Teachers teaching overseas… what was your worst experience? and what to expect?

I’m a licensed English teacher from VA who’s been teaching here in S. Korea for a year.

Teaching in Asia can be a great experience as long as you have an open mind, can handle different cultures well, and are flexible. Also, people in East Asia, while fascinated by foreigners, are somewhat xenophobic. You have to get used to people staring at you (particularly children and elderly) everywhere you go. Plus the food is extremely different. If you do not like spicy food or rice, you will have a hard time adjusting to the food here. More times than I can count, every single dish at lunch had a variation of hot pepper mixed into it.

Japanese food is the opposite, it’s pretty mild, but still alot of rice (3 meals a day)

The best way to guarantee you get a decent position is if you work at an international school. They pay VERY well and are extremely well-organized and respected. However, you need at least three years experience teaching at an American/Canadian/Brit public school to be considered for a position.

If you have connections, you can find lucrative work as an English tutor. These jobs involve strange hours and working weekends, but you generally work only 30 hours a week and usually in the evenings after the kids get out of school. The curriculum is usually set for these places so there’s very little lesson planing. In fact, you only need a college degree in anything to get hired. Also, these kinds of schools have a really bad reputation for mismanagement and poor treatment of employees. I know a few people who are working for CDI who seem to like it there. You can find loads of jobs at Dave’s ESL Cafe

http://www.eslcafe.com/jobs/korea/

If you want classroom experience, you can do the EPIK program. This program is run by the Korean government and it’s similar to the JET program in Japan. The EPIK program pays about 2-2.5K a month and provides housing. You teach in Korean public schools either your own classroom or in cooperation with a native Korean Teacher. My friend did EPIK and she liked it.

http://epik.knue.ac.kr/

If you want to do Japan, the best program in all Asia is the JET program. It’s too late to apply for this fall school year (the deadline for the following school year is in Dec), but it’s a great program with a lot of good reviews.

http://www.jetprogramme.org/

Although I’m American, born and bred, my heritage is Korean. Therefore, my experience is somewhat easier than that of my Afro-american or Caucasian colleagues. I did experience similar problems when I was working with schools in Africa. One of the African teachers there asked me if I came from a different tribe in America where all the people had small eyes.

You is not going to get a sure reply, there is not one. Each province has relatively distinctive regulations, plus what the regulation is vs. what occurs could also be distinctive. If you would not have a four 12 months measure (in any field) then plenty of areas will nonetheless rent you you probably have a TEFL or CELTA certificates. These will also be received in as low as a month. You can often get a role someplace with neither, however it often might not be an overly well institution. Also, with the olympics, matters have got extra strict, what humans might break out with even a 12 months in the past, they now not can. And even in view that the olympics, I have heard matters have got much more strict (for illustration, I entered China on a vacationer visa in September and had it changed, now that does not paintings)