…like wearing a tuxedo to a mud wrestling match.

With any luck I’ll be making the transition from Hagwon life to Uni life in a couple of months. There are mixed feelings:

10 Things I won’t miss about Hagwons

1.N-n-n-no block vacation – just the odd long weekend.
2.Badly behaved and sometimes rude, spoiled kids.
3.No respect or feeling of being at all valued.Might as well be 20 years old with no exp. and only a BA (in Geography…)
4.Interference in teaching methodology.
5.Ajoshi hagwon bosses.
6.Having to teach 4 hours straight without a break.
7.Not done till 1030pm
8.Being unavailable for any week day evening appointments.
9.Kids’ moms.
10. Tiny teachers’ room

10 Things I’ll miss about hagwons

1, The apartment – size and location.
2. Funny kids!
3. Desk staff.
4. No fixed curriculum.
5. Just a couple of NSTs
6. No early starts.
7. Order in meals.
8. Very casual dress code.
9. Small class sizes
10. Generally nice atmosphere

I’m confused! Till now, when people spoke of unigwons, I thought of a job where you teach kids, members of the public or students who don’t need it for the credit in a university’s language centre. Usually long hours, low pay, short vacation etc probably in the evening. In other words not uni students on credit-based classes.

The terms and conditions are all pretty bad these days so I didn’t think those made it a unigwon.

Recently I was considering a job that was different to that - university freshmen, credit-based program. No civilians, no kids, no evenings or weekends, between the hours of 9 and 6.

Yes it is in the Language Education Centre, yes the hours were longer than you’d expect (20), salary bog-standard at 2.2, vacation at 6 weeks rather than 4 months.

My friend said: “That’s a unigwon”
So is she right?

I protested “but it’s not kids! or civilians! it’s university freshmen students who have to pass the program!”

For me what made a job a unigwon was who exactly you are teaching: university students on a compulsory course (proper uni job) or kids/civilans/students who just want practice for no credit (unigwon)

Who’s right?

She seems to think the pay and conditions define a unigwon.

My point was that most uni jobs’ terms and conditions (bar a few great jobs in Seoul) are similar to those in the job we discussed, except maybe that the hours are a little on the high side/ vacation on the low side in this job!

What is the precise definition of a unigwon?

The same university was also hiring for a different program where you do teach kids in the evening for poor conditions.

Are both those positions “unigwon” jobs or just the latter?

My friend says if the job is in the language centre and not in a proper department e.g. the English department, then it is a “unigwon” regardless of who you teach.

Perhaps the job we discussed was some kind of hybrid? What do you think?

So often, when we talk about our job with others - it’s just a pissing contest. You walk away from those conversations less edified than when you started:

How much do you get?
How many hours do you have to work?
How much vacation do you get?
Do you have a private office?
What perks do you get?

Maybe someone’s bragging or someone’s moaning. I’m as guilty of getting into this as anyone. Anyway, there’s always somebody better off/worse off than you are so it’s just not that helpful.

The fact is, as far as terms and conditions go we all know that no matter whether you’re in a hagwon, public school or uni it can be terrible or wonderful or just alright.

If it’s good for you, that’s great but it’s not the terms of the deal that will really satisfy you.

If it’s really bad for you - grit your teeth, finish the deal if you can and get better terms.

What really counts will be your school and especially your classroom experience.

For most of us the terms are alright and a better conversation to have would be:

Do you enjoy your teaching in the place where you work? Why?
Are YOU learning? What?
Are you improving? How?
Are you enjoying your relationship with the other staff and students?
Are you having fun? Are they having fun with it?
Are you trying out new stuff in the classroom? What?
Can you get to observe others/be observed and learn stuff that way?
What have you read recently that’s interesting/helpful?
Have you got like-minded colleagues?
How can you make it better? How can you enjoy it more?

Kumbaya..I know
Just a thought…

My life in Korean hagwons is nearly over and I’ll soon be joining the ranks of the pseudo-profs in a national uni in March - which got me thinking…

How will I adjust to having to work a normal day again after a year of starting at 330 in the avvo? The start time in my current hagwon job is perfectly adjusted to Mike’s biorhythms. I’m an insomniac and when I’m on early morning starts - I WILL BE LATE once or twice per year. I don’t know why. I just will. Call it a malfunction.

It’s usually nothing to do with drinking - although admittedly that doesn’t help. It’s just the way I’m wired. I am very occasionally late.

This never goes down well. EFL is  one type of job where lateness on the part of the teacher is THE unforgiveable sin. Students in the class waiting for you and all that. You can be crap, you can be hungover, you can be unprepared, you can look like hell but Lord help you if you are late!

Don’t get me wrong. It is only a very, very occasional thing. But it happens sometimes and it is a failing that does tend to send me into hours or days of soul searching while I wallow in humiliation. It also tends to bring out the sanctimonious prat in others for whom this is never an issue.

Last time I think it happened was actually a couple of years ago now. I started my first hagwon job and I stupidly agreed to do 740am starts when my Dos was getting gip from another teacher about having to do them.

I was a couple of days off the plane and still jet-lagged and had never done split shifts before. The DoS, let’s call him Steve, was showing me the ropes and had invited me into the little personal interviews he had with each teacher when he broke their new monthly timetable to them. One belligerent teacher started acting up about the tt and refusing to do it. This was making my superior look stupid what with me there and all, I felt bad for him so I offered to take it. Big mistake!

I was tired in the afternoons between the shifts and took a daily nap as recommended by the other teachers as a way of dealing with split shifts but by the time I was finished at 1030 and went for the mandatory pint in the local bar after work (virtually expected in this job if you didn’t want to be seen as aloof), I, a natural insomniac anyway, couldn’t drop off till about 4am.

Next thing I know it’s 720am and there’s a 10 minute walk to school! I’m also the type who wakes up with a crazy hairstyle which needs work first thing so in my first month in my new hagwon, I was late about 3 times - all by about 5 minutes.

At that time of the morning, I was the only one in the building except for the very lovely desk girls who were always so nice to me. What I didn’t know was that the girls were under unders to report any lateness by teachers whether it inconvenienced the students (it rarely did -they too were always late at that time!) or not.

Despite all the mitigating circumstances, Steve was old school and couldn’t help himself from delivering a solemnly intoned and totally unnecessary speech about the importance of punctuality. Being unusually sensitive, I was mortified with myself. Steve knew that but enjoyed heaping it on anyway…

I’d worked with Steve in another school for many years. He knew me well enough and knew how reliable I am but still he felt he needed to tell me why it’s not a good idea to be late as an EFL teacher. What got me was that he thought it was useful to lecture me on that as if that would solve the problem. It was as if that gap in my knowledge was the problem. Prat! Steve was never ever late himself and took a special pride in it. I on the other hand can go for months and even years without it happening but it sometimes does but it never fails to surprise me how even when it’s the first instance in a very long time, some people love to put the boot in.

Anyways, I’m aware of this weakness in me so I’ll have to be extra vigilant come March. I’m just a guy who has a very small margin for error when it comes to early starts!

As any reader of this blog will know- I’ve spent a long time away from it and not made many contributions of late. One of the main reasons for this is a desire to get into debates/discussions on various issues. Unless you have a very well known blog or one with lots of bells and whistles with stuff for other teachers to use - you tend not to get a lot of replies!

I’m not the most technically gifted individual so I think there’s no way to compete with great sites like English Classroom 2.0 with its great array of embedded videos, forum for readers to paricipate in etc. Sometimes I also wonder whether I have the discipline to write as frequently and as well as someone like Alex Case.

Perhaps that’s why I thought I’d take a bit of a sabbatical as it were and spend time on Dave’s where you often get instant responses to your posts.

In the end I think I prefer the relative anonymity of the personal blog for many reasons! One of these is that a large number of posters on Dave’s are flamers and respond to well-intentioned posts/questions with invective and hateful/hurtful put-downs! Being a rather sensitive chap, I have to say this got to me after a while!

Another whinge is the organisation of the site. It does get very boring searching for that interesting post in the haystack of posts on issues which have been dealt with many times before. The vast majority of posts these days are on stuff like immigration rules and contracts etc and it seems there’s no way to get people to search for previous posts on these topics. They just keep reappearing again and again…

Still there are about a dozen or so good contributors out there which do make the Job related discussion board worth having a look at from time to time. Daves is  also a good place to get answers to questions you may have, providing you get at least one person to bite before your post disappears off the front page and off into obscurity…

Anyway - it was an interesting experience while it lasted but I’m glad to be home on my wee blog…

What is your opinion of the TOEIC test?

When I worked for a private language school in London it was regarded as a bit of a joke. I remember the school used to teach FCE to groups of young Swiss Bankers and  threw in the TOEIC test as an extra. The school didn’t offer any prep but just offered to invigilate it for them as it was an accredited TOEIC exam centre. It was an opportunity for them to gain another English Language certificate while they were with us.

To be honest, after the rigours of FCE prep, the Swiss teenagers laughed at the TOEIC test and indeed mocked it. They found the listening part absurdly easy, especially the initial questions where for example you see a photo of people in business suits sitting around a conference table and have to correctly identify the sentence “They are in a meeting” as opposed to 2 or 3 other patently false sentences.

The TOEIC test was designed to allow employers to predict how well a new employee would be able to cope in an English speaking workplace. It is therefore a predictive test and offers only a likelihood of language competence. The final score in the test (max 990) gets you a few sentences which offer an assessment of your ability to communicate well in the workplace.

It is a reading and listening test. There has long been talk of the much vaunted speaking and writing add-on, but to date I’ve yet to see it, or any great enthusiasm for it.

In Korea where the TOEIC test is still valued and indeed a high score in which is virtually mandatory for any serious job applicant, Korean TOEIC gurus are everywhere. These experts can get you the maximum score in the test if you follow their methods to the letter. It is possible to get the maximum score without being able to speak or write at all.

It’s similar to TOEFL which is required for entrance to US and other universities.

When I worked for my first adult hagwon in Korea, the owner headhunted the local TOEFL guru from another school and he must have thought he’d won the lottery when the guru’s devoted students all followed him to our school. I guess it was great business. The guru was given the hagwon’s biggest room - a really huge affair with better equipment than any other room - and it became literally a school within a school!

It was amazing to watch him at work through the window as we passed along the corridor. He stood at a lectern and his whiteboard looked like that for a mathematics lesson - covered with formulae with only letters such as “v” or “n” or “adj” to offer any clue that this was related to English!

What I could never understand was that unlike TOEIC, TOEFL has sections on writing and speaking, yet as far as I can tell, our school’s manager and the guru never seemed to be much interested in those parts - I still wonder why as those parts surely constituted half the test!

All the while, the native speaker teachers were slaving away on IELTS, which for those who don’t know, really does help students prepare for university life abroad but there was never THE SAME interest in that.

IELTS is preferred by British universities but I think all the unis will accept a good TOEFL score too. I’m very surprised all the big unis from across the globe haven’t banded together and shared their knowlege about the comparative English proficiency of IELTS versus TOEFL students. I’d hazard a guess that the difference in ability would be significant.

I sometimes pass by the entrance to my old hagwon when I go downtown. Sadly now, the native speaker department - its raison d’etre back in the beginning - has been downsized and dumbed down. The staff now are mostly Korean and there are two life-sized smiling posters of the TOEIC and TOEFL gurus in the lobby…

Sad to think that at start up, this franchise hagwon at one point seemed well on the way to persuading Korean students of the need for the communicative approach to teaching/learning English. All our teachers were CELTA qualified as a minimum.

Unfortunately when the profits didn’t flow in as expected, the Korean managers, after being initially impressed with our passion/commitment for best practice, decided to go where the real money was - TOEIC & TOEFL!

I guess from a purely business point of view - can’t blame ‘em…

Part 1: Synchronicity

Imagine this: It’s Monday morning and you are in your English hagwon with your colleagues, both native English teachers (NETs) and Korean English teachers (KETs). You are all in the school’s biggest room together. You wouldn’t normally be there at this time, but you’re all being paid to be there and there’s even a monthly bonus thrown on in top! It’s only once a month and the boss looks upon the extra expense as an investment. After the meeting is over, lunch is on him too!

Your boss is a huge fan of cooperation and teamwork. He believes NETs and KETs have a lot to learn from each other. He knows that these groups often feel threatened by each other, are mostly uncommunicative and even hostile on occasion, but he wants to shoot for a happy staffroom. He wants the teachers to respect each other and he wants to offer the best deal to all stakeholders. He knows the false ideas each group can often have about the other. He also knows that these people are pros and know infinitely more about teaching English than he does, but he wants to be there, so he can learn something himself and so he can protect them all from the whims of ultra conservatives and basically be a better employer.

In this meeting the KETs present which grammatical structures will be taught this month and which listening texts and reading passages will be used. NETs agree to stay on message and deliver speaking and writing tasks to activate/recycle the same grammar and vocabulary in speech and writing, if possible staying within the same themes/topics.

NETs share with KETs fun ways they know to present language and encourage them to develop pairwork, incorporate games, fun activities and useful error correction techniques. There’s even a schedule for a little peer observation! KETs explain about Korean student mentality, do’s and don’ts and why some activities are dogs that won’t hunt.

The two groups then discuss which lessons can be repeated to minimize the workload and the session finishes off with everyone sharing humorous little communiqués they’ve come up with such as “Top 10 foreigner misconceptions about KETs” or “10 ways to avoid boring your students to death!”

Not to feel left out, the Boss even weighs in with a tongue in cheek “10 ways I tend to irritate my teachers” or even “I am the boss round here, not the students or parents!” All light hearted stuff!

There’s a Q&A session where everyone can ask questions about common difficulties. The boss encourages everyone to share their knowledge and to never be too shy to ask questions of anyone, quoting the ancient Japanese maxim: All of us is stronger than one of us and the slightly less arcane: There are no silly questions, just silly answers. (exeunt. flourish)

Contrast this with a picture of another world. Tired and grumpy teachers arrive at their hagwon later that same day to prepare for the day’s lessons. KETs are earnestly beavering away checking answers at the back of their books and pondering how to be more dynamic in the way they present new language instead of the usual chalk and talk style. NETs nark about how much more vacation they could be getting elsewhere and what an affront it is that Koreans should have anything to do with the teaching of English.

NETs and KETs greet each other with a polite “Hi” but that’s really the extent of the dialogue as far as teaching English is concerned. Once the lessons start, it’s everyone for themselves. Everyone’s the undisputed world champion in their own separate discipline – the Grammar guru, the Listening Lecturer, the Reading Queen or the Speaking Master. The student, rather than being Jack of all trades, is master of, well….none.

The boss dialogues with each group separately and dictates new protocol/passes on negative feedback to each, often reflecting students’ or parents’ criticisms, mostly self-defeating and irrational. Both groups have no idea why the other tends to get bent out of shape about certain issues but the KETs are irritated that NETs get to do all the fun stuff while they have to do all the hard work, while NETs are amused at the enormous numbers of butterflies being broken on wheels.

At the end of the day, all make their way home reflecting on minor successes and failures. All are frustrated by the puzzling lack of progress in many of the students but are dimly aware of the fact there’s got to be more than this. We all could get a whole lot more out of this if we put our heads together…

Teaching English is a craft that we all have to learn. We all know that you are not automatically a good English teacher just because you are a native speaker. Having a Bachelor’s or a Master’s degree won’t make you one either except if one of these involved  substantial, observed teaching practice, in which case you’d be off to a great start. Likewise those with a PGCE or equivalent teacher training.

There are also teachers who although unqualified, have made it their business to read, experiment, learn from colleagues,  peer observe, ask for feedback and develop from an ingrained sense of personal and professional pride. These are to be admired.

In any event, what English teachers need, is proper teacher training - hard training in effective classroom techniques and methods. Why does this simple fact not register with so many employers in Korea and especially Korean Universities for whom a Masters (in anything!) is often seen as the badge of competence? Don’t people know that even most TESOL MAs are completely theoretical without any practical teacher training? Also, why do so many foreign teachers in Korea not bother to get trained or train themselves in ESL/EFL teaching methods? The obvious answer is they don’t need it to get a job here and once appointed, there is little real quality control after the fact in all but a few select schools. Read more »

Up and down Korea, in hundreds of English hagwons, the teaching of English vocabulary is perhaps one of the clearest examples of silliness in a business where even in this modern age, in this modern country, the basic principles of effective language teaching have never really been imported. The harsh fact is that Korea has not kept up with developments in language teaching and with few exceptions, follows methods written off by educators in the west decades ago. In these private language institutes, the daily “voca” tests have very little long term or practical value. Read more »

Yes it’s true - I do let my students watch episodes/parts of episodes of Friends with Korean subtitles. Why? Let me summarise the case for the prosecution. Then my defence! Read more »

I have found that when a lesson doesn’t work, it is often because one or more of the fundamentals have gone out the window! In my humble opinion, omission of the fundamentals include things like the following: Do you agree? Read more »

With any short or medium sized text, all you have to do is split it into two (photocopy & chop) and give each half to 2 students (Student A and Student B). Read more »

If your local bookstore stocks the book series called “Can you believe it?” at all 3 levels, you’re in for a treat and easy way to get students talking. These books are based on little 6-picture cartoon-like stories. All you have to do is photocopy the picture stories and laminate them. If you do this with all the stories, you’ll end up with about 60! Read more »

Sick of having your well planned lessons interrupted by late arrivals? Students seem wordless and unmotivated? Bring back the warmer! Read more »

It’s not easy to write this kind of post without coming across as obsequious, but sod it! Previous posts on this blog have featured Mike’s heroes in different fields and will continue to do so. I reckon all of us admire skilled practitioners in different areas. From the world of EFL blogging, let’s have a look at the giants and compare the ace bloggers.

Fledgling EFL bloggers like me who are interested in good EFL blogging will probably keep coming up against 2 names - Sandy McManus and Alex Case. So who’s the best? Read more »

In Daegu, and certainly in Suseung-gu, you actually have to beat off taxi drivers trying to get your business! I have to walk across one road to get to my hagwon and the only thing that makes it difficult is having to constantly refuse aggressive taxi drivers. They are also ridiculously cheap. You can get pretty far on 1800 won…

Ok. Back to the business of EFL. I’ve been considering lately what are the key ingredients for a good EFL teacher. When I was a DoS for a year, I was able to put my ideas to the test. Here are my results. I can’t really rank them: Read more »

I think the first ever Christian music CD I bought was by Steven Curtis Chapman - and played it on my first ever CD player. Great guy, amazing voice! Pretty distraught to read of the death of his little adopted daughter Maria Sue in an accident. Here she is washing up with Steven in one of his video blog entries. Read more »

Here’s William Lane Craig: Read more »

Here’s Venomfangx on the matter:

Gotta be one of the funniest Friends scenes: Read more »

Another great hero and role model is Bill Craig. Check out his debates against the champions of atheism on youtube. Here’s an example Read more »

The best preachers I’ve heard, in no particular order are… Read more »

Here’s the band who will be forever my favourite. Thanks to my mate Fergus who introduced me to them many moons ago… Read more »

Here’s one of my all time great singers, second only to the great Paul Rodgers. A little bit tragic here too folks, as Lou got ill, lost his distinctive voice and as a result of his medical treatment is now almost unrecognisable as the handsome bono-look-a-like here, but listen to that voice!!! Read more »

Here’s the later version. Me and my friend Mike were spellbound by her beautiful smile.. Read more »