Now, ask them why and you'll hear words like "kind," "respectful," "intelligent," "attentive," "caring," "down-to-earth," "trusting," "trustworthy," "honest," "responsible," "organized," "cool," "nice," "friendly," "funny," "patient," a general sprinkling of love, unicorns and rainbows!
Now, find a crooked businessperson, any crooked businessperson, there should be one close at hand. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Now ask that scumbag/person the kind of client he/she prefers to screw/do business with and you will hear a familiar list of words.
My point is that the qualities that make us teachers good teachers, the qualities that make people GOOD, are the very qualities that render us vulnerable to assholes in the business of education. And it is more and more a business, don't kid yourself. This is just one article I've read that shows this trend I have been noticing and complaining about for years.
In business, good = stupid. This is a loophole people who head up "schools," or more accurately the education shops of Asia, have been exploiting for years. Take a gander at the following job ad from Korea:
Now let's go beyond the normal discrimination that is allowable by law and common practice here like asking for a recent pic, birth date, actually stating that the person must be young, or old and healthy, (eye roll), religion, skin colour........ sigh. These are just some of the usual pitfalls that come with the job of ESL teacher. OTHER jobs can be worse! I've heard from some of my former flight attendant students that there are "swimsuit" interviews and pinch tests for fat. But a "drunken nation?" I wonder what THAT list looks like.
But let's just try to gauge the character of the business from the ad. Often, the "school" forgets that the teacher might actually have other job opportunities and they could be interviewing to judge the school. They get so cocky and comfortable in this heavily business favouring society, that they are holding all the cards in the interview that they don't even try to hide the assholery! I think the above might be a good example of this.
Now, it's gotta be said that sometimes the "teachers" that come over here are not going to be described with that list we made above. Sometimes teachers do bad things to employers like pulling runners in mid contract and leaving them in the lurch. Not paying their phone or cable bills and going back to their countries. Complaining a lot about cultural differences; not making the effort to learn the language or culture; partying too much; showing up late; taking days off; using sick days; even physical and sexual abuse of the kids. Sometimes the quality of the teacher is questionable. But in general, just like anywhere else, the low quality people end up in the low quality workplaces. At the end of the ad they say this job will likely be gone soon. Act now! This offer will end soon! This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds! ha ha ha.
This could very well be the truth, but what kind of self-respecting person would even apply? You'd have to be pretty much desperate. I mean, 40,000, (well, 32,000 when you remove the "administration fee" whatever THAT might be), is a pretty big carrot. That's about 35 bucks an hour. So there may be some interest, but anyone with the qualities of a good teacher will give this a miss.
The point I want to make here though is I've worked with these people before. Not THESE specifically, but I think many an ESL school/white conversation trafficker in Asia thinks exactly like this, they just aren't, (yet), quite so bold as to put it in their ads. So the trick is to figure out from a few easily fakeable emails and maybe a little phony kindness at an interview if the people you are signing away a full year of your life to aren't the kind of people who wrote the above ad. It ain't easy! I've been trying my whole career over here.
AND let me draw your attention to the visa portion of the ad. This you may not understand, but it's yet another example of a country tilting the playing field in the favour of businesses and businesses taking full advantage of it. This is the big problem I'm having now. You know of the stupid new rule in China that has led to all this unwanted downtime here in Korea. But even since that fiasco, I've had some problems. The problems HERE in Korea are new too.
I'm from the era when we didn't need to get criminal record checks or apostilled copies of our degrees. But I adapted to it. I did those dog tricks many times. And I'm willing to do so again for a good job in the country of Korea where I'm comfortable. But things have changed. As ever, entirely unnecessarily, in favour of the businesses and to the ever-enduring annoyance of the lowly ESL worker.
Lemme give you a ferinstance: I keep on seeing ads like the above for people with F visas. An F-4 visa is one that Korea gives to an ethnic Korean born in another country. These are gold to the hagwons and language schools here. They can give their money to a Korean, (which, let's face it, they would all prefer), but a Korean who grew up speaking English so has no accent and can speak fluently. If it weren't for the Korean preference for WHITE people teaching English, there would be nothing but F-4 "gyopos," (or bananas, (yellow outside and white inside, (I'm not kidding))), or Koreans born in other countries teaching ESL here. The thing is, plenty of people born in English speaking countries are not white. It even gets so silly that people from South Africa, (even the white ones), are not seen as authentic any longer. I have a couple of friends who are as white as I am and confused immigration officers with their South African passports. "How can you be white if you're African?" Yeah, that sort of stuff.
The F-6 is another good one. It's given to a foreigner who may be from an English speaking country, but who is married to a Korean. Oh how I wish I had one! I know some folks with these and it ALMOST makes it worth marrying a Korean. In times of desperation I've considered rushing into a marriage, I dunno, finding a homeless Korean gal who would have me, just so I could get the good jobs here. But then, I've seen ads specifying, "F-series visa preferred, but NOT F-6!"
An F-5 is for a permanent resident of Korea who is not Korean. An egg, (white on the outside and yellow on the inside, (I'm not kidding)), who has pretty much become Korean. The standards are high. You have to speak fluent Korean, listen to K-pop, follow K-dramas, go to singing rooms regularly, eat corn on your pizza, etc., etc.,... Like I said, the standards are high. But THESE guys are the perfect ESL teachers! It's what every Korean ESL school hopes for! And the "schools" are getting so spoiled here, it's what they all expect. So they wait until the very last minute and if they haven't found one, they'll settle for something else. I'll explain later how this screws the rest of us ESL job hunters in Korea.
The E-2 is the usual work visa for a foreigner like me who comes to Korea ready to teach ESL. You need to get a verified criminal record check and copy of your university degree stamped, (apostilled), at a Korean embassy in your country. This was something added in 2010. And if you read my blog from back then you'll learn how big a shit-show it caused here. But since then a couple of new additions to these documents have been added. Now the criminal record check is only good for 6 months. This is nothing but a money grab by somebody because, as explained on my blog before, if you haven't been in your country, you could not have committed a crime there. Korean ESL jobs are almost exclusively one-year contracts, but even though you are finishing a contract and getting a new job without returning to your country, and haven't set foot in it for the entire year, you still have to get one.
There are a few ways to get these documents. One could return to his/her country and do the paperwork there. One could ask someone else to do it for him/her. Or one could get the dox from one of many increasingly expensive document services who do such things. I found a service that was able to get my dox finished and mailed to me in two weeks. This is the fastest I've heard of. And this is where the F-5ers are killing us. You see, ESL "schools" are notorious for doing everything at the last second. They don't want to wait two weeks for a new employee, they want everybody to service them right away without the need for any foresight whatsoever. So now what you have are people asking for workers with F visas OR people who already have the E-2 visa.
How the hell might this work? one might ask. I certainly have been asking for a while! You see, in order to get an E-2 visa, a company needs to sponsor you. That is, a company needs to offer you a job and sign a contract with you. That's the way it's always been and that's the way it still is as far as I have been told. So I had thought it must be for people who are finishing their contracts and want to look for a new job. The paperwork is easier and it saves the company the cost of an oversees flight since the teacher is already here. But since the visas always expire a month or less after the contract expires, it's still a very tight window. Especially if you're applying for one of these jobs that needs a teacher right away. So I don't think that's the case very often.
I have been refused interviews because I didn't already have my E-2 visa. I actually talked to a recruiter here and said that I will get my E-2 after the interview and after I've received a contract. It's the way everybody has to do it, isn't it? The recruiter said, "No sir! No sir! No sir! The teachers should apply for the documents before being interviewed." I said, "Don't then need a sponsor?" "No sir! Not any more." So THEN I asked why one would do this even if one could since if you don't find a job within 6 months, the criminal record check will have expired. The answer was something like, "Well, it's how it's done now." So this got me curious. I searched all over for an organization who could give me some knowledgeable advice on this. It seemed at the very least like Korea was taking advantage of teachers and Canadian document services.
Well you KNOW I found nothing. But I was referred to a Facebook site that informed me that there still must be a sponsor. But I see ads for E-2 workers for two-month long summer camps. I have actually done these too. This IS possible if the sponsor gives permission. But full time, 8-hour-a-day jobs who won't interview you unless you already have the visa documents? This seemed strange. So I asked in that Facebook group if I could get an E-2 visa without a sponsor. The answer was no. And there are absolutely no short-term visas for if a person wanted to work less than a year, at a seasonal camp or something like that even though there are plenty of such short term jobs available. I still don't know the answer but I'm convinced there's something fishy going on here.
At any rate, I applied for a job at Dongseo University and spent over 100,000 won going to an interview in Busan. It went well and I was told by someone in the know that I actually GOT the frigging job... BUT... HR pulled the funding before I could be hired. What the hell is THIS now, Korea? Interviewing people JUST IN CASE?
And the recruiters! These guys didn't exist before. Now it's almost a must to deal with these superfluous entities when job hunting here. I applied for a really good job at Korea Electric Power Company, KEPCO, and had an interview set up and cancelled at the last minute... TWICE! Recruiters are not well known for doing a good job. They're lazy and undependable, but for a business who doesn't want to deal directly with the English teacher, i.e. speak English to them, these recruiters have become the way to go. And they're yet another burden for us ESL job hunters to bear.
SOOOO after many setbacks, at this time I am waiting for an online interview with a company in Saudi Arabia, or a job offer from ANOTHER electric company, Korea Hydro Nuclear Power, for a contract. I think I'll go with whichever of those two is faster. The three really good jobs waiting for me in September will have to be abandoned. I can't wait that long hoping to get some part-time work to tide me over here. It used to be really easy to get stuff like that under the table in Korea but even THAT has gone the way of tiny phones and Dance Dance Revolution here. It had its day, but is now gone.
I'm hoping to stay in Korea but I think the visa papers might cause some concern. As for Saudi, I think I will hate it going 5 1/2 months without bacon, beer or cool weather, but a guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do. Especially a lowly ESL teacher guy.
So now, maybe that ad will make a bit more sense to you. We are just a step above slime here. Not a single person on OINK, (only in Korea), the website where I saw the above ad, seemed surprised in the least at the sentiments expressed in it. Only a few expressed mild surprise that someone would post it.
And yet I keep looking for a place where teachers, REAL teachers, whose career trajectories are reliant upon the virtues in the list compiled above, are treated with the respect befitting someone better than slime. But it's a loophole I doubt will ever be filled. We're nice, so we're taken advantage of. I wonder who will take advantage of me next...
No comments:
Post a Comment