Contract Week part 4 (Hours)

Hello,

My name is Wintermute, and so far this week we have gone over; students caps, duties, and accommodations. We are now on Day 4 with contract week, and we will continue our teacher contract discussion with hours.

In your teacher contract it should contain how many hours you will be working and your hour range, i.e. 9-5. If you are looking at a public school position they may not have the range as it is not always clear which hours will be served at which school, that’s okay. But your private contract should always have this. It is not enough for the contract to say you will work 20-30 hours a week, you need to ask the school to provide on the contract what hours you agree to.  

But how many hours are common for teachers to work? Well if it’s a private school you are looking at a whole lot more hours than say public.  At my last school I totaled about 10 hours a day devoted to my school work (these were not all teaching hours).  I got up at 8a.m. in the morning and made it home for dinner a bit after 7p.m; class was from 9 to 6. You will find a lot of schools that provide much less hours for the same pay, I’d say do some window shopping, browse around and take your time. $2,000 for 9 hours of teaching is a bit of a stretch.

If you go the public route you will most likely be working odd blocks, as public school tends to run all day every day of the week aside from Sundays. So you could work 2-9 on Saturday, or 8p.m. to 12a.m. And yes school runs until midnight in South Korea. You could get lucky and maybe work a morning shift, leaving the rest of the day to you. Again much fewer hours, but odd hour times with public schools.

While on the phone during an interview, be sure to ask about paid preparation hours. If the school does not provide at least one paid preparation hour, do not work there, no questions, just don’t.  Something that I think is hard for soon to be teachers to understand are how important preparation time is. My first school said I’d have tons, what they meant was I had 5 minutes between classes. Those 5 minutes were usually used for taking a piss, fixing chairs, printing papers, and acknowledging your attention whore students. You need to make sure your school provides you with a preparation block, either before or after class, so you can effectively sit down and prepare for your classes.

Thank you all very much for your continued support and reading this blog, I will see you tomorrow!

Your friend,

Wintermute