ESL academies in South Korea
Right now I work at a decent company but I've tangled with some pretty brutal companies in the past.

The ESL industry in Korea is a joke. The first secret is that the ultimate goal of most people studying English is to get a good TOEIC score so they can land in a higher salary bracket at work. Companies do not care about your English ability, just your score on a multiple choice test. I strongly believe they see it as your ability to commit to a difficult challenge and do your best in the face of total incompetence. One of my former students worked at the DMV and said she needed to study English for her job. I asked if she needed to interact with English speakers at the DMV; she said no, just that she needs to pass a test to get a promotion. At best it's a measure of your obedience and your standardised-test abilities.

One other important thing: these tests do not help. They are largely vocabulary tests, asking you if you know the meaning of words like "conflagration" or "angioplasty" rather than any demonstrable skill.

At my current job I had a gifted student who was 14 who had a rare passion for creative writing and storytelling. She would post her stories on my website for me to proofread, and we would have a ten-minute conversation each day which was like talking to an actual English-speaker. It was successful so her twelve-year-old sister was signed up also. This girl was less skilled than her sister, but she shared her zest for writing and loved speaking. This lesson also was successful, so their 16-year-old cousin signed up. This girl didn't understand basic English questions like "How was your day?" and "What's your favourite food?" She would answer with an ear-piercing "Uhhh?" One day, I was talking with my first student, the 14-year-old writer, and mentioned that I was having trouble communicating with her cousin. The conversation went like this:
HER: No, my cousin is very good at English.
ME: Well, she's not good at writing. Or speaking. Or understanding what I say to her.
HER: Oh. Well, she's good at English because she gets good test scores.

I rest my fucking case.

Most academies geared toward kids have a few techniques to make it look like the kids are learning a lot. This impresses their parents who control the pursestrings for tuition. The most credible academies are the ones that assign the most homework, because it makes the kids look the busiest. This is a major problem, because kids spend more time on academy homework than actual school homework. The academy workload is pushing school work out of the way. And what does doing well at an academy get you? You graduate to the next grade. Nothing else. No school credit, no university scholarships, just a new book. That you must pay through the nose for. Studying at these academies is more likely to set you back in your real schoolwork. More importantly, children in Korea have no free time, thus no chance to develop important social and creative faculties. The life of a Korean youth is just periods of anxiety between ball-buster tests.

I had a job at one of the worst academies, just for a few days as a favour to a friend. The boss was a very strict woman who spent more time disciplining teachers (in front of students) than the students themselves, many of whom were out of control and whose parents were paying a small fortune for them to sit in a corner and scribble graffiti for four hours a day. The singleminded curriculum was getting the students to phoenetically memorise a page-long speech about an ancient king of Korea, which they would recite as a chorus at the end of the month in front of their parents, who would then be so impressed by this performance (which demonstrates no practical skills) that they would extend their contracts with the academies.

It's a con. If you have kids in Korea, don't work them to death. The kids of the future are the ones who don't commit suicide by age 12 because they're stressed out about the workload.
(racetraitor has an alibi for, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:36, Reply)