Contract Week Part 3 (Accommodations)

Hello,

                My name is Wintermute and today we will continue Contract Week with day 3, “accommodations”. It is the schools’ responsibility to provide you with a place to live. Being a foreigner you yourself cannot rent out an apartment and it’s just much easier for the employer to pick one for you. It is possible to ask for a specific apartment as long as they agree.

                This is one part of the position that can go oh so many different ways. I have watched hundreds of youtube videos of new teachers’ apartments, and there are a fair share of great and not so great. But how will you know which you’ll get before going? One way to insure you are well accommodated is by picking a well known recruiting company such as EPIK. They tend to make sure that their teachers are well provided for, schools want to continue working for companies like EPIK and so they make sure to keep their teachers happy.  

          
                One thing you can do for yourself is to ask for pictures of the apartment complex, sometimes the school will provide it, and sometimes the school will provide stock photos of studio apartments which will do you no good.  One thing you should always do is ask for the e-mail address of one of the foreign teachers, I have never been denied this and it can give you a lot of intel.

                Some basic things your room will include are, a bed, a gas stove, a t.v., a mini-fridge, a washer (Korea has no dryers), maybe a desk and couch. That’s about it, you could get lucky. You could get a modern apartment, that has closets, a shower, a loft, and maybe even curtains over the window, but I wouldn't hold my breath. And just so you know, typically in Korea there are no shower booths, instead you shower hose is hooked up to your sink next to your toilet, meaning  you turn the sink on and that’s your shower, there is a drain on the floor, so basically your whole bathroom is a shower room.

 Another thing you need to make sure is crystal clear is the distance from your apartment to the school. A lot of times they will say it’s a 5-10 minute walk. What they mean is, 5-10 minutes to the nearest bus stop/subway that will take you to your school. I was about an hour away from my school walking distance. Now Korea is a beautiful country so a nice morning and evening walk home was no problem for me, however I would have liked to of been told this prior to going to Korea. And I figure I should mention this for those who don’t want to walk for an hour.  Thank you all very much for reading this and I will see you tomorrow!

Your friend,

Wintermute

Contract Week Part 2 (Duties)

Hello,

Wintermute here, and today we will continue our ongoing conversation detailing every part of a teacher contract with “Duties”.

Every contract I have looked at list in detail your duties. This is a must have for all contracts as it needs to be clearly defined what the teacher will be involved in. This can range anywhere from assisting in other classes not yours, feeding students, progress reports, making test, talking with parents, etc etc.

You’d be surprised how many duties you can actually be assigned, and you may look at some and say to yourself that it doesn’t sound like a “teacher duty”. Such things as picking up students, feeding students lunch, checking in on students by phone at night to make sure they did their homework, along with making and passing out fliers. There really are schools out there that will require these and more. If your contract has something listed that you believe you should not be doing, than say so before signing.

True story, I was given a contract from a private school that had I think 6 foreign teachers already. After reading the contract I could not believe anyone in their right mind would sign it, I thought they were joking. Among the many things wrong with it the one that stood out the most was the duties portion. It had listed 8 duties, 1 through 7 were fine, no problem. But number 8 read and I quote: “Perform other duties given by the employer”. Well what the hell does that mean? That could literally mean anything, I am signing my life away to this school, they could ask me to do anything and I’d have to agree. I figured they don’t know English well, surely it’s not intentional, I’ll just ask them to change it to “perform teacher duties”, because then at least I would have something to fall back on. If the school would ask me to do something I could say “No, that’s not a teacher duty”. The school declined my request.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to be over critical of your contract, they are a year long, and require you to be in a different country, not too many can protect you there. Thank you all very much for reading this and I will see you tomorrow!

Your friend,

Wintermute

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