Tutoring and getting the shaft from directors

So I figured it would be a good time to talk about directors in the hagwon system in Korea.  So there are a lot of horror stories online about Korean hagwon directors and since I have met two I am totally a certified expert at this point.  Most hagwons are small and only really have a school director and a few teachers with maybe one or two staff people on hand to help run the school.  This is a position of absolute power within the school and what they say goes.  Some directors are benevolent and just want to run the school as best they can while maximizing profits, while others are malignant tumors on the misshapen backside of a particularly ornery Honey Badger.

This thing will mess you up!

What you need to understand about directors is that they are after everything is said and done after one thing, and that is money.  Teaching in Korea is an amazing experience filled with adventure and more than a little frustration, but the number one frustration throughout the entire experience will almost certainly be your director and the things that they will do to shaft you.  After all is said and done and no matter how nice they treat you as a foreigner in Korea you are literally a walking dollar sign to a hagwon director and they will make your life a living hell if they don't think they are squeezing as much money out of you as they possibly can.  Hagwons at their heart are businesses so if you aren't being profitable then you will regret it.

Children's Museum of Seoul

Our director is nice, but just behind that niceness lies a cold business woman who doesn't so much care about what goes on in the school as long as it doesn't effect her pocketbook.  She gives us general outlines of what to do for class and what to follow but when it comes down to it she does not give us the information or what we need to follow the schedule she has laid out for us.  So that ends up making us have to restructure the lessons, or change things around or even not do a class just to make it so we can survive the week.  The best part is our director doesn't actually care, as long as the kids are happy, the parents are happy, so the director makes money.

Picture from a science museum in Seoul

The desire for the director to make money leads me into my other topic tutoring.  Tutoring is a funny thing in Korea, technically it is illegal for ESL teachers like Manda and I to tutor people in English because it is a breach of our contract and can get us kicked from the country.  The catch is that the school you work for can actually set up tutoring for you, and thus making it okay/  The catch however is that the school will take a huge sum of the profits from the tutoring.  Manda is getting paid 13k won an hour for the tutoring (even though I am present I am not sure if I am getting paid for it at all), however the normal price for a tutoring session hovers around 40k an hour.  That means our director is pocketing close to 30k an hour for tutoring where she is literally doing no work.  This is pretty common because the directors know they can get away with it.  We are going to have a talk with our director, however how much things change really depends.  I am sure the term lazy will be thrown around quite a bit.  I don't think the tutoring would be such an issue if it weren't for a few problems.

The first big issue is the person we are tutoring.  Originally Manda though she would be tutoring one of her students on the weekend, which means she would be teaching a small child.  Manda is comfortable with teaching children so that would have been fine with her (although hours are probably the biggest problem with the tutoring and I've yet to talk about those).  To our surprise who we were actually tutoring was the father of Manda's student.  A middle aged salary man, whose interests include work, his family, and that is pretty much it.  He also talks about smoking a lot and how it is bad for you, which seems to be a topic he can speak the most about at any given time.  The second issue is that the man who we are now tutoring is in terms of fluency a level 2 of 4.  He knows a few words of English, enough to get him by if he was in America or England, however he has to think and does not understand English when spoken at a naturally fast pace.  This makes talking hard because there are a ton of awkward silences which I know Manda in particular has problems with.

As I stated above the biggest issue with this tutoring is the time.  The man in question literally has to have it be midday on Saturday (and he wants to do it every single week) which is a HUGE hindrance on our weekend.  One of the biggest reasons we came to Korea was the idea that on the weekends we could go out and have adventures, and being forced to wait until late Saturday afternoon to go out and do things just is not going to fly.  We won't be able to hop on a bus and go to Busan or Seoul and enjoy a full day, and moreover we don't feel like we can even make plans to go out for the weekend due to the tutoring.  We have plans to talk to our director about this, and I suppose we will keep you posted on how it goes!