A
major moment for me in ELT would be when I moved to East Seoul and landed a job at a private elementary school. An
actual private elementary school, not a ‘hagwon’ (small private academy). Up
until that point I had only worked at hagwons before as an ‘English Instructor’.
My job being to play with children in English, encourage speaking and perhaps do
some very low level grammar activities. I came to work in jeans and a T-shirt,
and did zero lesson planning whatsoever.
Suddenly
in Seoul, at this private school I was expected to come to work in a suit, plan
my lessons and upload those plans weekly to the intranet for the parents’ perusal.
I found myself looking up a lot more English grammar examples so as not to
appear a total idiot in front of the students and faculty.
However,
with teaching the students so often, I would have 17 new classes a week. No
class material was repeated (as is the case in public schools). This meant
having to plan 17 classes a week. And this was just 1 of 2 jobs I taught from
8:30am to 2:30pm – then again from 3:30pm to 8:30pm. On reflection, the quality
of life while working there was very bad.
Johnson
(Values In English Language Teaching; pg 105) makes reference to a teacher in Poland
who had doubts about continuing to teach as he couldn’t make enough money. He
saw teaching as a predominantly female market where female teachers didn’t have
to earn a living wage as they could live off their husbands. I agree with the correlation
that most teachers are female. Women generally get paid less than men (unfair),
and that teachers in general are underpaid for what they do (particularly in
Africa).
This
is the situation I found myself in. I was moving along my chosen career path,
but not earning the money that I envisioned for myself. Not earning what I
needed to give myself and my wife the life that I thought we deserved. So from
the start of my marriage I continued to work two jobs. Sometimes teaching up to
10 classes a day for a miserable 30 000 won per lesson.
This
work load over a 4 year period eventually broke me physically and I wound up in
hospital with heart arrhythmia. I had to make a decision. I couldn’t continue
with my current path. I had to either find another way to make more money with
less working hours, or lower my financial expectations as a teacher.
In
the end I’ve done a bit of both. I’m enrolling in a MA TESOL program so as to
land a better paid job and I’m cutting back on work hours (and pay) so as to
have a higher quality of life. I finished my duel job contracts just these last
two weeks and am now ready to embrace this change. I find this to also be the
correct moral decision for me as it will give me more time to put together quality
lessons that can affect positive change in the classroom.
Johnston
goes on to write (Values In English Language Teaching; pg110);
“In
teacher education, even more than in language teaching itself, there is a
question of integrity, that is, the teacher educator has a double
responsibility not only to guide students to becoming good or better teachers
but also to be a good teacher herself.”
With regards
to being marginalized within my job, I can first make reference to my
evaluations within the public school system.
I was recently
subjected to a round of evaluations from both my students and peers at my public
school job. A sample of 200 students
rated my classes and I scored well over the teacher average for student
satisfaction. Then came the “peer” evaluations. I felt somewhat marginalized to
hear that although my Korean peers would have the power to rate me, I would not
be given the opportunity to rate them…
In my second
job I have already made a reference to situations when the program
administrators would override my objections and place a student in a class that
they have no business being in (i + 10) just because a Tiger Mom said so. These
students ultimately destroyed the flow of the lessons and made for a very
exhausting second semester.
I
find both these instances counter to my moral values and beliefs in the classroom.
In the first case, I feel the “real” Korean teachers have placed themselves on
a pedestal and marked themselves as untouchable. This is not conducive to
growth as a teacher. This mindset of “my way is the only right way” is also a recipe
for teacher methodology fossilization.
In
the second instance, it bothers me that a mother could insist to have their
child placed in an inappropriately advanced class, just on her say so. This
conflicts with the autonomy that is required for teachers as described in
Johnston (Values In English Language Teaching; pg 99). The parent will always
only consider what is best for their
child. The teacher in contrast must consider what is best for the class.
The
mother felt that placing her child in a class that was too difficult, would
push them to learn. Well before I learned of Krashen’s i+1 theory I thought
this to be pure folly. The child gets stressed, starts to feel inferior and
quite often the other students can become condescending and hostile to the
lower level pupil. Thus I feel it morally wrong for this situation to occur,
and I strongly voiced my opinion with my manager.
This
led to loss of face, lost tempers and a very real danger of not receiving a
recommendation letter for my next job posting. These letters are absolutely vital
to my continuing to land job contracts in this ever tightening job market. I
ended up receiving said recommendation letters from both jobs in these final
weeks, but it was a close call. In one case, I had to write a letter to the principal
“explaining” by behavior.
Much
the same as STG administration can’t call out the Sookmyung University MA administration
department for their comically dysfunctional registration process for fear of “loss of face”,
so too do we as teachers have to weigh up the moral obligations of standing our
ground in the classroom versus the possible consequences that could follow.
Our
values, moral and beliefs are sown into everything we do as educators. As teachers, we should be mindful of the manner in which we influence and shape their minds.
