Well, I'm sure Sam will have allot more to say about all of this, but I can give you a general debriefing on my school. Sam's school has a fairly interesting history which he really should get around to telling.

The school I work at is known as a hogwan (hogwan means school), this is an academy that is extracurricular for the students who attend. Most of the english hogwans, and there are allot of them, employ one or two foreign teachers as well as several Korean teachers. My school has four forgieners which is quite a bit. Learning to speak English has a great deal of status surrounding it. Most of the kids I work with, if you asked them what they want to do when they grow up, will tell you they want to be doctors (many of my students' parents are doctors). Learning in an English Academy is good, but private lessons are better, and there is quite a big illegal market for teachers to do private lessons in the home. Private lessons are totally illegal and any teacher caught teaching a private could be deported. The immigration bureau, especially in Seoul, is not above entrapment. Lots of people have been busted for teaching privates or for agreeing to meet with an undercover officer! for a private lesson. Koreans don't have any entrapment laws, so you have to be very careful. I'm not teaching privates, and am not really interested as I've so much work at the school.

My school has the status of being a genius school, which means the classes are long and the work is difficult and volumous. Many of the students are attending several academies aside from this one. One of my students, a seven year old girl (American Years), went to public school in the morning, St. Paul (english) Academy, then she was off to piano lesson, voice lessons, and then the math and science school. She is in school daily from 7 to 9 and then has to practice and do homework for all of these academies. Sometimes I really think it's to much. My school keeps fairly reasonable hours, classes are from 3:00pm to 10:00pm, but I know a few of the english hagwons and science math hagwons are open till at least 1:00am. I was walking home one evening and saw a large group of high-school students who were leaving a school at 12:45 p.m. I can only imagine how much time they spend in schools.

Parents here are very competitive because the country has basically a two class system. Poor or Wealthy with no real in between. If you have money and want to have status, then you put your children in the most expensive schools you can find.

Several of the students I work with in my Primary Basic class were attending an 8 hour kindergarten school called Bright Academy which claimed to make children into geniuses. They were in the Academy from 8 to 6, when their kindergarten teacher brought them to me for english classes. They leave my class at 8 pm, and one of the students a 7 year old boy (Korean, American years he is 6) then goes for swimming lessons until 10 o'clock. The Bright Academy went belly up a few weeks ago...much to the shock and dismay of the parents, who sent their kids to school in the morning, and, when they went to pick them up, were handed all of their students possessions and told that the school was closed. Hogwans suddenly going out of business is not surprising unless you have a child in attending school there. The competition for schools is fierce, regardless of the type of school. Math and Science and Music academies are just as abundant and competitive as the English schools in Daegu, a! t least. There are about 75 english schools in the 6 block area around St. Paul, which is why there are so many foriengers living in this area of Daegu.

The hours at my school are pretty fair, again 3 to 10, if I wanted I would only have to be in the office during those hours, but I'm always early because I like to have time to prepare, teachers can also leave at 9 pm if they do not have another class. My classes are 90 minutes long, with a short break. I teach till 10 2 nights a week, which is about average. I don't have to teach on Saturday, however, many of the schools do have Saturday and Sunday classes. St. Paul does have Sunday classes but I don't teach on the weekends. Mr. Kim arranges the schedule so every teacher gets two consecutive days off, which is very considerate. Allot of the directors are fairly unconcerned with the Forgien teachers, and can be sneaky and manipulative, as in Mary's case. For this reason the American Embassy does post a warning about teaching in Korea. For the most part, I'm having a great experience, if I do sometimes get tired and stressed, it's my own fault.

At my school we do get the 10 national Korean holidays which includes Christmas day, but not Christmas eve. I will also get New Years Day off, and Mr. Kim is considering letting us have New Years eve as well. We also get a 1 week vacation which is fairly standard.

Korean public school has a 2 month winter vacation which is about to begin. The hours will be slightly longer during this period, as many parents take this as an opportunity to enroll their students in more classes or academies. A few parents will take their children to New Zealand, or the States to help improve their skills. Learning english is serious business here, and several of the parents at our school have sent their children to study abroad in English speaking countries in the hopes of making them fully fluent speakers.

It's a strange world. A note on the ages. Koreans have a different calender, they follow the lunar calender, so the student ages in Korean are about a year more than American Standard. For example in Korean years I'm actually 27, not 26....Koreans also do not practice the barbaric ritual of setting the clocks backward and forward so I had to relearn how to figure the time between Korea and the States when American fell back. Currently if you want to know the time in Korea, the easiest way to convert it, from New York, would be to add three hours to the time, and change the am, pm.

For example, if it is 12pm eastern, and three hours and change the pm, and you will arriave at 3am the time in Korea. If you are figuring from Chicago and 4 hours.

Anyway, hope this is all helpful and answers a few questions....

Cheers and happy holidays.

Sara