In a piece late last month, the Dong-A Ilbo took a look at the problem of illegal foreign English instructors:
An English academy is Seoul’s Seocho-dong, Seocho-gu. March 13. As an immigration official arrives at the school, which teaches TOEFL to students preparing to study abroad, Mr. C (42), a foreign instructor, furtively leaves the area.
C, a Canadian who came to Korea in 2000, is an illegal resident who worked as an English instructor at S and K universities in Seoul until he had his visa status revoked in November of last year when he was accused of sexually harassing female students. Early last year, he was also censured for frequent absences as he was working as an English teacher at D elementary school in Seoul. Despite this, he is now earning 4-5 million won a month working not only at the academy, but also at H university in Seoul.
Damn, 4-5 million a month? Why did I ever get out of teaching?
An official at the Bureau of Immigration said, “In January alone, we uncovered 11 illegal foreign instructors teaching university students at an English camp… Investigations revealed that these instructors were earning a lot of money teaching at two or three places.”
English academies, which have popped up like mushrooms after the rain all around schools in major cities. There are more than a few illegal English teachers at these places. In particular, with the format of the TOEIC and TOEFL scheduled to change from May to one testing conversational ability, the demand for foreign English instructors has risen explosively, and the number of unqualified English teachers is skyrocketing.
The Seoul Immigration Office believes there are 30,000 illegal foreign instructors teaching nationwide. According to the office, it caught 156 illegal foreign instructors in Seoul alone during the latter half of 2005, nearly double the number of the first half of the year (86).
There are more than a few instances of illegal foreign instructors with high-school or middle-school degrees making much more money than Korean foreign language instructors. Among foreign English instructors, only a small minority are English majors.
Only a small minority of English teachers are English majors? You don’t say? And does anyone find it strange that illegal round-eyes teaching English will soon outnumber U.S. troops based in Korea? Heck, they already outnumber illegal Mongolian immigrants (20,000), and that’s impressive.
Seoul Immigration Office deported on March 8 a Mr. M (26), a Canadian who entered Korea on a tourist visa in 2002 and illegal tutored students at an apartment complex in Bucheon, Gyeonggi-do for three and a half years.
M, a high-school graduate, fooled his clients by telling them he graduated from a famous Canadian university. Teaching the children of wealthy individuals like lawyers, doctors, Eastern medicine doctors and university graduates, he made at times up to 10 million won a month, investigations revealed.
10 million won? Jesus, the guy deserved to be deported just for being greedy. Although you gotta wonder how gullible his clients were. I mean, come on, everyone knows there’s no such thing as a famous Canadian university.
The Justice Ministry and police have since last year been cracking down on illegal English instructors, but catching them isn’t easy. One famous foreign language academy explained that it was entrusting an outside business with confirming the credentials of its foreign instructors. Punishments against illegal instructors are light. Employers who hire illegal foreign instructors are fined 4 million won, while brokers are fined 5 million won. Illegal foreign instructors are fined 2 million won or deported if they are caught. Early last year, 20 million in fines were leveled against foreign instructors who had taught in Korea for over a year, but the government simply deported most of them out of fear of causing diplomatic friction.
Diplomatic friction? You can’t be serious.
Anyway…
In another piece from the English teacher front, the Hanguk Ilbo proves that the Korean press does, in fact, report on English academies screwing their foreign staff. Or at least when the screwing is taking place in Japan. Quoting this piece in the Syndey Morning Herald about an Australian who sued Japan’s largest English academy chain for unfair working conditions, the paper said conditions for noobie foreign English instructors were better in Korea and China:
Richards’s advice to new hands is to think about going to China, South Korea or elsewhere in Asia.
I’m not sure if old Korea hands would agree.
35 Comments
Am I surprised that publications like the Dong-A Ilbo are still running this kind of sensational, completely unrealistic article? Not at all.
However, almost all the English instructors you and I know are, in fact, making about W2,000,000 per month. USD 2,000 per month sounds sort of low, but when you consider that most of the money is yours to keep, it’s not bad at all. In fact, I remember it fondly.
From the debtors prison in Rio Linda, California,
kpmsprtd
See? This is why Canadians aren’t invited to cultural awareness parties.
I have a big word of advice to Korean Immigration, whom I hope are reading:
Ok guys, did you ever consider it was strange how some American and Canadian tourists just can’t seem to get enough of Korea? I mean, I know you have 5000 years of culture and a lot of nifty sites to see, but don’t you think it’s rather odd for a Canadian tourist who finishes his 6 month tourist visa and flies to Japan and comes back for another 6 months? It’s more than just once - I have met one joker who has been re-entering on tourist passports FOR 8 YEARS.
My point is, Korean immigration has have enough brain cells between the all of them to know that these guys coming on tourist visa after tourist visa are illegally teaching. This is dead easy to stop. Why don’t you just start refusing them? Or put a clause in the law saying that you have to wait a minimum of 6 months or a year between tourist visits. Won’t affect normal tourists, just who you say you want out.
Or do they REALLY want foreign teachers out? Does K-immigration largely tolerate illegal teaching foreigners because Korean companies require them, making symbolic busts well-publicized into newspapers and publicly moaning and wringing their hands over the heinous crimes of illegal teachers to make Kim Q Public think they are actually doing something? With a nice side effect that these small-scale busts and deportations “pour encourager les autres”.
Korean immigration could stop illegal teaching in 2 months if they wanted to.
I mean, come on, everyone knows there’s no such thing as a famous Canadian university.
HILARIOUS.
Like I said, it seemed to me the expats in the English language sewer who seemed to have figured out how to work it to their advantage where the illegals — not the whiners and losers and cry babies and burger flippers and so on and so on and so on.
The illegals I met had their own place (of course they paid for it).
They also got their money from the hakwons up front if they did hakwon hours at all. That sure cut down on the varying taxes from month to month I dealt with in a couple of places.
They also made a killing with private lessons where they could set their own hours and got the money up front.
And if someone did start to screw around with them, they went to another part of the city or country. —- Or, they took what savings they had built up and went to Japan where there was legal protection for them if they went the normal route there.
Since the demand is so strong, why don’t they just tax it (lightly) and let it continue freely? I really don’t see what the problem is and if it’s that those horrible foreigners are charging too much, then allowing private teaching to go on (with the requirement of paying taxes on it) will cause prices to drop since every teacher will try to get in on it, if it were legal. In other words, a similar argument for legalizing prostitution.
I mean, come on, everyone knows there’s no such thing as a famous Canadian university.
HILARIOUS.
Hilarious indeed. Especially as the local bastions of ‘higher education’ like SNU and KAIST hold world rankings far below the University of Toronto, McGill, etc. This despite the fact Canada’s population is 1/3 lower than Korea’s and only 1/10th that of the US. Australia fits the same bill.
Mook: spot on. And I say that as an American. Both Australia and Canada have wonderful institutions of higher learning that can hold their own to the top universities in the US and the UK.
Cheers. The US and UK undoubtedly have the top schools but we won’t even start to compare the number of Nobel Laureates in Canada, Australia, Japan etc. (or Argentina, Egypt or Mexico for that matter) compared with Korea, it’s simply no contest.
I stopped swallowing the myth of the superiority of the Korean education system a long time ago.
I do not trust the type of “world rankings” that are published by the Western media. For that matter, even rankins within a country. A lot of it has to do with reputation and not absolute “greatness”. There are many koreans who have gone on very successful enterprises. It is not uncommmon to open up a technical journal and read more foreign sounding names than anglo names.
Nobel prizes are good, but there are many other technical prizes that are also awarded. Nobel does not award for example prizes in engineering, for building the world’s tallest building, or the biggest plasma TV. It only gives for basic sciences and some countries are just not interested in pursuing basic sciences because of the poor return on investment.
Nobel Prizes are just “good” and you don’t trust the “Western media” (as if this is monolithic)? You’re a funny one but, ok. How about a more ‘balanced’ Chinese world university ranking. Check it out.
http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/top500(1-100).htm
Good enough for you? Hmm, no Korean schools in the top 100 there either, mustn’t be so balanced after all.
By the way, yes there are other prizes below the Nobel but sorry, Koreans didn’t invent plasma TV science, skyscraper engineering, cell phones, computers, flash memory, or even the basic science mathematics which form the foundation of engineering. I’m not even sure if they invented kimchi. Agreed: Russian and Japanese surnames don’t sound very Anglo, but I’m cool with that.
Opps, my inferior western tech skills were responsible for that bad link. I’ll put it up again:
http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/top500(1-100).htm
If you need more, no problem.
Or just google ‘world university rankings’ and click the ‘unbiased, unwestern’ link for the Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2005.
After the Laughlin fiasco I doubt any Korean university will crack the top 20 in my lifetime.
aw, can’t you folks find the humor in canada bashing?
c’mon, people! they don’t even own guns!
and this is the part where you give me stats on canadian gun ownership.
Actually they have plenty of guns. Didn’t you ever see Bowling For Columbine?
“Nobel does not award for example prizes…building the world’s tallest building, or the biggest plasma TV.” (mahthir_fan)
I’ll be sure to write Stockholm and recommend they add these categories but pronto. I’m also sure when Samsung is awarded the prize Nobels will suddenly become greater than ‘good’.
Oh, you mean you can’t teach people English at home? That’s illegal? Really? Oh my God.
I knew of at least one high school graduate (never went to higher institute of learning) who pretended to be a university graduate and who taught illegally. That is the problem of letting illegal instructors roam freely. You are getting a very poor return on investment if you are a student while the reputation of honest legal and qualified teachers are tarnished. I think the press reactions would be much much more harsher in North America or Europe if it was found that many of the teachers in the education fields are illegals with phony diplomas. Illegals working in sweat shops and restaurants - who cares. But when it comes to jobs within public services like teaching, that just would not be tolerated in the west. There would be a massive public anger as to how can the government allow illegal immigrants with phony documents to interact and teach their kids. But this is Korea.
I agree in part but I see a much larger problem as Hagwon owners even more unqualifed for their ‘educational’ position and a national avoidance to enforce international standards-based curriculums in languguage education.
While I’ve seen some foreigners who simply can’t teach I’ve seen lots of Korean PhDs in English who could not teach as well as some foreign high-school dropouts who are teaching here under the table.
Don’t forget, though, that private teaching in general is illegal in Korea. At least if you don’t have a license or registration or whatever it is that the Ministry of Education requires. I’ve had Korean friends get busted for that.
@kmp (1st post): My thoughts exactly! The guys I knew who were raking in 3-4 million a month were working their a**es off running around town teaching 60-70 hours a week. They looked disheveled and frequently took a month off to recuperate in Thailand. I think some reporter pulled that 10 million number out of his bum to inflame Korean readers.
10 million is very high and you can’t make that much working for a school or university. But it’s doable if you do free lancing.
Actually, I do believe the top hagwon math teachers make upwards of 10 million a month… But to get that much, you need to be really popular, and have classes where you get a share of each student (and, most likely, a share in the hagwon ownership). Then you stuff the classes with a couple hundred students each. If your students get the math test boost from your classes, the sky is the limit for what you can get paid.
My daughter is eight and already people in our apartment complex want to pay her W20,000 an hour to come over and play with their kids, so long as she agrees to speak English and not Korean with them. These are the same kids who bully her mercilessly when their parents aren’t around.
This whole qualified, unqualified thing is such a joke. I mean, what English-teaching qualifications does someone with a three year BA in Biology have? Yet if he goes through the proper procedures he can be an esteemed teacher in Korea.
Even with a BA in English, what does that prove? I’ve seen terrible foreign teachers with Masters degrees in English, and really good teachers with no degree working illegally.
The requirement of a university degree means nothing.
This question is off-topic, but I’m curious, Brendon. Is the bully related to your daughter’s family background? How does she deal with it?
Yes, the bullying is always related to being “different”. Adult Koreans are almost always really nice, having grown out of it or perhaps being more circumspect about their contempt (I prefer to think the former), but the primary school-age kids are starting to get consistently mean. I shudder to think what the high school kids are like.
The latest antagonist, having studied Engrishee, has found that she can pull Debbie’s chain by declaring that Debbie can’t speak English, that the bully’s English is better than Debbie’s, and one hilarious variation has been that Debbie’s daddy can’t speak English. Debbie’s fully and fluently bilingual (actually, she speaks some Japanese now too), knows hundreds of Chinese characters and has won a prize for calligraphy — so her Korean is better than those little fools’ as well. But she doesn’t deal with it well. What an absurd claim, and so easily beaten (”Your English is good? Great! Show me, turd”), but Debbie is still pretty young and not as good at argumentation.
As for me, I always like to beat down the little bullies. The little neighborhood kids crowd around and ask me the same questions all the time (in Korean) and I always give ‘em a good answer, but sometimes I like to say things like “I’m not here to talk about that. I came to find out why Kyongmee’s ass is so fat.” Bullies are not good at taking it.
Anyway, I expect that when Debbie’s a little older she will come to appreciate taking away good money from their families for nonsense study sessions.
100 of us could pool our cash and pay Shelton 2 million won a month NOT to write.
Odd, people are always saying that the succeeding generations are becoming more tolerant.
More tolerant as they get older. When kids are in the Lord of the Flies stage, they are all beastly, anywhere you go.
Do Korean parents/schools teach that bullying is wrong? I know it might sound like an obvious point… but to me, it is also obvious to teach kids they should not play in the road, and that is not taught in Korea. Anyhow, I am seriously curious about the point. I can see that, in general, Korean parents are pretty lax with the discipline, at least before their children are around 8 or so.
The illegals are often “teaching” the illegal privates are doing little more than tutoring. You don’t need a BA or MA in teaching or experience to do that, and if you did have such a degree and hoped to do an effective job instructing students in Korea, you would end up pulling your hair out and die of a heart attack if you didn’t leave the country.
I guess is sounds all good and nice to talk about “quality experienced teachers” and the poor Koreans getting their money’s worth and all the other crap that has been floating around this topic for years.
The system is a sewer from top to bottom —- and the students or the partents of the younger students help make it that way.
I never wanted to teach kids in Korea (or the US), but I was pleasantly suprised when I did, because you could actual do some teaching with them.
But eventually, the constant phone calls from parents every single day and the nature of the cut throat competition between hakwons, the management was constantly telling you how to do your job —- and as someone noted, these people aren’t educators to begin with —- and all the instructors would get a steady dose of things like “Do X because Mrs. Kim said her son liked X.” Then a week later, “Why are you doing X! Mrs. Lee said she doesn’t think X is the right way to learn English and she is taking her little girl to another school!!”
With private “lessons” it is even worse. (I mean with ESL, not content instruction like math or science the Korean illegal tutors do).
But this is just more burger flipper whinning….
I didn’t care much for the people who could come to another nation and knowingly break the law in such a manner as illegal langauge instruction.
But as I keep saying —– it seemed to me they were some of the few expats who had figured out how to work the system the way the Koreans have designed it.
Yeah, then they grow up and join the Roh administration.
> Yeah, then they grow up and join the Roh administration.
And the ones that never grow up join the GNP.
Death penalty to them.