Level 1 - Ms. Bak (Park) – Will make constant “suggestions” on your teaching, such as “you should make this more fun” and “fun is important.” Never will she or any co-teacher ever lift a finger to help you make/fix a lesson plan. She is otherwise known as the queen of complaining. If you hear a complaint it will come from her first. She is supposed to be your liaison, but she is horrible at keeping you in the know. (Ex. Not being informed no lunch provided days on midterm and finals, being told of a faculty picture day, the day of, only after coming to school, which classes are being taken and which aren’t, planned afterschool dinners, etc) I am sure that she knows information long before she tells me constantly. Ask her for things and she’ll forget and never get around to it. She’ll also find every reason not to do something for you. If she wants something from you, it’s needed the moment she asks for it. I like to delay her, she likes to ask random out of the blue questions, say you need to think about it ask for a day or a few days… To them, you’re out of their thoughts after an hour usually. I was told that she was involuntarily picked for the position of liaison, which might be true. What I didn’t know until about the time I left was that she gets paid more all year round to be our liaison. Wow! That was an eye opener, for the very little that she actually did along with complaining and griping.
Level 2 - Ms. Hong – She is the worst teacher/person I have ever met in my life. If she does not work there anymore, by some miracle, then your job will be significantly less stressful. Perhaps they will trade her in for a real teacher who actually cares… She is the combination of a stone statue with the heart of a hardened life-term prisoner. She will do the least of all the co-teachers, but she will act like she’s doing something when she is being watched by administration. Her philosophy of teaching is that “the students can learn by themselves.” She said to me “how can I control the students when I cannot hit them (lie, teachers hit the students in various ways)” – this came from a 25 year veteran teacher’s mouth… she’s a travesty, she will almost never punish students in your class and will pretend that she doesn’t know how, even though you’ll see her punish students in her own class when you walk down the hall. She will try to take advantage of you by telling you that she needs to leave the class to work on her medical/scientific papers. Tell her that she must stay in the room, even if you are doing nothing important like watching a movie. Once they know that it is okay, they will do it many times. Don’t let her do it ever. She doesn’t lift a finger in your class. If anything, the other teachers will at least occasionally translate or help you pass out papers. There’s something wrong with her though; she won’t. How can a teacher care so little about Korea’s students?
Level 2 - Ms. Gang – She might also try to take advantage of you to further her own advancement in teaching, I suggest to reject any proposals she may have. Also, she may want you to teach classes alone since she goes on many business trips, say no, and if she just leaves anyways and makes you teach the class alone, just watch a movie. She will sometimes translate everything (to an annoying degree), and sometimes she will only translate certain things. She is unpredictable and causes weird time shifts in your class/lesson planning. If you run out of material (weather purposely or unintentionally) she will automatically go into repeat-after-me mode. During the co-teaching competition she finished early accidently (didn’t take the time into account passing out materials when she pre-prepped that same class) and made the students memorize a small passage by heart to kill 10 min of class. Great teaching comes with age here, it seems. They don’t have any sense of winging it. If you want proof that she is stealing material, I believe that she will pull out some photocopies (mine) that say something about rejoinders. You’ll know because “rejoinders” is a word that wouldn’t naturally pop out of any Korean teacher’s mouth.
Level 3 – Ms. Jung – Petite and generally quiet, she will yell at the students and then smile at you and excitedly ask what you need. She will keep the students under control, although by that level they are generally under control even without the Korean teacher there. She is two-faced at best. She is generally nice, but she will change into a moody state if you reject her request. She is usually the teacher that the co-teachers will go to try to sway you in some direction. She has a very cautious yet surprisingly well-formed way of speaking, but she won’t ever use it in your class. Amazing to think that the best teachers at speaking English won’t use it to teach… A further note: she is quite bipolar, she is generally mellow and pleasant, but if she doesn't get her way she throws a tantrum in front of her students. One advanced student from her class told me that she acted very much like a child (by lecturing the class about how evil I was) after I tried to show them a movie at the end of the year (after end of semester tests) and refused to do anything else (since I did all of the teaching the rest of the year and many other reasons).
Level 1 & 3 remedial tutors/co-teachers (not certified teachers) – They will probably give you these tutors, one (level 1) was slightly more helpful than the regular teachers and translated when necessary, the other was only helpful when she had to be. Remedial classes are nice and generally quiet, the way classes are supposed to be. Strangely, these were slightly closer to how I expected classes to be run – a mildly helpful translator in the background.
The co-teachers don’t intermingle. They don’t help each other; every one of them is independent from each other. They don’t know what the other foot is wearing. They especially don’t know if someone told you something or not, hence you become forgotten in their eyes. Out of sight; out of mind. They’ll try to sell you that bull about not being in the teachers’ room so they can’t share their schedule knowledge because they’re so busy, but that’s bunk. They’re just lazy and forgetful; the hallway to the English classroom is about 15 seconds too far in their minds. I sat in the teachers’ room for the last four months… I’m sitting no more than 3 meters from any of them, and they still don’t tell me anything until last minute.
One of the problems that Korea faces is that it doesn’t distinguish the jobs between administrators and teachers. The teachers here have a double role at times. The two second level teachers that I have Gang and Hong, of which I consider to be the worst of the bunch, will probably never be fired. They are bad teachers, but they also have other roles that keep their jobs secure. Gang only accompanies me with 3 classes (two 2nd levels and one 3rd level) total. As I understand her job entails making the school administrative policies/information booklets. Her preference for teaching is to write words on the board and tell the students to repeat after her. Hong is the school medical advisor; although I hear she does a bad job of keeping the medicine supplies available. Her preference for teaching is to stand, or sit if she can find a spare chair, and do absolutely nothing.
Level 1박선경
Level 2 홍지영
Level 2 강명갑
Level 3 정주연
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