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…