone with a Degree can come here and teach their native language - not just English but Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, you name it. And on top of all of this, there is a burgeoning industry of recruiters who have arisen to fill the void of time available for institute owners to do the recruiting themselves.

So, given that a fairly well-remunerated job can be had in fairly comfortable surroundings, how come there's such difficulty in getting people here? This is another of those nebulous ideas which crystallised after meeting fellow Linux adherent and Canadian ex-government worker Joerg (whom we normally, and mistakenly, call "George"), whose hagwon was having identical problems (he missed the entertainment with the Professor, though . . .).

The first hurdle is strictly logistic: it was a simple matter to get myself here because I was living in relatively nearby (geographically speaking) Taiwan, and it was also simple to receive the legendary "Blue Form" (the authorisation for the initial entry visa) and get my visa stamped because there is a convenient Korean Trade Office in Taipei which handles such things. Also, a one-way ticket to Korea from Chiang Kai-shek is much cheaper and faster than from, say, New York or London or Sydney; the people who could potentially come here and do this job actually have to travel half way around the world in order to do it, and this is not only expensive but physically difficult, too. So despite the fact that the cost of travel is defrayed entirely by the new employer, many people are daunted by the prospect of flying far away from their own country to another about which they know basically nothing.

I should digress here momentarily and put it to my reader that there is an increasing amount of fundamental ignorance in the world about surprisingly simple things. People from an older generation - even those who hadn't fought there - knew where Korea was, they knew that there had been an unsuccessful war prosecuted there in the early 1950s and those who didn't would have at least learned something about it from the famous American TV series, "MASH", with Alan Alda, and a small number of films made about the Korean War in the 1950s (as well as the original 1970 "M*A*S*H*" film starring Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould). They may even have not known exactly where it was but they had some idea that it was somewhere around China or Japan. Nowadays you talk to young people about a place like Korea and they are clueless; they have never studied a world map even with any passing interest and so they are completely ignorant that such places so much as exist. This is a sad indictment of our modern educational systems, which, far from educating people and encouraging their curiosity about the world around them, seem to be robbing them of any sense of historical, cultural or geographical perspective.

Some time before departing the green shores of England to teach little kids in Taiwan, I worked as a temp (not for the first time) at a certain well-known fire alarm company in my hometown (also, alas, not for the first time). On my last day there, I was talking to a rather nice young blonde lady:

"Well, it's my last day here today," I said.

"Oh, that's right!" she said: "Where are you going?"

"South Korea." I said.

"Korea?" she replied: "Where's that?"

Apparently she had never even heard of the place . . . so much for the English education system!

Another example of this kind of ignorance was related to me by Gareth, a former co-worker from Ireland who worked with me at the Sodab-dong hagwon back in 2004-2005. He had gone to fellow Irishman Austin Buckley's "O'Brien's" franchised Irish-themed pub the previous night, and had an encounter with a young American lady:

"Ohhhh, what an unusual accent you have!" she said (or words to that effect). "Where are you from?"

"Ur, akcherly, Oi'm from Oireland." he replied, with typical humility.

"Ohhh, Ireland, yeah, uh-huh . . . uhh, Ireland . . .uhhh, is that anywhere near Maryland?"

Whatever . . . getting back to my theme, we are subject to a curious phenomenon, according to which people express an interest in the job but then change their minds about it. This has devastating consequences. What usually happens is that they show in the beginning that they are interested, but then, of course, they are also looking at other potential jobs alongside the ones we have on offer, and among these will be better-paid (but not necessarily better in fact) jobs in more northerly locations like Seoul, better-paid simply because it is, er, Seoul.

For a long time, our Boss had had the luxury of being able to employ people who were willing to work for him more cheaply than for other hagwons. But in the end, he was forced to begin raising salaries because otherwise, he was simply unable to attract attention from people seeing his advertisements alongside others which were offering more money. And even then, the recruiting problems continued. At the time of writing, we have finally succeeded in recruiting a third new, male, British teacher, older, well-qualified and with experience, who has committed himself to the new job. And it is a 'new' job - once he arrives, we will be able to rearrange our timetable and get all of our allotted tasks completed on time and with less stress. But he was the fourth or fifth in a row who had come to us through the recruiter in Seoul expressing an interest, and the only one who has stayed almost to the end, waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting . . . for his visa authorisation to arrive.

Which brings us to a matter seldom mentioned but nonetheless real, as I myself experienced the same problems: leaving the place where you lived previously, which may be your homeland or simply the country where you worked beforehand, means also leaving whatever work you were doing there in preparation for what comes next. But your bills and things do not suddenly stop because work stops, so savings go down and with the time-consuming and usually expensive process of forwarding documents, processing and returning the authority for entry, as well as actually flying here, they can go down to virtually zero; many are those who arrive here with little or nothing despite having been financially sound after quitting their last employ. It's all a question of time and expenses; small wonder that employers in Korea have found that they have to pay for travel costs - the price of the necessary commitment may be more than just money, which is something you as an individual perhaps don't realise before setting out. Circumstances may be tough at times, and may certainly be tough at first because you may have to adjust to all sorts of new things, as well as an initially dodgy financial situation. Finding your feet in an environment which is completely foreign to your previous experience can be another daunting task, one which may weigh heavily in the minds of potential candidates.

It would be nice to be able to end this diatribe by saying that hagwons are able to get around the problems on a temporary basis by planning, but alas (again), this appears not to be true. Given that the recruitment process is a tedious and time-consuming affair, clearly a successful conclusion can only come from a sensible, long-term plan which takes account of all the aforementioned - in other words, a rolling recruitment style with a long lead-in allowing all of the parties concerned to finalise arrangements and avoid all of the hassle. Then if the current foreigner decided to stay, there would be no problem and more time would be available for the next instance of recruitment.

Practically, however, the opposite is usually true: the previous incumbent of the post decides to go home or transfer to another employer and because said employer has not bothered to ask beforehand, suddenly they are in a panic as they realise that they now need a new foreigner at very short notice. This was the reason why recruiters took off in such a big way in places like Korea and Taiwan. This is also why they have such trouble recruiting - the lead-in time is invariably too short. People cannot simply drop everything and fly out, because the result is often a hopeless mess in one's personal affairs. Planning these things, in terms of having enough time to secure replacement personnel when foreign staff leave, is very important, but one does wonder at times whether such things ever enter the minds of the average private school owners; the evidence does often appear to the contrary. But then, like any other business, it is (or can be) only as good as the man or woman who runs it. That's the bottom line: a strong business plan with good process monitoring is as important for the running of a private school as it is for any other business.

It does have to be said that as a result of often unscrupulous hagwon owners, many of these institutions have acquired a bad reputation, and as anyone interested in working for them these days will almost certainly try to find out about them - usually on an Internet-based blacklist or greylist - they may discover something unsavoury about them. This is doubly unfortunate because these Internet documents are often not subject to regular editing, so that the company can change hands, go under and be replaced, in fact almost anything can happen to change things, and the readers of those pages would never know about it. Franchises of my own school chain around the Greater Seoul area, for example, seem to have acquired a bad reputation, yet you wouldn't know it where I am. So remember again: the business is only as good as its owner, always.

The final point which needs to be made is that with such a large population of dedicated foreigners in a place like South Korea, there must surely be enough dynamism of this population that there are always people coming to the ends of their contracts at convenient times; then they could sign a contract with the new employer, hand in their notice and then the old employer would have enough time for recruitment of the new foreigner. Experience here in Changwon seems to suggest a lead-in time of three months or more is necessary as a minimum owing to the very high drop-out rate among applicants. Clearly, hagwon owners would stand to save an awful lot of time, stress and money if they were able to recruit new foreigners directly in Korea rather than having to drag them in from abroad; the greatest inconvenience would only be sending them across to Fukuoka for a couple of days to get their new visa stamped. But this type of mechanism seems to be lacking, whereas in the Anglo-Saxon world, at the very least, it is perhaps more common these days for recruitment agencies to assist rather than the employer spending money on expensive (and possibly ineffective) Internet or mass-media advertising.

Let me end by addressing anyone who is interested in coming to Korea. If you are genuinely interested in coming here, then plan for the long term; this may include transitioning between jobs, so have a good plan available and stick to it. But more than anything else, commit yourself to what you are doing and don't enter into it with the intention of funking out prematurely because it helps no-one - least of all yourself. The first place you will be hit is in your bank account, after all. Just because the contract says "one year", it doesn't mean that it can or should be seen as only a one-year commitment - these contracts are renewable and have the added legal benefit of a thirteenth month of taxable salary paid as a bonus upon completion of each year.

In terms of what you do after arrival, try not to be loud and intrusive; and remember that you are now part of a business, and the way you behave impacts directly on the well-being of that business, and ultimately therefore upon yourself. Familiarise yourself with the materials and work out your own "method" or "system" if nothing like that is established (remember that this may often hold true for a small school), and don't be afraid of using a little Korean in class because there is always a very small proportion of stuff - be it vocabulary or grammar - which cannot otherwise be explained easily. Your students will respect you more when they realise that you can read and write their language, the more so when it is targeted and appropriate to the context.

You may be suffering from more or less financial "exhaustion" upon arrival and although your employer will usually be happy to assist by giving you a part of the first month's salary early (with just the remainder being received on Pay Day), it's not a good idea to spend every night at the local foreigners' pub until you are established there. Let yourself build up some savings, then start getting around a bit. Doing the job well is more important than spending money, so become proficient in this first. Logical, Captain!

Finally, and most importantly, remember that your new employer has just spent an arm and a leg paying for your inbound flight, sponsoring your work permit, arranging your accommodation and things like bed, TV, refrigerator etc., and the most important thing for him or her is that you should be as reliable and sufficiently able to do as they ask each day with a minimum of friction not only between yourself and him/her but also between yourself and other staff and the students, too. You are being paid a lot of money (by local standards) to be a help and (one would hope) a friend to them, you are the "native speaker" expert and they will often need your input for things like grammar and alternative vocabulary, so remember that you are not just someone who does a job, you are a linguistic resource; that is primarily what you are paid for. Look at it from the point of view of the business before you look at it from your own POV and take note of the obvious differences between the two, and where they synergise. You are not paid to be perfect, but you are being paid to do your job effectively and reliably.

A person who can do the job acceptably well, gets on well with Korean teachers and students and generally assists with the profit and growth of the business is someone the Boss will ask to stay. Just look back at my previous posts here and see that I have not just been working each day, I have been innovating and using my knowledge for the benefit of the business; our hagwon (and the students who go there) has won all sorts of awards for excellence of service and in the local speech contests and has been growing for the last few years. How do you think I feel about that?

The one thing we can conclude from all of the above is that the instability in the recruitment of foreigners for hagwons results from an inefficient system geared to annual contracts, so let's just finish by saying that all of this can be avoided if you stay put, and if you want to do that, you must make sure that you are comfortable enough with what you are doing that moving anywhere - even within the same country - would be enough of a wrench to make you think twice. If you find yourself in that position after your first year, it means you're doing something right.

Andrew ^_^

Trying to teach serious English to the kids in Korea is a pain. Why? Firstly, the type of institute I work in is strictly "after-school", i.e. the kids finish day school before they come to our school and are therefore, both physically and psychologically, drained after a day of having their heads stuffed full of facts which will almost certainly be completely useless in their adult lives. Again, almost certainly, and especially later in the evening, this is probably not the only such institution they attend on a daily basis. They are then subjected to a dull routine of brain-numbing exercises designed by people who are not themselves native speakers, so that the errors are propagated at the expense of learning the correct language. Add to this the fact that the parents who can afford to send their kids to a succession of such institutions on a daily basis have probably indulged them over much in terms of boredom-relieving devices such as computer games and TV, and you have a perfect recipe for constant dullness. They are not interested in the idea that what they are supposed to be learning may actually be useful (one day . . .).

Secondly, even the "native speaker"-written texts themselves leave so much to be desired in terms of useability. There is a common disease rampant in the world of English language teaching that the learner's first language must be rigorously excluded from the process in order to force them to become more self-reliant in their adaptation to the new language. The immediate consequence of this is that learners cannot understand their textbooks; they are all written in English with no guide or gloss in their language to make them easier to understand.

This second factor is very serious. Part and parcel of the modern way of learning English is that the foreigner coming here to teach is somehow "magically" supposed to be able to explain to non-English-native learners how to speak the target language; yet it is commonly acknowledged that this cannot work simply because there will always be a minority of items - some 3% or more of the total - which can only be communicated in the learner's language.

Imagine for a moment what is really happening here. Foreigners with undergraduate Degrees - the minimal qualificational requirement for teaching in any East Asian country - are invited, often by employment agencies rather than by official bodies or even the schools themselves, to come to Korea and there is no mention of having (or desiring to acquire) any Korean linguistic ability of their own. So these people - often, perhaps, not even having known beforehand that Korea so much as exists, what a great sense of geopolitics they must have! - are brought here with no clue as to what they are supposed to be doing. The materials themselves are a mess and the totality of the whole even more so. The foreigners themselves probably have only some rudimentary notion of how to do grammar even in their own language. Result: chaos.

There is no denying that from the foreigner's point of view, the desire - genuine or implanted - on the part of people like the Koreans to learn English fosters a sense of laziness. The Koreans want to learn our language, and we apply no desire on our own part to reciprocate substantially despite the clear benefits of doing so, because this would subvert the notion that exclusion of the mother-tongue enforces independent thinking. But it is not only teaching in Korea which is affected by this. English teaching is infected by a deep sense of narcissism. The foreigners, we tell ourselves, are learning our language because they want to be like us. But this is not the case: usually they have a strong sense of their own ethnocentrism, and learning English is really just an accessory for them to be what they are somewhere within the English-speaking world. So, in their minds, there is something unhelpful and unwholesome in all of this because it implies that somehow, their own language or culture is not deemed worthy of joining the ranks of those considered to have the greatest cultural or economic significance. And they necessarily resent this.

They can see the inherent narcissism of the foreigner all the time. And not only can they see it, they have to suffer it as part of their educational system, too. They can't understand their textbooks because they are written entirely in the target language, and the authors' collective notion of good performance in the target language seems to demand not only the avoidance of useful first-language glossing, but also the introduction of polysyllabic words which the learner finds not only difficult to pronounce but to understand too. I have personally lost count of the number of times, during actual lessons, when the absurdity of the situation has just slapped me in the face like a wet flannel. These people who write the textbooks are just talking to themselves! It's like the politician who never answers questions, but just makes absurd political statements and speeches all the time. We wouldn't respect this in our politicians and young Koreans certainly don't respect this in the resident ET (English Teacher, but you get the implication . . .).

Sadly, when it comes to the foreigner having any reasonable desire to learn Korean, the same applies. The Korean educational system has traditionally been like the Chinese - based essentially upon memorisation and repetition. Only very low-level effectiveness would be expected from trying to learn a foreign language like that. Consequently, it is difficult for the foreigner to get to grips with Korean seriously because - paradoxically - some of the best materials for learning to speak Korean are actually written by foreigners rather than by the Koreans themselves. Books written by Koreans often seem illogically laid-out and the different social levels of speech, a feature apparently absent from modern English, are seldom explained adequately. Add to this the fact that most hagwons (and other institutions) seem not to place any importance upon actually teaching Korean to their resident foreigners, and you end up with the situation we have now.

The hagwons are unfortunately not the only way in which students are supposedly introduced to the English language. Their parents are often tempted to send them away to residential "camps" where it seems they do little more than play games. This is another little "syndrome" within the English teaching community - provide the student with an "immersion" environment and lower their affective filter by forever playing games. The kids then come back to the hagwon, but when they write in their diaries about what they did, there seems to be no evidence of having learned anything, or at least anything which would have helped their English written skills. It all just makes money, and that's the bottom line. The kids are easily bored, and learning any language demands concentration and application; the games relieve their boredom, and there are people out there who are happy to relieve parents of their hard-earned dosh by doing this under the pretence of teaching the language. It's a growth area, and an infallible way of making money in Korea.

The final part of the puzzle, as to why it becomes progressively more difficult for a foreigner resident in Korea to learn to speak Korean, is simple: no spare time. In my own case, when I first came here, I had plenty of time. I could go to the hagwon where I was working and could spend literally hours listening to my tapes, reading and writing, before even having to set out my timesheet for the day's lessons. Nowadays I get out of bed later (in order to avoid the absurd and constant yawning which results otherwise) and when I go to work, there is a pile of paper waiting for me, including badly-written diaries which take ages to correct. Indeed, during the recent schools' winter vacation, I had an extra speaking and writing class (in fact, during that period I acquired six extra classes), and the only way I could do my lessons, make the minimal number of telephone consultations and get the diaries marked was to take them home - often keeping me awake until three or four a.m. No wonder I couldn't get enough sleep! :-P

To this, perhaps, should be added the fact that it often seems difficult to emulate a good learning environment. The hagwon, paradoxically, is supposed to be a place of learning but the foreigner never seems to have sufficient space for such things, and this is very telling. I have found it similarly difficult to rearrange things at home to the same end. Everywhere, space is at a premium and this affects the learning process, at least in my own experience, since the number of errors in East Asian language learning materials requires me to have a range of them open before me simultaneously so that I can detect the errors and correct them by cross-checking.

It's not difficult to see where the real problem lies. At the Korea Herald web site a while back was a telling commentary in which the editor bemoaned the glacially slow rate of educational change within South Korea. The reason being to do with the idea that educationalists - and educational institutions - were afraid of deviating in any way away from the consensus norm of education in Korea. They were afraid of trying something new and being seen to fail. And it is this which keeps the regrettable status quo within more educational systems than just the Korean.