want to keep it secret
- 2009-02-28
This same situation happened five years ago when I worked there too. It's not a surprize that the current staff is facing the same situation. Good luck
theprisoner0000
- 2008-03-01
In reading the posts about Bupyong SLP, why am I not surprised?
The management, and in particular the two owners have this thing for treating the teachers who work there like children. They have a very top down mangement style, and absolutely no clue as to how to deal with people. Over the years, there have been a number of meltdowns in the staffroom caused by mangememt--teachers are personally blamed for the drop rate, and public finger wagging scoldings are not unknown.
The owners know that they need Western teachers because they attract students but do their best to consistently disparage, humiliate and otherwise make them feel like crap. They enjoy talking about their Western staff in Korean making disparaging remarks about them knowing that they can't be understood by the Western staff. There is a very strong anti-Western feeling at that school; whether it be by the blatantly discriminatory actions of a former supervisor, stirring up of anti Western sentiment by starting false rumors(ie all the Korean teachers were going to be fired),and by generally if not encouraging then being silent about hostile treatment by their students towards the Western staff--Students pulling ears and making monkey noises when being taught by an African American teacher, and the violent behavior of more than a few students directed at Western staff. The school's management took a very hard line AGAINST any form of discipline that the Western teachers used. Time and again the refrain was it was the Korean teacher's job to discipline those kids.The Korean staff when I was there strongly resented and had a high degree of antipathy towards the Western staff. The ones from that private school Han il were a total nightmare--no conception of how to act and extremely distructive/disruptive. But the owners smiled broadly whenever they came.
Be careful about the housing deposit that the school illegally deducts. They will find ways and means to try to keep as much as they can from it. It took 3-4 phone calls to get them to acknowledge that yes all the bills were paid and that they had to pay the rest of it back. Even so, there were mysterious deductions so that I only got 45% back--all of the bills were paid up to the date of my departure from that zoo. They even charged 50 000 won to clean the apartment--(it just needed a fast sweep). Do you think that the cleaners got any of that? Fat chance.
They are also known to make false promises to get people to stay a month or two longer because they have no clue as to how to recruit. They stiffed me for 200 000 won saying that they were going to keep that money and not to bother trying to get it. I have watched as false promises were made to others--stay an extra month and we'll give you extra classes so you can make more money and they NEVER fulfilled their part of the bargain.
I could go on but I think you get the idea. One last thing, the owners plan on pulling that particular location out of SLP and to go the independant route.They plam to keep their other location in south Incheon in SLP-=-Kinda neat idea--poach the product. At one point they wanted to develop their own program and franchise it. Then they realized that it would cost money to do that.
This place is going downhill fast. The current and former teachers are keeping in touch as we watch the place collapse. The ones who have left are the lucky ones. The ones still there are fearful, and for good reason.
It all started with the fact that the teachers were (and still are) highly dissatisfied with the cirriculum, which seems to involve rushing through as many expensive books as quickly as possible in order to sell the parents the next set of books. When one of our teachers pointed out that the supplemental books were too difficult for the kids to understand, she was told flat out that the point wasn't that the kids understand the books. The point was that the parents would see the kids reading them.
Teachers are ordered to inflate the kids' test scores on report cards so that the parents won't realize the kids aren't learning anything. Even if a kid is so totally lost that he didn't even write any answers on the test, the teacher has to give him a score of 60. And they just advance him to the next class.
Things are so bad that the school had three runners in just ten days in January. Then in February they refused to pay one teacher, saying they were afraid she'd run if she had her pay. She had to refuse to come to work until they paid her, and then they insulted her and belittled her. So though she'd originally planned to stay until the end of the semester, she walked. This went down during orientation week for a new teacher to replace the first "runner". He saw this and said he didn't want to work for them. They tried to hold his diploma to keep him from leaving! Only after they found out that all the remaining foreign teachers were up in arms did they give the man his diploma so he could leave.
When a school has lost four of its ten foreign teachers in just one month, and resorts to trying to strong-arm the remaining teachers into staying the last three weeks of the semester, you know it's bad.