Two down and one to go

I finished my second group of first grade camp today, and now I have just three days left until complete deskwarming. Not that I am not deskwarming now, its just that I am currently only deskwarming 4 hours a day, instead of eight. That is including lunch of course.

We were recently chatting with a friend of ours who is working at a hagwon in our area, and we were comparing our jobs.

Our friend makes 2.3 million won without a TEFL compared to our 2.2 million with, which initially makes her job seem like the better deal. Until you find out that she has 29 hours of actual classroom teaching compared to our 22(I actually only teach 20). That is not counting the overtime that I get for teaching after school classes of course.

She also only gets 5 days of vacation time during her entire contract compared to our 5 weeks, not including several weeks of deskwarming during winter break, spring break, summer break and the random days of no class, for no apparent reason. She pretty much teaches the entire time.

One advantage she gets though, is when she finishes her last class of the day, she is free to go home. She does not have to be a white head in office just for the sake of appearance. I know most of us in the public schools would kill to not have to spend an 8 hour day on facebook. Although my crops do need watering.

She also gets less sick days, and has to actually do lesson plans, which neither of us do at all anymore. My wife in elementary never had to do lesson plans, but I use to do lesson plans, which is to say that I made one lesson plan when I first started and made slight modifications to it weekly. Then I got tired of that and began turning the same thing in week after week, but by April even that was too much work. So it has been three months since i turned in a single lesson plan.

She replaced someone who worked this job for one and half years before realizing they were getting screwed and left the country. I am surprised that she took the job in the first place. People complain about jobs drying up here with increased competition due to a shitty American economy, but you can do a hell of a lot better than that. A friend of mine is looking for a job closer to Seoul right now and has recently turned down 3 or 4 jobs with public schools that are far better than what she has.

She is incredibly unhappy with her job. She is so unhappy that she is actually pulling a midnight run later on this week. So if anyone is looking for a ahitty job, with shitty hours, I know a place that is hiring!