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| POSCO in Pohang is the 2nd largest steel factory in the world. Try not to breathe when you're there. |
Thinking of teaching English at Korea Poly School in Pohang?
They probably advertised it to you as a seaside town, they offered you a high initial salary, they did everything they could to convince you that it's a wonderful teaching experience in a pleasant Korean environment. However, what they didn't tell you us that most of it were lies.
If you value life, dignity and other things like some free time, then this school is definitely not for you.
This English teaching hagwon is well-known for many English teachers who got fed up with the poor working and living conditions and decided to do a midnight run, essentially abandoning Korea over night.
Note about the POLY franchise:
Please note that while Korea Poly School is a reputable hagwon franchise, the branch in Pohang (Korea POLY School Pohang) is its blackest sheep that is nothing like other Poly schools around the country.
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| POSCO looks like Mordor at night. The rest of the town is very unimpressive. |
The pros and cons of being at Korea Poly School Pohang
+ The only positive thing about the Pohang Poly School is that it pays a higher initial salary than regular hagwons, they will likely offer you between 2.5 and 2.7 million Korean Won. Unfortunately, this is where the good points end.
- The first downside is that the Pohang Poly School director (and his co-director wife) will literally cam you for your Korean pension fund money (which amounts to 9% of your total salary) to which you are entitled to by Korean Federal Law.
If you will bring up the issue with the director you will either get fired or not hired in the first place - which happened many times before.
- The Pohang Poly School school director is trying to evade taxes in every imaginable way (a frequent modus operandi in Korea), operating it in a very shady manner.
He is also concealing the badly managed chaos of his school to both parents and the Poly School franchise headquarters, which keeps him from getting fired.
- The director will try to control your life in every imaginable way. He will try to make you come to him for any bank transaction and purchase you make in Korea. He will also try to keep some oversight over your mobile phone, bank account and your travels.
- The school itself is very disorganized, even though they claim to have a curriculum, the teacher has to adapt it daily to cater to every whim of the directors and the Korean parents.
- Even though they will say that you will teach for 8 hours, the reality is that you will have to be in school for 10 long hours, from 9.20 in the morning to 7.20 in the evening, with two to three 40 minute pauses in between - since you have to be prepared for the next class 10 minutes before its start, these pauses are barely long enough for a meal and you won't be able to make a use of them.
- The Korean children you will be teaching can be characterized as extremely spoiled devils. Korea Poly School in Pohang caters to the rich parents who send their spoiled children there.
That means that A. you will have a very hard time controlling them in the classroom and B. the parents will make unreasonable demands regarding the curriculum to you.
Both of these facts will erode your sanity even faster.
- As mentioned before, the Poly School in Pohang is known for several of its teachers running away, one after another, due to poor working conditions, shady management style, unmanageable children and the poor general living area.
Location
- Poly School in Pohang is located on the provincial northern outskirts of the town, a very bumpy 30-40 minute bus drive to the city center. It almost doesn't deserve the "Pohang" tag. The area is heavily polluted and infested with garbage (that is not an understatement), a lot of people are wearing face masks due to air pollution (Pohang is home to world's second largest steel factory).
Be warned that your living options will be very limited. Once you get bored of local restaurants, you will soon realize that you are virtually trapped there. Pohang is not a lively or party town.
- You will be assigned an apartment withing a 10 minute walk from the Poly School, in the same heavily littered remote area.
- The area you'd be living in is filled with three things: garbage piles, square apartment houses and highrises (many of the last two still in the process of being built). It is not a pleasant sight. Do not expect a friendly or welcoming attitude from the local people.
- Another minor detail is that tap water is not drinkable so stock up on bottled water. Also, if you have sensitive skin you will likely get a rash every time you shower.
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| The beach and water in Pohang are not something to look forward to. |
Bottom line
You should only decide to teach English at this hagwon if you are prepared to give up your life and soul and trade it for a bit higher initial salary (you can say goodbye to the Korean pension fund money and other things that you are supposed to get).
By being there you risk developing depression, obesity (a lot of Korean food is heavily sugar based), suffering from low self-esteem (if you stay there) and high stress.
Don't count on spending time at the beach: the water in Pohang is dirty and the beaches are littered with garbage of all sorts.
If you can, avoid not just the Poly School in Pohang but the whole polluted region around Pohang.
Very interesting post.
ReplyDeleteI think I have a hunch on who wrote this post. I have experience of working at Pohang Poly, and I can assure that most of the things mentioned here are not true. First of all, she simply copied and pasted bunch of random pictures found on the website. Other than the first two pictures, she found some random trash pic on the web. I enjoyed visiting chilpo and bukboo beach, which are two of the most famous beaches in Pohang. I have never witnessed such trash there.
If Pohang is like the Mordor, all the people I ran into are the Orces or what? lol.
The environment was nice- compared to crowded cities like Toronto, NYC or LAs. It's not that big, but I was able to hang out with great people, and I enjoyed traveling around. I think it depends on what you prefer.
I have to admit that there were some misunderstandings between the directors since they are not comfortable with English; but his son was very helpful in terms of resolving the issues we had. When he was gone, there were Gyopos (which means Korean-Americans) who were supposed to be there to facilitate the communication among the teachers and the directors, but it did not work out well all the time.
I liked working in Poly, though it was a bit demanding. I loved the kids, my fellow teachers and all the experience I had back in Pohang.
Instead of relying on this biased post, I think directly talking to the teachers who are working in Poly right now would provide you better ideas.
Maybe I should forward this website to the directors so that they could take some moves about this. I feel sorry for them.
A lot of foreign teachers, including me, asked the directors to help us so that we could register for the bank and the cell phone; as far as I know, nobody seemed offended about this. This lady posted stuff in a pejorative way; I cant deny the fact that there are some points where the directors and the teachers should work hard, but the points mentioned here are mostly ridiculous.
I have worked at this institution for over a year (September 2010,October 2011). When I first got there things were gong well. We had a translator, weekly meetings and a good staff. This did not last for long. They are not hiring teachers anymore. The standard rate was 3.1 million before I got there. It turned to 2.6 Million when I got there. It is now less than that. The Korean and foreign staff do not communicate. The staff that is there now are nice people but do not stand for their rights and are losing out on their money. Their has been three midnight runs since they opened. I know work at a school across town making 2.5 Million and working 6 hours a day. I highly recommend that you look around and do not take this job.
ReplyDeletePros- 1.
1.They will pay you on-time and in full.
2. Around the holidays they will give you cash of 50,000 won.
3. The children's English is pretty good.
4. The pay is pretty good, but not really for the working hours you put in.
5. They go on field trips.
Cons-
1. You pension which is owed to you by law, is hard to come by. I had to threaten to quit.
2. I didn't receive my airfare home at the end of the contract. This has also happened to two others.
3. They cannot speak enough English to have a conversation and their is no translator.
4. They do not follow the rules of the rest of the POLY Schools in the country. Pay amount, pension, working hours.
5. Long 10 hour days.
6. You cannot pick your holidays and they are short.
7. You do not have sick days and if you do not show up they will come to you house and bring you to the hospital. Also they will dock you pay for that day.
8. It's a part of town that no one lives in.
Thank you for the input regarding Poly in the city of Pohang, both for the blog owner and the people who commented regarding Poly.
ReplyDeleteI would like to first introduce myself; my name is Joseph Jeon, the director of Poly in the city of Pohang since 2008. When I first heard about this blog and the information covered within the blog, I simply disregarded it because I believed that most people would not believe the misleading information described here. That was the reason why I have not been doing anything regarding the post. However, it seems that (different from what I was expecting) a lot of English Teacher Candidates from the States, and Canada have been misled and negatively biased regarding our school after reading this blog. So I decided to reveal certain concerns, points, misunderstandings and information that the blog owner and other people who commented pointed out.
Since 2008, a lot of foreign teachers have been working with us. As of now, there are currently seven Korean Teachers and six foreign teachers who are from either the United States or Canada, and our relationship is great. (Of course, there may be certain conflicts due to cultural differences, misunderstandings and etc, but we are all having good time, building positive relationships among workers.) As I previously mentioned, I decided to comment on this blog after reading extremely biased, and falsified information.
Let me first clarify about the city, Pohang (for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pohang). Pohang is located in East coast of Korean Peninsula, and there are 520,000 people living in the city. The city is similar to Pittsburgh in a sense that there is a world-class steal manufacturing company called “POSCO(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSCO),” and the city’s economy is hugely dependent upon this company. Also, there is an internationally well-known Engineering University called POSTECH (Pohang University of Science & Technology—for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pohang_University_of_Science_and_Technology). As you can see from the descriptions from Wikipedia regarding Pohang, POSCO, and POSTECH, you would probably have already concluded that the blog’s information regarding the city is extremely biased in a seriously negative way. POSTECH is one of the leading engineering school in Asia; if the environment were that bad, the school would not be able to attract eminent scholars and graduate students around the world. Again, Pohang is a beautiful, mid-size city along the beach (East Sea).
DeleteSince the first start of Poly, most foreign teachers successfully finished their one year (basic) contract, and some of them even extended to stay here for a couple of more years. After the contract has been successfully fulfilled, teachers were paid with bonus termination fees, and airplane ticket back to where they came from (or for those who decided to travel around the Asia, we paid them the equivalent airfare from Pohang to where they came from in cash, KRW.) While most teachers successfully fulfilled the contract period, there were some unfortunate cases where a few teachers were not able to finish the contract successfully, which resulted in the termination of contract.
The reasons for termination were:
Delete1) Falsely reported health condition: health / conditions issues regarding teacher’s health status—some teacher falsely reported his/her health condition. When it turned out that the health issue got worse and serious, we had no choice but to terminate the contract for both the teacher’s, and the school’s benefit.
2) Clumsy Teaching: As English teachers, we expect them to have certain skills and individual teaching pedagogy. When the school tries its best to hire most qualified, well-prepared teachers, the school cannot always choose best teacher through interview and resume-screening. Unfortunately, after giving new teachers orientations, observation classes, and class preparation materials for classes, certain teachers’ teaching skills seemed not qualified for teaching students that we had. We had to terminate the contract due to teacher’s lack of teaching abilities. (When we decide whether to terminate teacher’s contract due to lack of one’s teaching abilities, we usually consult with some of English teachers working who had observed the teacher’s classroom, and use fellow teachers’ input to decide whether to terminate or not.)
As you have reasonably guessed, I also assume that this post was posted by one of the teachers who were not able to successfully fulfill the contract. I can assure all of you, that the life in Pohang will not be as devastating or crazy, as described in this post.
I am sure that some of you who are considering a position from our school may still be in doubt, regarding Poly, and Pohang. I would be very appreciated if any future tourist to Pohang, or future English teaching candidates (not just necessarily for Poly, but for other schools in Pohang) could look for more “objective,” and “realistic,” view of Pohang and Poly before they make their own decision regarding the city and the school. (Again, referring to Wikipedia, or going through Government’s official website, tour guide and etc may help you to build more objective and unbiased view regarding your experience in Pohang.)
If you happen to have more concerns or questions, I am willing to provide both my contact information and any current English Teacher that we are working with right now. If the experience in Pohang and Poly were that bad, we should have closed the school long time ago. There are six English teachers and seven Korean teachers who are enjoying their experience in Pohang and Poly. I sincerely hope that future English teaching candidate would not get negatively biased with extremely, and seriously falsified information.
My contact information is: pohangpoly@naver.com, and please let us know if you want to talk with current English teachers and Korean teachers.
Additionally, I would like to give my sincere apologies for those who had bad impressions or misunderstanding regarding Poly. I would also like to talk with the blog owner so as to resolve any issue / misunderstanding that he or she might have.
Again, I am sorry for the possible misunderstandings, conflicts, confusions that I may have caused due to my lack of awareness regarding Western Culture, and lifestyle.
I am sure the poster is just disgruntled and a lot of what he/she says is not true.
DeleteI find it off however that the director would take multiple posts to defend himself and yet, not talk at all about the claims that this POLY does NOT PAY PENSION. Serious red flag here. My advice to any newbies, take any criticism online with a grain of salt. A vocal few dominate the criticism of certain hagwons. However, never work for a place that doesn't offer pension. That adds up to around 2.5m a year, which is no small sum.
I am sure the poster is just disgruntled and a lot of what he/she says is not true.
DeleteI find it off however that the director would take multiple posts to defend himself and yet, not talk at all about the claims that this POLY does NOT PAY PENSION. Serious red flag here. My advice to any newbies, take any criticism online with a grain of salt. A vocal few dominate the criticism of certain hagwons. However, never work for a place that doesn't offer pension. That adds up to around 2.5m a year, which is no small sum.