Hagwon Vs Epik

Hagwons vs EPIK

A lot of people have been asking me about teaching in Korea and how to go about it. There are a lot of things to consider when taking a job in Korea, so I'm going to write a post that discusses one of the important things you need to consider when choosing to teach in Korea: 'Whether to teach in a Hagwon or teach with EPIK (public school system)'. This post is also to help people understand what I do in Korea, and some of the risks/experiences I go through when choosing where to teach.

When you go to teach in Korea you have two options of what kind of establishments you can choose to work in. EPIK and Hagwons. This essay-length post will help explain what both of them are and what are the pros/cons for each choice. I'm not going to tell you which one is best, because a lot of what you'll prefer is based on your personality.

Image taken from sjleesj's blog. Which taught me there are dating hagwons!

Hagwon

What is a hagwon (학원) (Pronounced somewhat like hog-won)

In Korea, your average student finishes up in school at around 3-4pm and then heads over to an after-school private tutoring center called a hagwon (or in English, 'Academy'). These are somewhat similar to 'Oxford Tutoring' or 'Kumon' which you can find in the west. Hagwons help with a whole range of studies (Math, English, Music, etc.), and the student stays there for about 2 hours (this differs between hagwons) for extra studying. So a student may have a schedule like 'English on Monday/Wednesday/Friday, Math on Tuesday/Thursday, and Music on Saturdays' all at different hagwons. Of course this is all dependent on finances (hagwons tend to be at least 200$ a month). Needless to say, Korean students study often and study hard.

What is it like to work there?

Most hagwons have you work in the afternoon until the evening. My previous schedule was 1pm-9pm and I had Elementary & Middle School students. Most hagwons have you come in an hour early (The contract doesn't show that, so watch out!) for class preparation, and then you will teach small classes (10-15 students) for 45-50mins at a time. You will teach alone. Most of the time you be a fairly independent teacher with your own tasks and responsibilities and no one bothering you. You will probably have a few Korean co-workers, and depending where your hagwon is, you'll have anywhere from 1 foreign co-worker, up to 20 foreign co-workers. The bigger the city, the more demand, the more money, and so the more foreign teachers a single hagwon will have.

Pros:

• - Small Classes
• - A lot of room for creativity in teaching
• - Good teaching hours
• - Independence in teaching
• - An arguably more real teaching experience
• - Great for beginners (books are all very comprehensive)

Cons:

• - Because hagwons are so popular most Korean directors start hagwons because it's an easy profit, rather than for the love of education. This means that some will cut corners and costs which could result in them not paying your pension/overtime/the amount you deserve based on your education/give you a lousy apartment
• - Because there are SO MANY hagwons, there's a chance it could go out of business while you're there
• - Vacations are much shorter (make sure that when they say 5 days in the Summer and 5 days in the Winter, that you can take the 5 days off TOGETHER)
• - You will probably have to be at work the day after you arrive in Korea (hurts!) and you may or may not get an orientation

Summary:

Hagwons can be a very rewarding teaching experience and you'll be more likely to see progress with your students and get that warm, fuzzy, rewarding side of teaching. The problem is, Hagwon directors are notorious for taking advantage of naive new English teachers and it can be difficult to find a safe hagwon. You can have a good experience, but you have to be willing to take the time to find a good place.
At the bottom of this post I'll write a bit about how to avoid horrible hagwons.

EPIK (English Program in Korea)

What is 'EPIK'?

This is a government run program that allows you to teach in the public schools (and sometimes language centers) within Korea. Because you're a part of a government-run program, you'll be first sent to a week long Orientation in Seoul before you're sent off to your workplace. Being a part of EPIK also means that occasionally you may be invited to special cultural activities (overnight stay at the temple, hikes, etc). There are also offshoots, SMOE is a government run program for schools in Seoul (Please note that when I last checked, SMOE no longer existed and they were working towards removing GEPIK), and GEPIK is the EPIK program for Gyeonggi (the province that Seoul and most of Korea's population resides in).


What is it like to work there?

Your average class size will probably be around 30 students. You'll also get a co-teacher who will be with you for all of your class. Your relationship with the co-teacher is usually her/him assisting you with the class, helping plan lessons/activities and helping on the disciplining side of things (but this can vary depending on the personality of your co-teacher). Your day will be the typical 8am-4pm workday, but you'll probably only teach for about 4 hours. You will also be expected to help run Summer/Winter camps during the school's vacation period. That being said, you get way more vacation time than hagwon teachers (any time that the students have vacation and you're not doing camp, + 3 extra weeks off)

Pros:

• -More vacation!! YAY!
• - You get a co-teacher
• - More job safety (You're much less likely to be screwed about, the school doesn't run the risk of going under, & your contract is less sketchy)
• - More likely to be paid on time/ Less payment issues
• - You'll be more likely to get a nice apt.
• - You're guaranteed a good orientation that will help you prepare for working with a co-teacher, culture shocks, and teaching in the system (and you'll make friends!)

Cons:

• - You don't find out where you'll be teaching in Korea until you arrive for orientation in Korea (if you apply directly to EPIK and not through an agency)
• - A lot of sitting around (Just because you don't have any classes, doesn't mean you get to go home. So when that Sports Day comes and you have no classes to teach, you'll rarely be allowed to go home)
• -You will be required to participate in summer camps or special teaching days meaning you will be teaching when everyone else may be on vacation
• - Paper work and procedures for applying for EPIK is painful.

Summary:

This is a safer environment to teach within and you likely meet many friends during your orientation. You'll be able to receive help from your co-teacher and have a great vacation. Although be prepared to waste many hours in front of your computer becoming extra acquainted with Facebook. You may be lucky enough to be invited out on a field trip, but it's likely you'll just be keeping your seat warm with all the down time you'll have. Camps can be lousy, and if you're sent to a camp right after orientation be sure to get the contract from them to sign before the camp (or else you won't be paid for the camp).

How to Avoid Horrid Hagwons

If it's your first time, sign up with an agency. They'll be more likely to get you a safe hagwon. (This is because they SHOULD be blacklisting bad hagwons. That being said, I've run into pushy shifty agencies, so trust your gut if you feel uncomfortable with your agency. If you don't trust your agency, how can you feel good about the job offers you get?) Your agency will hook you up with a hagwon for free and they'll help you along with Visa paperwork. I would recommend 2 agencies:

Canadian Connection (good for non-Canadians too)
Jeju ESL (Only for Jeju island)

Make sure that before taking a job with a hagwon, you have the chance to talk to the current foreign worker. He/She can give you great insight on what the hagwon is like (and the apartment!) If they refuse to let you talk with the current foreign teacher, then don't take the job. The pay should match your experience. If you just got out of university with a BA in Biology, then 2.0mill won or 2.1mill won is all you're gonna get. However if you have a TEFL certificate/Year of Teaching Experience, then you should expect a pay increase. Make sure that you can take those 5 vacation days off at once (and you should get a total of 10). You can travel a lot better with 9 days off (5 week days + 4 weekend days), rather than my previous 3 days + election day vacation. You should be getting contractual basics (apt. with stove/sink/toilet/table/bed/mini fridge, 50% of insurance paid, pension, severance).

Triple check that contract!!!! Have your brother, sister, mother, father, neighbour look over that contract for shifty things!! If it says you may do weekend work, then make sure the contract mentions how many days (and how much you'll be paid)! If it mentions you'll have an orientation, then make sure it mentions how much you'll be paid and for many days! (Sometimes you won't be paid at all, but that's not the end of the world.) Overtime, sick days, apt., health care, pension, severance, airplane tickets (both ways and how it will be paid) are all things that need to be in the contract!

Finally, with every hagwon suggestion from your agency, make sure you first google it. There are a lot of hagwon review sites, and I strongly recommend you check out what the reviews say about your hagwon. That being said, hagwon review sites can be a source of venting for unhappy employees who were overwhelmed by the culture shock and the different attitudes Koreans have about work.

Have more questions? Or you just need lesson ideas/discipline/help or anything else. This website and the forums are great for any questions you may have.
Dave's ESL Cafe

If you see any corrections that need to be done, misinformation, or just have questions, please feel free to contact me!

Getting in touch with my Seoul

As you may have noticed, my blogging has completely stopped. I stopped partly because I'm lazy and hated editing each post (there were always grammatical & spelling errors, and uploading photos was an exercise in frustration), but I also stopped because I didn't think anyone read it.

Well... sure... a few random people read it and posted on it (thanks random people!) Actually after looking at my blog stats, it turns out that most of my viewers came from the USA, followed by Canada, and then a tie between the UK, Germany, India, and Australia (which is odd, because I don't actually have that many friends in those countries).
Furthermore, it turns out most people found my blog by googling 'Johnny Cade' (HEY!), or some other special key words that lead them to reading my post about Loveland. I do NOT want to know what they were googling.

Of course, after I stopped posting and got back to Canada, it turned out everyone and their 2nd cousins had been reading my blog. So once again I will attempt to maintain a blog.


So, would you all like a mini update?

I'm moving to Seoul!!!

Yes I've taken on a new job in a hagwon and so this blog while be dedicated to those experiences.

So I have decided to update a few things in this blog.

Deep Fried Seoul is the new name. It's meant to be a pun off of the fish 'Sole'. I actually looked at a lot of potential puns (Chicken Soup for the Seoul, Seoul Survivor, Seoulmate, Mind & Seoul, Seoul Sistah, Seoul Train etc), but, tragically, it turned out that they were all taken. So to all the random bloggers, tour agencies, documentary film makers, I hope you're embarrassed by your ridiculously cheesy names!

Still, I'm pretty pleased by this choice and it's a good follow-up name from my previous salad dressing-inspired blog name: 'Memories of Jeju'. (Don't sue me President's Choice!)

The background image is taken from an image I found on google. All credit goes to the photographer who is uploading here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/doegox/
Thank you random photographer, I liked your photos of the lemurs, and now I have officially followed your reproduction rules. The fish were stolen from a random blog I found here: http://sellmic.com/blog/2008/02/15/the-constructor-that-doesnt-construct-blooper-of-the-day/. Uhm, your blog was nice... but I didn't really understand any of it.

So now the adventure is about to start up all over again. I hope you enjoy it! Please write as many comments as you can, I like reading them and it encourages me to be more active!

No, really! You keep commenting about how awesome I am, and I'll keep making your life better with tales of my life!

(Sounds like a deal!)

My Life is Made Further Complete by Another Temple and Festival

Yakcheon-sa and the Cherry Blossom Festival

Yakcheon-sa (the '-sa' means temple in Korean)

My friend Mike's relatives were visiting and needed something to visit, so I suggested the Yakcheon temple. This is a temple I had been meaning to visit for awhile now because I had heard that it was one of the largest Buddhist temples in Asia. That didn't turn out to be completely accurate, but it was not disappointing.

I'll just mention the 2 highlights. Starting with the room with the 500 Buddha statues. Like the name suggests, there was a room with 500 unique, individually painted Buddhas doing various things. Apparently of these 500 statues, one was depicted in a Korean style while the rest were done in a Chinese style. Unfortunately there were no signs or information in the building ( the only information we had learned was because my friend had done a special foreign temple stay) and because the room had be re-arranged due to renovations, we could not find the special Korean Buddha. And honestly.... they all looked like they had been done in the same style.



The other highlight was the main temple prayer room. Now the temple claims that this is the largest Bhuddist prayer room. And it's not difficult to believe. I rarely see a temple/palace reach 2 floors, let alone 3 floors like this one does. In the center of the room there are 3 massive Buddhas, flanked by dragons curling up the poles supporting the temple. The temple isn't very old (I believe it was constructed sometime in the late 20th century), which means the paintings are still vibrant and in excellent condition. You're allowed to climb the first 2 floors, and the floors are filled with paintings and statues. All and all, it was a worthwhile trip down to Seogwipo!


___________________________________________________________________

Cherry Blossom Festival

There isn't as much that I can say about this festival as it was rather uneventful. I don't recall the names of these trees, but despite the fact that I'm calling them they're certainly not Cherry trees. Each year these beautiful trees bloom for only about a week, and so during the weekend of the strongest bloom, they host a festival. This festival also coincides with the Rape seed festival, what today westerners would call Canola oil flowers. For some strange reason, the Koreans still insist on calling it by it's old name. I'm assuming they don't quite realize what 'rape' means in English. I didn't get out to see that festival, as I ended up choosing to sleep in to get over a cold caused by the 'Yellow Dust' in order to prepare for Malaysia. 'Yellow Dust' is something I recommend you google... I may blog about it later.

Back to the Cherry Blossom Festival, having read about the lavish festivals held in Japan for the Sakura (the same kind of tree) I was very much excited to see what Jeju would do! One fact I was aware of, was that in Korea, many couples have their wedding photos taken infront of the Cherry Blossoms.

Unfortunately this year Jeju's spring has been a pretty cold one, and so the Cherry Blossoms still had not fully blossomed by the time the festival had rolled around. In fact the entire festival was rather cold with the wind and a temperature around +10 celcius. Still, my friend Judy and I headed out to the colorful tents to see the festival. The festival wasn't too different from previous ones, but I was able to dress up in a hanbok again, create my own hanji doll (hanji is the Korean paper art, used in making doors, windows and other various things) and receive a painting made out in my name. Or least he painted my name on it.



It says something along the lines of 'Without friends, all the beautiful things in this world are meaningless'. Rather depressing, but apparently is of the Joseon Dynasty style. Either way the painting is gorgeous.

So there you have it. A quick update of 2 weekends I experienced in March (although I realize posted up very late). Next post? ~Malaysia~

Jenny's 'Factoids' About Koreans & Jeju Life

As of late my poor blog has been missing out on some Jenny-lovin', and since no one enjoys experiencing that, I decided to put up a filler post. I will soon be heading to Malaysia for a short vacation, so you can expect a long-winded post about that. But until then, enjoy this post about observations made about the every day life of Koreans in Jeju.

• 1. High heels are ideal footweal for any location. Caves? Mountains? They have the stability of mountain goats, and I'm clearly a wuss.
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• 1.5 Small feet + high open-toed heels = Elf Feet. Naturally, Korean have smaller feet than Westerners, which is to be expected considering their natural smaller bodies. The current shoe style style for women right now, are these wickedly high, thick strapped, open-toed heels. What Korean women don't realize, is that the combination of tiny feet (made tinier by the shoes) and the tiny high-heeled shoes, give off the impression that the woman is top-heavy. Not sexy ladies!
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• 2. Knocking on the bathroom stall door before entering is remarkably clever and helpful. How many of us have sat in a bathroom stall where the door won't properly close? And end up using one hand to keep the door closed and the other hand awkwardly using the toilet paper? In Korea you don't have to worry about that, because before any Korean enters a bathroom stall they usually knock! Although me figuring out why they were always knocking, took awhile.
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• 3. Being too cheap to pay for hot water results in no one washing their hands and a great market for hand sanitizer! Heat is expensive in Jeju, so most restaurants don't bother to have hot water run through the restaurant bathroom. So from what I've seen, usually Korean women are NOT washing their hands. This, for me, led to some confusion, as Koreans insist you wear a mask when you're sick, and yet don't seem too fazed by the lack of hand washing.
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• 3.5 Please stop putting cloth towels in public washrooms! Ew!
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• 4. Throwing paper advertisements onto the streets is not littering, it's a legitimate form of advertising!
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• 5. A big thank you to Jeju society for not making me worry about being robbed! For once in my life I've actually been carrying cash in my wallet, something I would never EVER do in Canada. Due to Jeju history, no one really steals out here. Despite there being tables of items out on the streets and no one really looking, no one really takes anything!
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• 6. Another big thanks! If you forget something at a restaurant, the workers will actually run out of the store and chase you down to return it. I know that if I ever lost my wallet here, not only would it be returned, but the money would be there as well.
• 7. LEDs on your scooter is not sexy! I'm sorry, but outfitting your tiny weiner scooter with a blue glowing light underneath it, is incredibly lame.
  
• 7.5 Having 3 guys on one motorbike with no helmets is not only dangerous, but also slightly homo-erotic. I know many Koreans don't even recognize the possibility for people to be gay, but come on.... this is up the same alley as the drunk men whose hands fall a little too close to their friend's bum!

I will add up more as I remember these small differences between my home and Korea, but for now enjoy these awesome bits of 'facts' that I've noticed during my stay here!

Fire? and Alcohol? That sounds like a good combination to me!

My Visit to the 2010 Jeju Fire Festival

Once again I haven't been posting as often. I apologize but I wasn't sure people wanted to hear my tales of woe about my demonic computer or how much I've enjoyed playing Aion. And truthfully, that would be a good summary of the last few weeks of my life. However this weekend, finally after so many weeks, I got off my butt and headed out to Jeju's largest festival!

The festival runs for 3 days and celebrates the years first Full Moon (based off the Lunar Calendar). Since Jeju is an old extinct volcano, they celebrate by embracing fire and imitating the power of the volcano through fire and fireworks. This festival is also connected to the old tradition of burning fields to prepare the soil for planting. This is Jeju's largest festival and tends to bring in people from all over Korea.

I only went to the last day of the festival because that is when they burn the entire oreum. And the fact that it rained all weekend was also a bit of a deterent.

Most of the activities had been done on the previous days, so there wasn't much to see before fire. There were TONS of food stands and a lot of free alcohol lying around. So it would be fairly safe to say that the majority of the Koreans there were definitely buzzed. That's not to say that the foreigners weren't, but you didn't need to guess if they were drunk or not.


My friend and I did the same tradition as the last festival, which is writing down our wishes for the new year on a piece of paper, and hanging up it up on some rope. Except at this festival, my wish was burned up with the rest of the haystack it was attached to.


One other thing they did have was kite flying! Now that may sound a little dull, but they had the the largest kites I have ever seen! Not to mention a giant flying Spongebob! And if that wasn't incredible (or random) enough, they later on had kites with flashing LED lights!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj5p3jlckYo

[I couldn't get the entire video uploaded here. So here's a link instead]

Finally there was the procession of the torches to the base of the oreum and they stood with torches in hand while the entire mountain side blew up with fireworks. And after a brief wait the entire place was set on fire! You can't really understand how amazing this was with just words or photos, so I've uploaded a video (ignore my dorky voice in the background)! It truly was an amazing spectacle...

Afterwards we were able to get up close to the fire and ... well basically screw about. The police didn't seem to mind, but then it's not as though anyone did anything stupid. And that was about it. It really was an amazing night!