Methodology – Week 15 – Final Reflection

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.