After much thought, I have come to the conclusion that everything that Korea does to “help” native speaking teachers is just a front. It is all to pretend like their actually trying to fix a problem, but they really don’t care and aren’t willing to do it correctly. It’s similar to a corrupt plumber, who’s willing to take his sweet time, since you’re paying by the hour, and not fix the pipes correctly; He’ll make sure to fix it just enough where it’ll start leaking again in the near future.
This covers a range of things from orientations that are fairly useless. They also don’t occur until 8 months later for many people because of the backlog. After 8 months, I’d assume you know all you’re going to know about teaching in Korea already. Even after 2 months of teaching, it’s not useful. The program directors just don’t get it; there’s no point in co-teaching if the Korean teachers have no idea how to or just don’t want to do it. There needs to be effort with both teachers, not one. There also needs to be an adequate feedback system that actually does something. This isn’t new, these concepts have been making the rounds forever, but have yet to be implemented to any successful degree.
Korean teachers have no idea what occurs at these and would probably scoff at the idea if they knew. Half of it is boring Korean lecturers the other half is relaxing at your vacation away from work.
There are also last-minute co-teaching evaluations which are not anonymous and you aren’t given any information regarding where it goes or how it will be used. And yes, they submit them, not you. I’m fairly certain that they didn’t submit mine after reading it. It would have been a bad mark on them; they can’t have that in Korea. It’s okay to blame native teachers for them, but when they get criticism they’ll do everything in their power to make it disappear. This includes you, if you trying to say anything about them that is negative, they will work against you to eliminate you as much as possible – so much for teamwork. One of the things I learned is to just give them copies of everything; do not trust them with anything.
You’d better hope you and your school/co-teachers are awesome, because trying to fix anything is like trying to swim with a block of concrete attached to your feet.
Although I'm pretty sure this never went to its destination, this is a copy of the evaluation I wrote at my 6 month mark (halfway):
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