posted November 29, 2009 05:18 AM         

--------------------------------------
English Teacher Needed in Seoul, Korea

Posted By: Sungshin Women's University <gedu@sungshin.ac.kr>
Date: Wednesday, 25 November 2009, at 9:48 a.m.

Position: English teacher

Posted By: The College of General Education
Sungshin Women's University
Seoul, Korea
All applications must be received until December,2, 2009..

Date: November,25 (Wednesday)

The College of General Education is seeking dedicated, experienced, and qualified instructors to teach writing and conversation in the College of General Education for the year of 2010.

Duties
- teach a minimum of 9 hours per week;
- prepare lesson plans
- attend regular faculty meetings
- regular office hours and consultation and mentoring are required
- assist in developing curriculum and teaching materials for all 3 levels of writing and conservation courses.
- attend regular professional development workshops.

Salary
- The annual salary will be approximately 30-35 Korean million won depending on educational background and teaching experience.

Qualifications
- Applicants must be native English speakers
- Applicants must have a Bachelor's degree (BA) or a higher degree
& Master's degree preferred in TEFL, TESOL, Education, Linguistics or English
(TEFL/TESOL certifications are acknowledged credentials)

-------------------------

Well I don't have a Master's Degree in TESOL (Teaching English To Speakers of Other Languages) but I'm actually going to start that course through distance education in 2010 so I hope they are impressed enough by my Philosophy degree. Actually I taught language philosophy for two years so it shouldn't be a problem. So I hope : D Anyway I'm posting all this here because I've been waiting for a chance like this for years because if I get this job I really will be doing what I love, which is teaching about writing : )

posted December 01, 2009 09:28 PM         

-------------
For English studies , Koreans say Goodbye to Dad

AUCKLAND, New Zealand —1. On a sunny afternoon recently, half a dozen South Korean mothers came to pick up their children at the Remuera Primary School here, greeting one another warmly in a schoolyard filled with New Zealanders.

2.The mothers, members of the largest group of foreigners at the public school, were part of what are known in South Korea as “wild geese,” families living separately, sometimes for years, to school their children in English-speaking countries like New Zealand and the United States. The mothers and children live overseas while the fathers live and work in South Korea, flying over to visit a couple of times a year.

3.Driven by a shared dissatisfaction with South Korea’s rigid educational system, parents in rapidly expanding numbers are seeking to give their children an edge by helping them become fluent in English while sparing them, and themselves, the stress of South Korea’s notorious educational pressure cooker.

4.The phenomenon is the first time that South Korean parents’ famous focus on education has split wives from husbands and children from fathers. It has also upended traditional migration patterns by which men went overseas temporarily while their wives and children stayed home, straining marriages and the Confucian ideal of the traditional Korean family. The cost of maintaining two households has stretched family budgets since most wives cannot work outside South Korea because of visa restrictions.

5.South Koreans now make up the largest group of foreign students in the United States (more than 103,000) and the second largest in New Zealand after Chinese students, according to American and New Zealand government statistics. Yet, unlike other foreign students, South Koreans tend to go overseas starting in elementary school — in the belief that they will absorb English more easily at that age.

6.In New Zealand, there were 6,579 South Koreans in the country’s elementary and secondary schools in 2007, accounting for 38 percent of all foreign students.

7.“We talked about coming here for two years before we finally did it,” said Kim Soo-in, 39, who landed here 16 months ago with her two sons. “It was never a question of whether to do it, but when. We knew we had to do it at some point.”

8.Wild geese fathers were initially relatively wealthy and tended to send their families to the United States. But in the last few years, more middle-class families have been heading to less expensive destinations like Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

9.Now, there are also “eagle fathers,” who visit their families several times a year because they have the time and money. Those with neither, who are stuck in South Korea, are known as “penguin fathers.”

The national experience is considered enough of a social problem that an aide to South Korea’s president recently singled out the plight of the penguin fathers.

10.President Lee Myung-bak said he would start to address the problem by hiring 10,000 English teachers. “This is unprecedented,” he said. “Korea is actually the only country in the world undergoing such a phenomenon, which is very unfortunate.”

11.South Korean students routinely score at the top in international academic tests. But unhappiness over education’s financial and psychological costs is so widespread that it is often cited as a reason for the country’s low birthrate, which, at 1.26 in 2007, was one of the world’s lowest.

12.South Korean parents say that the schools are failing to teach not only English but also other skills crucial in an era of globalization, like creative thinking. That resonates among South Koreans, whose economy has slowed after decades of high growth and who believe they are increasingly being squeezed between the larger economies of Japan and China.

13.It could take years to see how well this wave of children will fare back in South Korea, especially since they are now going overseas at the elementary level. But earlier this decade, when the wild geese children tended to be high school students, many succeeded in plying their improved English scores to get into colleges in the United States or other English-speaking countries, education experts said. For others, their years overseas was a roundabout way to get into top South Korean colleges, like Yonsei University in Seoul, which increasingly offer courses or entire programs in English.

14 For New Zealand’s public schools, which charge foreign students annual tuition of $8,700, South Koreans provide an important source of revenue. The economic benefits have helped offset resentment toward an Asian influx that has remade many schools in Auckland, the country’s largest city, lending an Asian charnefer to the business district and raising home prices in the wealthier suburbs.

15 At Remuera Primary, Ms. Kim said she believed that English fluency would increase her sons’ chances of gaining admission to selective secondary schools in South Korea and ultimately to a leading university in Seoul. Her husband, Park Il-ryang, 43, graduated from a little-known Korean university, and he said that the resulting lack of connections had hampered his own career.

16. Even so, the sons were not making sufficient progress in English, the parents said. They hired a private English tutor to supplement the supplementary cram schools. “We didn’t think the cram schools were doing any good, but we were too insecure to stop sending them, because the other parents were sending their children,” Ms. Kim said.

17. The parents were pleased that their sons had integrated well into the neighborhood and school, and were now even speaking English to each other. But Ms. Kim was worried that her younger son was making shockingly simple mistakes in his spoken Korean and might not form a solid “Korean identity.”Striking the right balance would be critical to the brothers’ re-entry into South Korea, with its fierce competition to get into the best schools.

18. South Korean women’s rising social status and growing economic power have fueled the wild geese migration, according to education experts like Oh Ook-whan, a professor at Ehwa Womans University who has studied the separated families. Conservatives have criticized the wild geese mothers for being obsessed about their children’s education at the risk of destroying their marriages. The women’s real intention, they say, is to get as far away as possible from their mothers-in-law.

19.The mothers say they are the modern-day successors to one of the most famous mothers in East Asia: the mother of Mencius, the fourth-century Chinese Confucian philosopher. In a story known in South Korea, as well as China and Japan, Mencius’s mother moved to three neighborhoods before finding the environment most favorable to her son’s education.

20.I don’t know why Mencius’s mother is so revered and why we wild geese mothers are so criticized,” said Chang Soo-jin, 37, who moved here with her two children nearly two years ago. “Our coming out here is exactly the same as what she did.”

21 Yet Amy’s father, Kevin Park, 41, was not totally convinced that the benefits had been worth splitting up the family. He had reluctantly agreed with his wife’s decision to come here with the children and then extend their stay, twice.

22. After his family left Seoul, Mr. Park, an engineer, moved into what South Koreans call an “officetel,” a building with small units that can be used as apartments or offices. Hearing about wild geese fathers becoming dissolute living by themselves, he stopped drinking at home.

“I’m alone, I miss my family,” Mr. Park said grimly in an interview in Seoul. “Families should live together.”

23. Living apart for years strains marriages and undermines the role of a father, traditionally the center of the family in South Korea’s Confucian culture, education experts and psychologists said. Some spouses have affairs; some marriages end in divorce.

24. “Even if there are problems, some couples choose to ignore them for the sake of their children’s education,” said Choi Yang-suk, a psychologist at Yonsei who has studied wild geese families in the United States and Canada.
---------------------------

posted December 02, 2009 09:34 AM         

quote:

---

let the English teachers who are actually here in the country teach from the textbook, put Korean English teachers in classes where they get taught to better their English with trained professionals like me who have learned how to teach English to adults!

---

posted December 02, 2009 09:17 PM         

Anyway, sorry about going on and on ... I'm getting tooootally distracted from my lesson plan prepping, but maybe I can use this stuff in the interview. If they hire me I will not have freaked them out : )

btw I'm gonna post a link here to my other 'research' thread for whoever wants to help me prep for my demo lesson by doing the writing exercize I came up with ... I just wanna see what kind of results I get. The link will follow:

posted December 03, 2009 05:03 AM         

quote:

---

Were you in Gyeonggi Province? We have the GEPIK program which is Gyeonggi EPIK ... GEPIK: Gyeonggi English Program In Korea.

---

I was in Chungnam province, about 2 hours from Seoul by train. Tiny town called Yesan. The EPIK programme: http://www.epik.go.kr/

Nationwide government programme, which I only got on to through knowing my bf! His PhD tutor is a big cheese in the Korean studies world and he gave me a reference. I didn't have a TESOL but got paid well because I had a Masters. If I remember right I was on 2.2 million won, got a free furnished apartment, an introductory payment, severance payment and free return flights, and that was 10 years ago. He wanted a break from his PhD (which he was 2 years into when we went in 1998) and to improve his Korean. The irony is the standard tof his Korean actually went down when we were there because every man and his dog wants to speak English to you! Anyway, if this job doesn't come off (I hope it does) it may be worth investigating EPIK. It looks like it's expanded since I was there, and they now give you a standard 5 weeks holiday instead of the 1 week I had. Here's me in the back row, just by the "r" of "program".

quote:

---

How come you guys broke up?

---

His parents were very manipulative and wanted to keep me in my place. I broke up with him when he was over in Yonsei. It was horrible. I had every intention of waiting for him but as soon as he'd gone I realised I couldn't. I was working as a waitress just to keep our apartment for when he'd come back, and I had two degrees, there was no proper work in the city we lived in, and I'd seen a bit of the world and had trouble settling back in. His mother called me up and told me to wait for him, for a YEAR! because she didn't know what silly thing he might do (suicide) and if I did wait she'd pay my rent while he was away (emotional and financial blackmail - his family were way more wealthy than mine, she thought I was a gold-digger all along, little did she know). He's in Japan now, he's fine, of course he is! Speaks fluent Japanese and fluent Korean.

To be honest my experiences in Korea made me mad because I was ignored a lot of the time because I was a woman (even at my interview at the Korean Embassy in London they asked questions about me by asking my boyfriend instead of me - a taste of things to come). No way was I going to stand the same treatment in my own country from her, I blew my stack. Stupid woman, she was so clever but never worked after she got married and was deeply unhappy. She wanted the same for me. 2.4 kids, shut the **** up, follow your husband around, don't ask questions, go to art class on Thursday and have polite dinner parties, don't talk about politics or religion or sex, wear court shoes that match your dress, la la la. Korea actually made me a lot wiser and stronger, if I hadn't been there I'd probably be married to him right now. And I was fed up of certain subjects being taboo in Korea, I didn't want that for my life. He was too much manipulated by them himself to see what was going on. But with parents like those you don't break the mould without paying. My name is mud with her, mutual friends tell me. Good. She couldn't buy me.

Blimey! Where did all that come from!

posted December 03, 2009 05:18 AM         

Well, it seems like a problem that your co-teachers don't want to make use of you as much as they should. I had that problem only once, but because it was a government programme, the teacher just had to get over it. To be honest she was embarrassed about her own standard of English, which was very poor considering she was teaching 15 year olds.

I had an absolutely brilliant co-teacher in another school though, and she made it all worthwhile. She was so open to suggestions, and consequently the kids in her classes were miles ahead of kids the same age in my other schools (I had three schools but taught two age groups in each). So while we taught from the textbook/curriculum, it wasn't dry. I remember teaching past participles or something, and got an idea from a Korean TV show to buy two massive inflatable hammers from the market. We had two kids sit opposite each other on stools, each with a hammer. Each kid also had a hat. So you ask the kids a question, if they know the answer they smack the other kid on the head with the hammer and shout out the answer. If the kid who gets hit manages to put the hat on his head before the hammer comes down, the kid who got the answer gets 1 point, if they're not fast enough with the hat the kid who got the answer got 2 points. If they answer wrong you make them do something embarrassing a forfeit, this can be as elaborate, bonkers or educational as you want. The other kid gets 4 points and a chance to answer for another 2 points.

We used it time and time again with various grammar. It was a hoot, I used to be in tears, and they loved the violence. We had them doing treasure hunts, everything. We had a league table with scores on it for the year, they were so competitive. Just for sh!ts and giggles, we (Julia, my co-teacher and I) would occasionally let THEM ask the questions and whack each other with the hammer, which brought the house down.

My beautiful girls' class won the regional speaking competition and got to go to Seoul for the finals, country bumpkins on tour in the big smoke, god love them, they'd never been. They wrote their own play about bullying and had to perform on stage. We coached them and coached them for it. I could weep I miss them so much. We had this amazing karaoke bus on the way up there, they had me singing Arirang and I was rubbish, but they were like "Your Korean soooo good, you sound like Korean person!". Everybody's mother made me kimbap, and I was like a stuffed pig by the time we got there, because you have to try everybody's don't you? Don't want to offend the ajumas.

Of course they didn't win, they were up against kids who'd been to America, precocious stage school brats who went down a storm with the judges (talk about missing the ******* point!) but we always told them they had every chance of winning, why couldn't they? And they believed us. I just loved the girls, I used to tell them they could do and be whatever they wanted. Wishful thinking for sure but I had teachers who stamped on my dreams because I was working class from a hick town and I never forgave them for it. I've got loads of origami stuff they made me, and they did me a big photo album of themselves when I left. Angels they were, so affectionate. But their Korean English teacher made them that way, she was a DUDE.

posted December 03, 2009 06:44 AM         

For the moment anyway. Get the buggers later. Softly softly catchee monkey.

posted December 03, 2009 07:42 PM         

Sorry for all the yapping

___________

Don't be silly! This stuff is fascinating wheels. I have sooooooooooooooooooooo much to say in return, both on the subject of being in a relationship where the pressure is on you from family to be basically a traditional 'chicky' (a typical demure female in other words), and in reply to your remarks about Korea and life in general. The first topic is well known to me 'cos actually I'm a divorcee ... I was married to an Italian guy. So basically same thing - he was nice and sweet, but his family and their influence over him ... different story. Anyway I'll get back to you on the other stuff later, but I just want to say for now thanks for reminding me regarding not being too revolutionary. You're totally preaching to the choir, but I do need to be reminded to be slightly more Machiaveliian, and I need to be reminded often! So thank you : ) I get a little worked up but in truth it's actually because I've come to really love this country ... it's so crazy/ beautiful, so I'm like ... I want what's best for you! I believe in you Korea! Trust me! I won't s c r e w you over!! But don't worry ... revolution is the long term plan. The short term plan is a lovely, little, cozy and uncontroversial job.