“He must be really be a master, too (of what, I don??t know), because it??s a samt??aeg?k, not any lowly old binary t??aeg?k.”

I thought I understood. Now I don’t know what’s going on. All those apostrophe’s makes Korean look Klingon.

Qa’pla!

Scum? Who is being called ’scum’? Teachers who screw underaged students (as the Marmot said ‘one of whom…’, which doesn’t quite justify ‘those people’, being plural as it is) or people who come to teach in Korea who are unqualified? If the latter, is this not hyperbole? In the comment section here, I don’t see ’scum’ applied to a person who runs one of the worst dictatorships on the planet (or to a leader who invades a country on a flimsy pretext, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths). But unqualified English teachers deserve this epithet? Let’s not sink to a troll’s level here, just to make a point more palatable to said troll (even if it was supposed to be the ’sugar to help the medicine go down’, so to speak).

Compare the average foreign-administered company to the average prestigious Korean company. Prestigious Korean company is full of smug, dim folk from the elite schools. Foreign companies are often full of extremely talented people who went to other schools but who could not catch a break from the Korean companies… and who are often extremely grateful to have been given a chance to be judged on talent instead of some mindless other criteria.

Yes, a generalization, but I think a useful one.

When the school my recruiter helped me land in turned out to be going bankrupt, and I wasn’t given more than 50,000 won a week to live on - if that - for two months. And my contract was used for toilet paper.

And I ended up in an apartment with no electricity, no gas to heat shower water or cook with, and little money to buy food with….

…..the government made it plain the only way I could legally continue to teach in Korea was if my hakwon boss gave me an official written letter of release saying I could work somewhere else.

Even then, the government regulators informed me, once I found a new employer, I would have to quickly leave Korea and get a new visa in another country with sponsorship from a new hakwon boss.

This was supposed to be done qucikly, I was told, after I somehow got the magical letter of release from the guy I could barely control myself from pounding into a little bloody spot on the floor, which the government said I had better do quickly (the getting the release and finding new work — not killing my current boss) - because they said since I had refused to keep teaching for nothing and had quit working — if I didn’t get such a letter and wasn’t working for my visa-sponsoring boss, I could technically be deported.

So, I am painfully aware there is some government regulation and oversight going on in the hakwon system.

It is at least in part significantly due to the legal definitions of the hakwon system that the industry is as shitty as it has been for over ten years.

The South Korean owners treat you literally like a slave sometimes, because they believe they own you, and after my experience in about as worse a case situation as you can get, and having found out how the government works to protect the interests of even the worst bosses, I know the government does do some regulating……

There are some unqualified teachers, yes. There are some people who get tenure and get lazy. But there are also lots of people who have drive and enthusiasm who get drowned in huge classes where students have lost respect for teachers and authority. And then they have parents bitching and whining that their kids aren’t learning “useful” stuff like how to pass the ?????? exam. As with the hakwons, the problems can’t all be placed on the teachers.and do not teach what children are expected to learn forcing parents to look for a place that will teach them.Which is ??????-related stuff. They put priority on their kids going to a top four-year university, not actually learning stuff. If parents would realize that there may be more money in having their kid go to a two-year college and gaining a skill, this might be alleviated.Hakwons are not educational institutions, they are businesses that exist but to turn a profit. The greedy owners are left to take advantage of the parents.Who themselves are often motivated by greed. When a parent wants to mortgage their kid’s childhood in order to secure their own retirement, I would call those parents’ values into question. It’s neo-Confucianism at its worst.The other group of people in this equation are the Korean idiots that think that just because they spent a few months in another country they are now qualified to teach English either privately or in the hakwons too-but no one talks about them?? caveat emptor when it comes to Korean education.Those idiots are people trying to get ahead and are basically trumping up their qualifications.The company I work for went back and used an American company to verify degrees obtained in the US by its employees in an effort to deal with any irregularities quietly rather than have it come out in the economic daily that they had a bunch of unqualified people working for them. I understand why they did it but I still had to lecture the HR people on the principle of due diligence.They were checking only the foreign nationals or the U.S.-educated Korean nationals, too? I know some places that distrust the allegedly foreign-educated Koreans more than the foreigners. We’ve been asked to check up on a few people.

marital rape was also legal in this country. so folks who looked like you did the same thing. that don’t make it right. that means the koreans are as you once were. don’t forget that while you on that high horse bringing up rape again.

‘japanese and koreans share genetic ancestry due to the massive rapes the japanese unleashed onto the koreans.’ krz, man who likes to joke about women being raped.