By SHELTON BUMGARNER
Marmot’s Hole Guest Blogger
The thing I don’t think a lot of foreigners appreciate is how one event can change the entire dynamic of life here in Korea. Things like little girls getting accidentally run over by a tank or ESL teachers giving tips on underage speed seduction really have a powerful resonance in the populace that outsiders underestimate.
The reason is, I suspect, is they both came to symbolize a deeper issue. With the little girls, it was the continuing presence of the American military. With EnglishSpectrum, it is the growing number of foreigners (of any stripe) in the country.
The Globe and Mail, a major Canadian newspaper, touches on the lingering after effects of EnglishSpectrum-gate in a recent piece:
Visa frauds go on in just about every country, but Korea’s clampdown has been lent a sense of urgency by highly publicized accounts of immorality by young foreigners. Reports of marijuana and cocaine busts have long tended to feature Westerners — including five Canadian teachers who were arrested two years ago.
But more recent events have led to a furor. An unknown English teacher in Korea used the Internet to post what amounted to a how-to guide for seducing Korean women. Then, two English teachers from Cape Breton, N.S., made the headlines for breaking a local man’s jaw in a bar brawl. They spent 40 days in jail and were ordered to pay $30,000 (U.S.) in a form of restitution known locally as “blood money.”
And lately, Korean TV has aired segments painting English teachers as inept, unqualified foreigners who frequently lie about their credentials.
“People basically think all foreign teachers are drunks and molesters who can’t get a job back home,” said the teacher who helps run the Internet board for expats.
The story goes into a lot of detail about yet another round of EnglishSpectrum-gate related crackdowns vis-a-vis “unqualified” English teachers. Given that many English teachers are Canadian, that this makes headlines in The Great White North should come as no surprise.
Be sure to read the rest of the article on your own.
H/T to Mike Weisbart
Sphere: Related Content
37 Comments
out with the criminals!!!
Here is the thing: by and large, English in Korea amounts to a horse and pony show requiring anything more in the are of looks and accent than in the reasoning ability one would expect from a college graduate. The fact that there seems to be a sizable gap between what many English institutes are willing to pay and what qualified teaches expect and deserve leads many to hire anyone who is foreign that can produce documents that will allow them to work - sometimes not even that. Nothing is ever said about these people in the media though - they are Korean business owners trying to make a living in a hard market having to work with distrustful foreigners, all the while providing a quality education at a minimal price. Much less is mentioned of the Korean teachers who, in my opinion, by and large are uneducated and are able to claim the title of English teacher due to a semester or two spent overseas at some ESL course they went to. If that were not enough, many of these people also teach high priced illegal private lessons - but again, that is not newsworthy. In reality, this is nothing more than the Koreans blaming EVERYTHING bad on the foreigners. Yes there are bad people out there. Unqualified? - absolutely but do many fit into that category? I believe not - just another excuse not to trust foreigners.
‘underage speed seduction..’
you start messing with children, you gonna have problems. so, even if only a few expats are guilty of this, most people won’t care. that’s a natural reaction. got nothing to do with xenophobia.
****
you folks who are interested in a bit of korean culture, there’s good news! mbc will be putting out ‘morae shigye’ with english subtitles. the series has got to be one of the best korea has ever made. i highly recommend it to those who can’t speak korean but are interested in korean culture or to those who just want to watch it again (like me!).
Go Judy.
About time they did something about the crap that goes on here.
Too bad the Koreans weren’t a little bit more savvy about some of these teachers.
PS Thanks to this article my prices have just gone up 10%.
There wasn’t anything about the women being underage in the “Ask the Playboy” forum was there?
I am not an English teacher, but I have visited a few of the places that offer English instruction with my Korean friends. I am consistently shocked at the low quality and poor creditentials of the teachers. The majority of the “teachers” that I have encountered have little understanding of how to speak or read Korean. How do these people teach non-English speakers Korean? Just because you are a native speaker of a language does not make you a teacher in that tongue. The Koreans that hire these sub-par teachers need to be held accountable for the dismal level of instruction that they provide.
To be fair to the Korean authorities, they aren’t cracking down on qualified English teachers, or even raising the qualifications necessary to teach in Korea (which they probably need to do), but cracking down on those who fail to satisfy even the barest of requirements set by the Korean authorities, i.e., a 4-year degree in anything. And it seems that one of the degree forgers turned over his client list, so a roundup would only be natural. Anyway, if the Korean authorities are cracking down on some of these guys with fake degrees (rather than the guys who might be engaged in side jobs, which is a waste of time, frankly), God bless them, although if they really want to solve the problems facing the English language education industry, a crackdown needs to be accompanied by an overhall of the regulations governing who can teach in Korea.
As for the supposed xenophobia, well, yeah, that’s certainly an element, as was duly noted when these stories broke. But a lot of it is due to nonsense committed by English teachers themselves. I mean, come on — anyone who has taught here knows teachers who were banging their students, smuggling pot into the country and engaged in other behavior that is generally frowned upon in the Republic of Korea. It was only a matter of time before some of this got mentioned in the papers. Was the press reaction responsible? Well, some of it was less than responsible, especially by some of the start-up Internet media publications like Dailian that used English Spectrum-gate to launch themselves. But then again, perhaps the increased media scrutiny isn’t such a bad thing. That is to say, perhaps the knowledge that their nonsense might make the papers could prompt some English teachers to take their jobs — both as educators and cultural ambassadors — a bit more seriously.
A confession: OK, I’ll admit some of the glee I get from English teachers getting their fair share of shit from the media comes from more than a few comments I’ve heard from English teachers comparing themselves a tad too favorably to U.S. military personnel. You know, the “stupid GIs making all foreigners look bad” comments. And I spent enough time in the English teaching business to know that it wasn’t just “stupid GIs” engaged in behavior detrimental to the image of Westerners in Korea.
The majority of the ?teachers?? that I have encountered have little understanding of how to speak or read Korean.
Duhuh. They’re not supposed to speak Korean, but English [or German, Japanese or French]. When I taught at HUFS ? supposedly the elite Uni for languages ? I was specifically asked *not* to use any Korean in class, since I was there to drill the kids in listening and expressing themselves in French, not Korean. Classes that require the local language ? grammar for instance ? is usually done by local people.
Just because you are a native speaker of a language does not make you a teacher in that tongue.
Yes it does. In Republic of Korea.
Read the article very carefully. It’s rumour mongering, not based on facts.
What is clear though, is the sense that English teachers feel they are under siege.
Maybe if Koreans toss out enough unqualified clown-shoe wearing unqualified jerks, they’ll start getting a little more accepting of the foreigners that are left. I doubt it, but it’s worth hoping for, right?
i think that everyone should have the right to act like a moron in their own home. in fact, you can act like a moron in your own culture in public and often get away with it (i.e., jerry springer, george bush, howard stern, as well as half of hollywood). but that doesn’t translate to other cultures very well. foreign teachers, military personnel, “models” or just good ol’ fashioned kyopos milking their preferrential treatment for some quick money should be dealt with quickly and fairly for their moronic behavior here-most especially if it’s illegal or immoral within the cultural framework of the society.
this is a time for americans in foreign countries to stand up and represent our country the best we can. putting politics aside, the collective output of american individuals will have a greater impact in the future than anything else. it’s easy for us to forget our morality and more difficult to be leaders, but this is our responsibility.
living in south korea as a foreigner, i have absolutely no time for morons or criminals who come here from other countries. i applaud immigration’s attempts to clean house and look forward to further awareness of these problems in the public sphere.
Is there really a crack down?
If there is, what’s so different about this one and the regular annual ones where they round up a few illegally working teachers for publicity effect? Has anything really changed other than the current mood?
As for the supposed xenophobia, well, yeah, that?s certainly an element, as was duly noted when these stories broke. But a lot of it is due to nonsense committed by English teachers themselves. I mean, come on ? anyone who has taught here knows teachers who were banging their students, smuggling pot into the country and engaged in other behavior that is generally frowned upon in the Republic of Korea.
Setting aside for the moment the issue of smuggling pot into the country (as an attorney in a Korean law firm which occasionally takes such cases as a public service, I say do it!), I would question whether fringe benefits such as banging the students aren’t the only attraction for coming here to Korea in preference to other places. It can’t be the English teacher salary, or the accommodations, or the joy of dealing with hagwon “management”.
Actually, just like Watergate, in my mind, “Englishspectrum-gate” is made up of a lot of crap, not just what happened via the Ask The Playboy forum. I don’t know/ remember the details — and please correct me if I’m wrong — (which I’m sure someone will ) but two things seemed to have happened at about the same time:
1. Ask The Playboy had a “sex” party at Mary Jane’s in Hongdae (and pictures/video from that event started to bounce around the Internet.)
2. Someone wrote something silly about how to bed your younger female students.
What gets me is that some people simply don’t understand how pissed off Koreans are still about this and how much Englishspectrum-gate is seriously going to change life for ESL teachers.
Maybe Korea is on the cusp of demanding that ESL teachers actually, like, be real teachers and stuff. CDI seems pretty hardcore when it comes to making money teaching, so maybe they’ll change everything for the “better” vis-a-vis how much English kids actually learn. In fact, I think someone should do a story on CDI and their dream of having an IPO. Say, that sounds like something I should write about for the KH, KT or the IHT. Hmmmmm.
With my luck, of course, it’ll be OhMyNews.
I don’t know how much of what’s going on could be called a “crackdown” as it is the typical, “Let’s suddenly decide to enforce the laws that are on the books in such a random, arbitrary and capricious way that we piss off and alienate the most amount of people possible.”
One thing is for sure — the rules have been tightened up a great deal since the Englishspectrum thing broke. Probably 99 percent of the people kicked out of the country shouldn’t have been here to begin with, so it’s no big deal. If you’re not illegal or not totally an insane drunk thief then you shouldn’t have any problem.
I think it’s not unresonable to expect that “teachers” act like real teachers, but it’s also reasonable to think that you will attract the worst kinds if the standards aren’t up to it. The standards are set by Korean schools and the Korean parents/students themselves who will flock to any white/caucasion,/blonde/blue eyes man/woman, (even off the streets) no matter what the qualifications or experience. If you base your entire ESL education on just race and looks, then that’s what you get. Whose fault is that other than Korea’s?
shelton, as long as we’re throwing around abbreviations, here’s one for you…
WTF?
Korea Herald, Korea Times, International Herald-Tribune
sorry.
Oh, anybody know a good hagwon in the greater Incheon area looking for a “qualified” teacher who has a writing habit to feed? Wink. Something starting after the middle of November. I have experience, I’m “cute” and am pretty fun to work beside. Just don’t cross me, or a fictional version of you will end up on my blovel. Brahhhahahahah… grin.
I’d be interested in working for the Korea Herald or Korea Times, but it’s my impression they don’t pay very well (at least starting out ) and they don’t give you housing. Sigh. One day….one day.
I really hate foreigners from Canada, US et al. who start fantisizing about regulating Korea. Korea should “overhall of the regulations governing who can teach in Korea”. Veiled condescension.
I like Korea BECAUSE there are few rules and regulations. Don’t you realize that THIS is why you (’you’ plural, that is) stay her for 5 to 10 years is spite of the “xenophobia,” etc which you (and I) moan and gripe about every single day on this blog.
And this: “Maybe Korea is on the cusp of demanding that ESL teachers actually, like, be real teachers and stuff.”
To this stroke of brilliance, I quote ‘Alice in Wonderland’:
“‘Tis love, ’tis love,” said the Duchess, “that makes the world go round.” “Somebody said,” whispered Alice, “that it’s done by everybody minding their own business.” “Ah well,” replied the Duchess, “it means much the same thing.”
The problem is Korean mom’s (thus hagwon owners) don’t care much if their kid’s teacher has a Masters in Education, a 4 year degree in (fill in the blank), or is a high school graduate. They think all teachers are pretty much equal and kids will somehow learn through osmosis.
Of course it is important that they look the part though. Ask any Korean if they would like an African-American with a Masters degree in TEFL or a blonde hair, blue eyed high school graduate teaching them, and 99% would choose the blue eyed person. Also, they can’t look too old or too fat.
Educated and experienced teachers are not highly valued in Korea. Therefore much of the blame goes to Korea for the unqualified teachers. Once they truly value educated and experienced teachers, they will get them.
Let’s not even get into the Korean English teachers who can’t even speak English or have zero experience and education.
I agree with Marmot. This symbolizes Korea’s xenophobia about Foreigners. Let’s not also forget it symbolizes some Korean male insecurities and possessiveness of “their” Korean women.
Shape up (teacher) or ship out! Or maybe English teachers should hide their transgressions better like Korean profs and or assorted foreign professionals (does translator qualify?) in this country. The bottomline is that GIs are lowest on the totem pole around here, followed by English teachers. Both become easy targets. Kindly, show restraint.
Wait until they start taking a look at all the wacko leftist Korean professors. Sucking up to North Korea or aping Bruce Cumings is arguably worse for the moral or intellctual fibre of a country than holding wet tee-shirt contests with willing co-eds.
The Ask the Playboy ‘Hongdae party posts’ were discovered by netizens, who began scouring esl forums for more dirt and found an older post called “How to Mollest your students”[Sic, and sick]. If you read the original post Marmot linked to at the time of ESG, the comments from foreigners were overwhelmingly disgusted with the guy who posted it, who said he’d ‘found it somewhere else’, and had just posted it to test the censorship of the board moderators (don’t see the foreigner’s comments there anymore). Whoever wrote it seems to have put a lot of time and thought into achieving the goal stated in the title; you can decide for yourself.
I decided to find it originally after seeing it quoted in that episode of “I want to know that” (which you can find on emule, along with every episode of Morae Sigye, btw). Just in case you’re wondering, that episode about the English teachers opened with excerpts from that posting, which has got to be one of the most irreponsible things I’ve ever heard of (great for ratings though). It also, according to a Korean friend who watched it, mistranslated the english teachers who were interviewed on several occasions (mostly through the tone of what they were saying rather than the content).
I don’t know how many TV shows have been focussing on foreign teachers, but I imagine the Globe article might be blowing it a little out of proportion in order to make things look a little more dire (and interesting) than they are. Crackdowns have been going on for months (a friend’s co-worker was nailed with (so the story went) 30 or 40 other teachers in an apartment complex near Gangnam station back in June), but I don’t see that as anything too out of the ordinary. Every time the public blows up about something the government or lawmakers or some authority figure passes some law or cracks down in order to give the appearance of doing something (like the real-name law with the dogshit girl, or the stricter broadcast rules after the couch incident). I don’t think that English-Spectrum-gate is really still with us; I think it’s mostly faded away, other than this unsurprising legal response. The teapot has mostly cooled down, but, unlike dogshit or public nudity, things involving foreigners have much more of a chance of boiling over again at some point.
I’m not in Korea now, and I haven’t been in the language instruction business since 2000, so if things have changed significantly….
Crack downs are not new though the gensis of this round might be specific.
We might be in a vicious cycle right now, but Korea created it and foreigners helped fuel it. When I arrived in Korea, I replaced a guy who had been the first native English speaking hakwon instructor in a city of 250,000 people in Kangwon Province. By the end of my first year, it had gotten to the point it wasn’t so unusually to run across another hakwon non-Korean. And at the end of my first year, Kangwon had a mandatory meeting of all native ESL instructors — and at that meeting, which was when the Korean economy was steadily rolling toward the collapse of 1997-98, I learned that the boss I couldn’t stand wasn’t so bad — well, not as bad as what seemed to be the majority. At lunch, I found out from other instructors in the city that only 3 of the hakwons seemed to be paying their people and making any money. My boss was stealing from my tax money and a little more here and there, but we were getting paid basically per contract — and we were just about alone in that.
That is what created this cycle of unqualified teachers and shitty instruction. Most of the hakwons I’ve worked at or heard about were run by people with little business experience — at least the managers. They were started by people looking to make a quick killing, often with loans for startup money, and then they found it was a cut-throat business. So, they try to squeeze every ounce they can out of instructors. In my first school, I taught 8 hours in class a day and was farmed out to factories about an hour away by bus, so I spent often 12+ hours either in class or going somewhere for class much of my time. And if you want good, quality class instruction, working the teachers 8 hours of in class time a day, often on split schedule, isn’t going to encourage it.
Maybe that is what hakwons in such a competitive industry have to do to stay afloat — but that just tells me the industry sucks. It is an excuse — but excuses don’t wipe away the problems.
And I’ll apply that to the instructors too.
Because of the over-worker, problems with pay, problems with cheating and lieing to the staff and treating them like slaves — and the huge problem of not being able to change jobs without getting a release letter from you boss — caused many instructors to leave Korea. The turn over in hakwons is high because most people don’t plan on working more than a year anyway, but in every school I worked at besides the first (which only had 2 native speakers), I watched people flee fairly regularly, and I can’t remember every blaming them for it.
By the time I left the industry in 2000, I noticed that I was running into instructors from New Zealand —- this when managers I’d helped recruit people before didn’t really want to hire Canadians because they wanted the students to hear “American English”. I also started running into more ex-pat free-lancers — people who came on tourist visas and taught only privates (illegally in more than one way).
Korea has created this mess for itself. The expats who come into country knowing it is illegal help make the mess function too.
But, you don’t hear this kind of stuff from Japan. Apparently, in the early to mid-1990s, Taiwan’s ESL industry was a lot like South Korea’s. I read about it when picking where I wanted to try teaching in the mid-1990s, and Taiwan shut the industry down for a couple of years and revamped the visa system and the regulations on schools. And at least in the late-1990s, by what I could gather over the internet, it seemed to have helped out a lot.
Korea needs to do something like that.
On the sex matter….
bulgasari,
Thanks bunches for the link. It satisied one curiosity I’ve had since the story first broke. My initial reaction on reading the first 1/3rd of it (which is all I read) was to say that it was so blatant it was probably meant for flaming on the net. But, my brain forced me to reconsider that —- because I’ve seen stuff by NAMBLA….
I still have a curitosity that I won’t be able to solve.
In the origninal articles that broke and Marmot showed us, the article was vague on the idea of sex with underaged students. It said the teacher had had “inappropriate” sex with a student, but it didn’t tell what kind of school the hakwon was — all adults, split adults/kids or only kids….
And since more than 1 hakwon manager told me when I started working for them that I shouldn’t meet Korean women outside of class (meaning any Korean women - students or non-students), there is definately more going on with the moral outrage you guys are describing than just the understandable outrage at a NAMBLA type article and the idea that someone is actually putting what the article said into practice.
If my comment makes it through moderation, in the last two paragraphs, the teacher having sex with a student mentioned in the article wasn’t connected with the intenet post about how to seduce children. As I remember it, it was a story about some teachers in country illegally getting busted, and one was said to have had inappropriate sexual relations with a student, but it did not get into specifics and there was no way to tell from the article if it was a kids hakwon or mixed or adult only or connected to a university and so on. The article put it out along with various other “problems” with with ESL natives all over the nation including the wet tee-shirt contest and the internet post and the guy having sex with a student of some age in a way that wanted to tie them all together, but I doubt seriously one and the same teacher took a elementary school student to a bar to enter into a wet tee-shirt…..
On the hysteria caused by the internet posting of the wet tee-shirt contest, I can’t remember which Korea blogsphere site it was on, but somebody posted a photo of a bar (not in Seoul) where part of the organized festivities was sexy strip dancing —- down to bare skin — to win door prizes - and this had nothing to do with GIs or ESL instructors —- this was a Korean show…
It made me remember fondly when I first started going out with some of my younger adult students (some college aged and mostly between 25-30) to Korean clubs after I had been in Korea about 9 months or so…..
What a difference………Not that it was SHOCKING or anything like that….
I realized how much I had not understood how much I was getting the conservative side of what Korean society is like from my students (all adults).
They would say bad things about Korea and talk about its problems, but the tendancy was definately to give me the tourist guide version……
I had already noticed how after a class every once in awhile on some social issue, usually brought up about the United States they wanted to hear about, and I always focused the topics they chose on both Korea and the US to have a comparison, — a student would hang around as the other students left - so they could tell me the non-tourist guide reality
Educated and experienced teachers are not highly valued in Korea. Therefore much of the blame goes to Korea for the unqualified teachers. Once they truly value educated and experienced teachers, they will get them.
This is incorrect. Educated and experienced locally-licensed teachers are highly valued in Korea. The good ones go on to open very successful independent teaching institutes, and make an extreme amount of money from tutoring and from pimping out other, less-experienced teachers under their brand “umbrella”.
Public-school teachers are also highly valued and well-compensated. Public school teachers earn a substantial supplemental income from bribes and “gifts” eagerly offered by parents; the really enterprising ones sell favorable treatment for students who pay more.
I decided to find it originally after seeing it quoted in that episode of ?I want to know that?? (which you can find on emule, along with every episode of Morae Sigye, btw).
Does anyone have an ED2K link for this show? I tried “?·Έ?²??? ???³? ??Ά??€”, “want to know that”, and “???³? ??Ά??€” and turned up nothing. Maybe all the seeders have dropped since it aired so long ago
Speaking of protecting Korean women from us molesters, it was refreshing to spend last weekend at a great beer festival in Osaka and be able to chat up the lasses at will without Japanese men doing any cockblocking. Of course, you tell this to a Korean and it’ll just confirm to him that they’re right in doing it..
that sounds perfect, wedge. japan is a wonderful, mature, secure, first-world country where most threads like this one wouldn’t apply. korea is an unstable, developing country with completely insecure men and too many discussion threads like this to count in one’s lifetime.
i can just imagine osaka and beer in the fall right now…and lots of onsens!
“I affirm that, within 10 years, this country would become a place where people should not need to pay for private tutoring of their children for college admission,?? he [Noh Moo Hyun] said. “Private tutoring should be restricted to helping children develop their special talents.??
10.11.05
After a bit of searching around, I found that the post on how to molest students was actually posted on July 11, 2003, attracted several negative comments, and then apparently dropped out of sight 3 days later. Marmot first reported on the negative response to the Ask the Playboy Hongdae party post on January 12 of this year, and the student molesting guide was discovered by netizens on January 14 - a year and a half later.
To get an idea of what the guy who wrote it was thinking, have a look at his posts on the topic here. He says he cut and pasted it from a newsgroup and was just trying to see if it would be censored (I’m assuming because KoreanESL had no censoring at the time). To read the angry comments by the foreigners who read it when it was first posted (and to see what he was responding to), you have to go just below the halfway point on the original page and look for “Webmaster — What are you thinking?” by ‘Bruce’ and read the next dozen or so posts (a few more are further down). A link to this page is in Update 1 of Marmot’s post ‘English Spectrum-Gate continues!’
If you assume that this article had been buried after 18 months without anyone replying to it, you’d have to guess that Korean netizens were going around to all of these ESL sites doing searches with sensational words in order to dig something up to pump new life into the hatefest. Maybe you could draw a parallel between the searches that turned this up and the false rumors that were spread about the Katusas getting into a fight with the soldiers involved in the June 2003 accident after it occurred (as they were supposedly laughing about it - a blatant lie). Having read the comments by the guy who posted the molestation guide (and seeing the blatant spelling errors in that post, while the poster’s subseqent comments were relatively error free), I think now that it was likely what he said it was - a(n irresponsible) provocation directed at the board’s moderators, and likely the other members. Who would have thought it would have had the repercussions it did?
(btw, could someone explain the preview function to me and tell me why all the text between two links disappears in the preview (or why text disappears after a certain point)? Is this just part of the moderation function? I’ll likely have to break this up into 2-3 comments…)
Usinkorea - Allegations of teachers sleeping with underage students were raised in that episode of “I want to know that” which aired February 19, but before that it was not mentioned in any of the English Spectrum Gate coverage by the English language media or here at the Marmot. It’s been awhile since I watched it that show - I seem to remember that it consisted of some guy saying that his co-worker had told him he had slept with an underaged student. Well, if some guy says that is buddy told him that…then any program that starts off with a reference to a 19 month old forum post in order to paint all foreign teachers as pedophiles is obviously going to consider that to be an unassailable fact.
The other allegation you were referring to, where the age of the student the teacher was alleged to have slept with was unclear, was from August 16th, and was not mixed up with the original English Spectrum fiasco. Marmot covered this in the post “Forged degrees and screwing your students”. I agree with your comments from back then - if there was some frollicking with adult students, I don’t see a problem with that; if it was with underaged students, then obviously there will be problems. The articles didn’t state the age of the students involved, and I have to wonder why - because they didn’t know the age[s] of these girls, or because calling it ‘improper relations’ would give the impression of something that might not be the case - something that might sell more papers or get more hits?
KrZ
Click here to get that episode of ?·Έ?²???΄ ???³? ??Ά??€. It isn’t been shared anymore, it seems, but I threw it back in my share folder, so you should be able to get it. If you’d rather get it via bt I can share it that way.
PS - if the link doesn’t work, search for this file:
English Teachers - I want to know that.ep327.050219.KOR.SDTV.XviD-2DOT
Illegal Teacher Crackdown
This has been going since august as far as I know, but has been getting alot of attention on expat blogs and daves cafe lately. The recent attention is mostly due to an article in the Globe and Mail that made the front page of the print edition. I wasn…
Interesting thread
Lets hope that North Korea absorbs the south so that both GIs and English teachers can get out of that shit hole. Shouldn’t be long now.
LETS HOPE FOR AN EARLY WITHDRAWL OF US FORCES FROM KOREA
I have 1 question to ask all of you with valid opinions:
Should the wife of a legal visa holding English Teacher who is living with her husband in the republic be fined and deported for getting caught teaching nursery rhyms to kindergarten students?
Choose 1 of the following repercussions of this:
1. Immediatedly be taken to the immigration office and interogated for many hours by the same people who arrest drug dealers and other criminals who are in hiding in Korea. Then get fined 700,000won ($700 US),blacklisted and promtly given exit orders.(The is the current outcome)
2. Be fined 700,000won ($700 US) and be given a warning but not deported.
3. Nothing, the rules should be changed so that wives of legal working residents should also be allowed to work in the Republic.
Please post your response 1, 2 or 3 with reasons…
japan is a wonderful, mature, secure, first-world country where most threads like this one wouldn?t apply.
I’m guessing you never rode the subway there, then.