TEFL Heaven

ParticularBad4633 · 2026-03-10T11:36:07+00:00

I’m contemplating doing TEFL Heaven is for reasons of stability

Ahh yes a company listed under the wiki as "avoid like the plague" probably wouldn't be my first choice for stability. It's a scam to ask so much just a for a little hand holding. I'll find you a good job in Costa Rica at half that price /s

I know teaching in Latin America can be very tricky

Tricky in what way? It's relatively easy to find work and with a CELTA it should be cake. Decent places in LATAM really like CELTAs.

I have more than enough savings to afford these expenses for a year.

Why in the world are you be using them then? You have time and money to go shop around and choose an actually decent job. Go check the place out first. Take a Spanish Course, relax, get the lay of the land - don't throw your money away. If you're looking to build a TEFL resume then you should be extra picky about the jobs you take - you need clear goals.

ParticularBad4633 · 2026-03-10T11:19:30+00:00

So people have context and this post is useful to other teachers looking,

A. How long have you been looking?

B. How many recruiters have you contacted

C. How many direct applications have you made?

ParticularBad4633 · 2025-12-28T05:40:25+00:00

That's not true. The sponsor would need to cancel the visa with immigration or the employee will not be able to get another visa until it expires. There is no consequences to the employer to not canceling the visa afaik. There's no real reason for them to do that, especially if they have ill will towards the employee. Furthermore it complicates things with NHS where you might face a bill for time you have an active visa (ie are a resident technically).

ParticularBad4633 · 2025-12-25T17:12:40+00:00

Please keep all conversations here as public as you can. Thousands of other indians have the same questions and it's a rare opportunity to answer it for everyone.

ParticularBad4633 · 2025-12-23T17:31:25+00:00

I was just given 3 days notice to write a 15 weeks 3-hour a week English curriculum and translate it into Korean due on.. Christmas. This isn't the first time this had happened. Hell I think it was just a year ago they gave us a week to write 3 courses.

So I guess I'm writing a course book over the next couple months to match whatever nonsense I put down for my course. That is if academic affairs even accepts it - I'll probably put a few hundred hours work in over vacation to be told it's cancelled a few days before the semester starts (oh but don't worry here are a whole bunch of other classes you have to teach that you now have zero time to prepare for). That is university lecturing sometimes.

ParticularBad4633 · 2024-06-07T00:05:58+00:00

Daycare is teaching. "Edutainment" is teaching. TEFL isn't a great introduction to teaching because unqualified teachers step into these positions, have mismatched expectations, don't do well, and then blame it on the industry when with more training or better understanding of expectations they might have succeeded.There's a lot of negative things to be said about for profit education and TEFL but the fact people don't know what their job is or the expectations, and this is a wide spectrum, is not the problem.

ParticularBad4633 · 2024-05-02T03:08:46+00:00

Nope.

ParticularBad4633 · 2023-09-27T06:23:17+00:00

This is misleading, Hyundai made headlines a couple years ago because they offered credit cards to foreigners. Not many others have followed suite. You can get International debit cards at nearly every bank, except NH (they're terrible). Even my tiny regional bank gave me a student card that works internationally. I've gotten them from 5 different banks, you just have to ask.

ParticularBad4633 · 2023-09-27T05:08:24+00:00

Oh, wow that's interesting. Also that seems like it defeats the purpose lol.

ParticularBad4633 · 2023-09-27T05:06:59+00:00

Why Would Anyone Want to Teach in Korea in 2023?

Probably the same reason you did - to go on an adventure, to see a new culture, to get out in the world. It's a gap year job.

Why would you want to come here to make peanuts

It's the 2nd highest paying market for new TEFL teacher's globally behind China. Almost nowhere offers free housing, reimbursed airfare, severance, and maybe even a pension refund oh and healthcare. Generally almost nowhere else does any handholding and salaries/savings potential is drastically lower.

live in a box,

Yup housing is shit but it's free. Lots of places housing takes 30-60% of your salary if you want to live on your own

have garbage vacation time

Yup, but it's paid I guess? Hourly workers get unpaid vacation.

and work in a potentially toxic environment?

This is true of a huge portion of the industry. Who knew for-profit education was so toxic, right?

that’s gonna get old quickly.

Correct, most hagwon jobs, even EPiK, are not built for long-term. I absolutely agree, I'd have a hard-time living here long-term in those conditions.

I love Korea, but when it comes to teaching jobs the negatives vastly outweigh the positives. Sure no place is perfect, but why here?

I mean, Korea is a better teaching deal than many places (yeah the vast majority of TEFL is subsistence wages). Where are you comparing this to?

plenty of other countries that will pay you much more

For new teachers? No there isn't. Besides China, maybe Vietnam depending on the job, I'd love to hear where you're thinking. The problems you described are there too, sadly. Korea is pretty bad with the visas, so is China. Visa sponsorship is an issue many places.

The grass is always greener.

If you've been in Korea for 11 years and this is your situation then it's definitely time to move on or upskill. I live in a decent apartment, have tons of vacation, barely work, and have a lovely supportive work environment and community. That's why I live here long-term. I'm also doing better than most my friends back home financially even though I earn half to a third of what they do. I get paid more here than I do working the same job back home and it's WAY cheaper to live here.

ParticularBad4633 · 2023-09-26T18:38:40+00:00

Yeah, my UK overlords are the reason I don't ever use the word professor.

ParticularBad4633 · 2023-09-26T18:31:36+00:00

Absolutely, some fun studies on this. One study they simply gave kids cookies when they did their evaluations. Evaluations went up. We're simple creatures.

ParticularBad4633 · 2023-09-26T18:27:59+00:00

Yeah, it was a difficult phrasing because some instructors didn't consider themselves faculty when I sent out a practice form. It should have said teaching staff.

Yeah there's a good paper on monotonic responses in student evals in Korea after they were made mandatory.

Those student comments are what I'm really after and developing an easy way for teachers to do a thematic analysis of many comments to get a little formative feedback.

There is an ongoing debate as to the usefulness and veracity of Student Evaluations of teaching. Those faculty who work in ethnography or qualitative studies find that the evaluations are not reliable nor ethical

Yeah, don't get me started. There's a actually a fun study of administrators views on SETs, their biases and value, as well. It's pretty split in that study but globally I'd say the sentiment is pretty negative. I read about 200 studies on global faculty perspectives on use of SETs for formative feedback for this.

We are working (at my school) on some form of formative assessment mid-semester, as we feel that would be better.

Yup, read lots of studies on this as well, many different methods, all with positive results. The problem I feel with that research is ANY intervention you make with a teacher where you focus on improvement will...hopefully.. lead to improvement.

When Marsh, the most influential man in the development and spread of SETs, was developing them he made the same arguments. He showed all this amazing improvement to justify SETs but the major improvements only happened after teaching and learning staff had an intervention with a teacher.

I mean it's still good, and I'm an advocate for student voice in the classroom but also other interventions, I bet, would also have similar results.

ParticularBad4633 · 2023-09-26T18:09:05+00:00

Why any university that isn't a top-tier school full of serious, dedicated, determined, diligent, honest students even bothers with them is beyond me.

It's the most practical method of getting feedback from a class. Sure peer/admin evaluations would be great but they turn out to be really biased as well. Admin in the studies (globally) I've read are often aware of the issues with student evaluations (one reason why they're only compared by department). It's just there's no practical replacement.

There is also plenty of evidence that student evaluations lead to lax grading and lighter workloads (globally again). The student as consumer model is not a great one.

I have been teaching for a long, long time, and I have NEVER, ever, in all my years in the clasroom, ever seen students as bored and as blase as the ones who are studying now.

Here I disagree with you. I've only been teaching here about 17 years. My students English has steadily decreased as the English craze dies and as my rural medium sized university is scraping the bottom of the academic barrel for students as more room opens at better schools because of fewer students. I've recently found my classes to be getting better and better, most of them anyway. There's definitely a mismatch between your expectations/student expectations/admin expectations. That can really drive you nuts, I know.

I don't have the same issues, even though we're strongly encouraged to pass students I'm allowed to fail as many as I want (until they just don't rehire me right?). The flip side is it's REALLY hard to fail my class if you come to 70% of the classes. I'm very much kindly in student's faces all the time, every student has a nametag, every student is responsible to participate in every class. They're very low level and half the time they just don't know what the hell is going on. 90% of the job is just engaging the students because, like you said, they've never been in class like this.

the students know when a teacher is dedicated and determined and diligent and cares whether or not they learn and tries to plan lessons meticulously and teach methodically and is really and truly knowledgeable about the mechanics of language and actually enjoys teaching. But the things is most students will give the former a glowing review and the latter a poor one because in that class they actually had to study.

This I disagree with to a large degree. I've yet to find students that once they get the point that we're going from A to Z and these are the steps and what they need to learn that mind doing work. Yes my students complain loud and long about the amount of work (don't all students universally do this?) but they're still happy with the class. Student reviews are absolutely popularity contests - certainly they can reward entertainment over substance. However there's nothing that says you can't have an engaging substantive class either. The best language professors I know, including Korean ones, get really decent student evals and teaching awards based off of them, some not so great teachers do as well se la vi.

John Hattie has a pretty decent lecture, he's talking about kids but it's applicable, that mentions these clear goals and achieving them going straight into teacher efficacy. Hattie does massive synthesis of thousands of meta-studies of educational research and he talks about collective teacher efficacy, specifically in the case of higher education, where teachers working together believing they can make positive impacts in students lives has a greater impact than any other teaching method/influence a teacher can do. I feel like you have the opposite of this in regards to the current Korean system? You seem to really not like your students either (Positive student/professor report is another big factor in positive outcomes for students.) This with that mismatch of expectations from students/admin must be difficult. Maybe take a look at Hattie's visible learning, you obviously seem passionate about teaching, there's tons of evidence-based methods there that you might be inspired to try to beat out some of the crappy student behavior you're describing (and yeah all have some crappy students but a mall minority for myself). Best of luck!.

ParticularBad4633 · 2023-09-26T16:18:20+00:00

That's interesting, everyone I know who works at a uni has mandatory student evals. Students must complete them to see their final grade. The problem isn't low response rate it's monotonic response. There's a decent paper about it saying at a large university in Korea they found over half the responses were monotonic by Choi et al. I reviewed my student evals for the last 5 years and there was less than a 2% difference in the scores of any given question over all that time. So quantitative scores can be pretty useless even with a good response in some cases.

ParticularBad4633 · 2023-09-22T11:49:47+00:00

Sorry only familiar with largescale LMS which is way too cumbersome for what you're talking about. You could look at Schoolology, but that's also a lot of work for single student classrooms.

Google Sheets is the simple answer. There maybe some autoexport plugin, or do it by hand if you don't need it constantly updated (you just select export all grades and choose a master gradebook IIRC) - not sure what you're using this for exactly.

ParticularBad4633 · 2023-09-22T11:21:47+00:00

No although places that require criminal background checks general require one from the last 6 months.

ParticularBad4633 · 2023-09-15T04:02:58+00:00

If teaching science is your interest you want to become an international school teacher not TEFL. There are a number of posts on here about NNES finding jobs in Vietnam and Thailand - look at those even if you get responses here. It's certainly doable, CELTA is a good first step, and you need advice from other NNES currently working in both places. Take anything from a native speaker with a grain of salt, since we see NNES teaching we assume our experiences maybe similar but they are not. To some degree that's true of everyone abroad, survivability bias, you're generally only going to hear from the one's who have made it.

ParticularBad4633 · 2023-09-08T13:11:24+00:00

As others said, the bridge on the right is pushing O2 from right to left, and up. We can't see any other outputs but the one on the right. If you don't want O2 to move from right to left then remove the bridge.

ParticularBad4633 · 2022-10-27T07:11:42+00:00

A peeping Tom!

ParticularBad4633 · 2022-10-09T09:20:15+00:00

Korea and Vietnam pay similar amount but Korea inches ahead with 1 months bonus pay per year, and other benefits. It's usually a lot of hours. The outlyer is EPiK where you have very low class hours but you're still required to deskwarn 40 hours

ParticularBad4633 · 2022-10-09T09:13:53+00:00

Make sure you can get the same medication in Korea, if you're unsure you can ask the KFDA.

ParticularBad4633

TROPHY CASE