Contract Week part 1 (Student Cap)

Hello,

Wintermute here, I hope you all are as excited as I am to begin our discussion on certain red flags you should watch out for when signing a teacher contract at a school with “student caps”.

Most contracts in Korea will read something like; “the teacher will be given a class of students when he/she starts, depending on how good the teacher is he/she will be given more or less students”. This is very common; typically they will have a student cap. I read a contract that did not, meaning I could be stuck with 40 students while the other teachers only had 10. I asked the school to place a student cap in the contract. The school declined my request.

True story, at my first school a cap was clearly placed in the contract. However one day the school decided they wanted to exceed that number and give me more. I already had the most students than any other teacher, they claimed I was doing a wonderful job and thought I could handle more. Okay yes I could easily handle more, but if I accept this one student, what’s to stop them from giving me 2, 3, etc etc? Had my contract not listed a cap, I never would have been able to contest denying the student.

Sadly the school did not listen to me and gave me the extra student anyway and I walked out and waited until they got rid of the new student. Understand that had I taught that child it would have been all profit for the school, I would be teaching the kid for free as my contract said I was making X amount of money for teaching X amount of students. I asked to be given more money in compensation for the student. The school declined my request.

What really got me though was I was working near 2 more hours a day then some other teachers and had roughly 36 something students, while one teacher had around 10, and I got paid less than any other teacher. If you think I was being spoiled and unreasonable I can assure you that was not the case. I never complained to the school as I agreed in the contract to make oh so much money for oh so many students and agreed to work oh so many hours.  And I am not complaining about it now, but what I still don’t understand was if I reached my limit and could accept no more students while there were teachers with 2 hours extra to sit around on YouTube and Facebook, then why couldn’t they have been given the extra student? Thank you all very much for reading this and I will see you tomorrow!

Your friend,

Wintermute