The thrust of my arguement is that the $2500 a month a teacher is paid helps the school gross $15000 a month, however, the teacher was promised $3000 a month (overtime not paid), and is not covered by health insurance despite having $50 deducted from his/her pay check monthly, has his/or her income misreported to the Korean Government and has their tax deduction pocketed by the director, lives in the cheapest apartment they could find, works from 6:30 AM to 9:30 AM then again fron 2-3 PM until 9 PM, may have classes on Saturday, gets no vacation aside from national hoildays, and might be cheated out of thier return airfare and competion bonus.

The Hakwons of S. Korea are emblematic of S. Korea’s flaws, and a reflection of the Korean People values, character, and society as a whole.

The guest also makes the excellent point that evolving your ESL teaching career in Asia to one in North America may not come with the financial rewards and benefits you came to expect in Korea.

Anyway, I appreciated the guest’s candor.

TTC ticket takers make a very high wage (about 60K) but it’s not an entry level job. It’s a senior position, kind of a reward for service. At the TTC you have to start in the grease room and work your way up. It’s probably not a fair comparison, whatever the guest was using it to compare to.

It’s correct, of course, to say there is no career path in ESL teaching in Korea but then that grim prospect is shared by the majority of native Koreans in the system as well. And where else on earth is it likely you are paid more than your superior? I know at my hagwon I was earning more than my department head.

The guest seemed to be a bit inconsistent in terms of what he viewed as fair compensation. While he believed ESL teachers were underpaid in Korea, as a principle of a school in Toronto and presumably in some control of wages, he seemed rather pleased that he could pay qualified teachers $20 an hour.

I will still contend any job where you simply need a BA in anything and have zero skills that pays you enough to bank $1000 a month (assuming the won’s value picks up a bit) is not, in my experience, an underpaid job for the given qualifications.

The thrust of the guest’s argument was the $2500 a month a teacher earns helps the school gross $8000 a month. There’s a large gap and therefore ESL teachers deserve (or could morally ask for) a larger cut of the gross. Of course out of that $8000 must come rent, insurance, pay for support staff, janitorial services, taxes, etc. I’ve never seen a school’s books of course (and I’m sure I would not want to) and I’m running on the assumption that a hagwon actually complies with things like insurance and taxes. As if. However, even if all of those things are only a small fraction of the gross, one must remember the owner ultimately takes the full risk and only receives a fraction (even if it is a large fraction) of the reward.

If a teacher feels unfairly compensated, he should ask for more pay. However at some point a teacher might realize if not him then the next guy in line. I might value myself at 4 million won to a school but I know for a fact there’s a guy waiting in Canada to get on a plane who is 80% as competent but will ask for 40% less.

You’re spot on about us being spot on.

About yen and won thing, I was skeptical when I heard it, but in my usual babbling way, I spread the rumor without checking it out. After that, I couldn’t find a way to cut it out of the show without it losing flow. So, you know the whole dilemma–hurt the show or make myself look like an ass.

I guess you can see what I chose.

2. I agree with much of the condemning of Cho Joo-hee. There are more foriegners in Korea now, so consequentially the number of foriegners using drugs would probably increase, that is the number, not the percentage. I think that it would be worth it to do an article about the attitudes of Korean teachers in Korea. If the situation were switched, and masses of Korean teachers were going to the west to teach things like math, I can assure you that if Korean teachers acted there the way they do here, there would be many Koreans in American jails. I work in a middle school. Probably 90% of my co-workers would get their asses sued off by parents because the teachers beat the shit out of students with sticks here. Cho Soo-hee can try to fix foriegn perceptions all she wants but she should try to fix domestic facts first.

3. What is the website where you can download the Canadian ESL curriculum? That would be pretty sweet to have.

4. All of that stuff about the human resources couldn’t be more spot on. It is nice to hear other people talk about some of the wack jobs that come here, rather than the blanket defense of English teachers. There are some unstable folks here, but you do have to blame the people who hired them. For my job I was interviewed, but the lady was just asked me questions like. “How about Korea? or “Do you like kimchi?” I would encourage these people doing the hiring to call references and former work places to see if the people can stand doing work. My girlfriend told me that they don’t even do that for Koreans though, she said that they just get a slip of paper that is evidence that they held a job in the past.

5. The thing about the tourist signs was spot on as well. I live in Jinju where there is a recreated fortress where this woman committed suicide while drowning a Japanese general. There, there is this nice pavillion. The tourst sign boasts of how the pavillion was destroyed and rebuilt, and was once known as the finest pavillion in Gyeongsangnamdo province. Yet it doesn’t really describe the pavillion’s function.

Best/greatest drivers in Korea are the tow truck drivers. Hire those drivers and companies to drive/run the ambulances and fire trucks.

Joe – Just tried the “Check Spelling” but got an “Error 404 – Not Found” page…..

The Korean word for cigarettes is “dom-bae.” This is derivative of the original Korean word “dom-bak-ko” = tobacco, one of the oldest examples I have ever found in Korea of Konglish (a foreign/European word (not Chinese) that Koreans adopted as their own.) As far as I know tobacco was introduced to Korea about 300-400 years ago, probably by Japanese traders who got it from the Portugese. It’s possible also that the Korean word for bread “baeng” was also introduced around the same time. The Korean and Portugese words for bread are very similar.

As far as I know, historically Korea has never had a huge illegal drug problem. I believe that the reason why Korean laws are so draconian when it comes to illegal drug use is not historical but that when Korean decided to write up their modern laws they merely copied Chinese laws regarding illegal drug use.