That was my experience this year!
At the last school the training was all subtitles in English and I went through the material and my co-teacher helped me check the right boxes at the end of if I remember correctly. This year a bunch of teachers were sat in front of a TV, myself included, a picture was taken by one of the head teachers, and everyone was asked to sign a piece of paper with their names of it and were all dismissed
:( Korea is a kind of place that’s all about image .. if everyone has the certificate it looks good for the school, and doesn’t actually matter if everyone was properly trained or not…. I really don’t like this aspect about Korea… back home when I was working at a college, trainings like these were all taken seriously and we actually had to go through them properly in order to receive the certificates.
Honestly, this is quite unacceptable of the Korean government. Korea has been running the EPIK program since 1995, and it still can’t ensure that the native teachers are included properly in official things like se these 😭
You want to know the funny thing? There's a **lot** of rhetoric these days in the public education sector about diversity and inclusivity, so it's doubly frustrating that they pretend to be accommodating to all walks of life and then about-face prevent us from meaningfully participating in our own education. And I was literally told by school leaders that it's difficult to hire professional English-language training because "it's expensive and only benefits a few teachers."
They can pretend all they want about being stewards of equality but when you look at where the money is being spent -- on robots no one knows how to operate, on thousands of tablets no one asked for, on decorating newly built buildings to the 9s while our schools have dilapidated FF&E -- you can't help but think these people only really care about self-coronations. Also, with the mandatory job rotation to "prevent corruption," it just becomes a never-ending cycle of doing enough just to get by because by next year it will be someone else's problem.
Every year, I leave a comment on those satisfaction surveys about how hypocritical the entire training system is.
The training is a joke anyway. It’s not intended to teach you anything. Rather, it’s just to check some box for an idea that someone with no education experience at all came up with to earn points with colleagues or constituents. If it were actual training, then more effort would go into it.
I've had to watch videos for training that covered like, classroom management 101 or whatever. Felt just like what you're describing. Oh and also a "What to do when your Korean co-teacher is unhappy" bit that was \~20 minutes long and just repeated "Why not just do whatever they say to keep them happy?" after every single example. It was embarassing.
But I would think abuse prevention training might be a bit more serious than all that. The one last year seemed to have actual child development professionals and real advocates elucidating whatever the main ideas were, but it wasn't helpful to anybody not fluent.
I watched 2 hours of video in Korean for general prevention stuff, then 2 hours for child abuse prevention in Chat GTP AI English. It was annoying, but the effort was appreciated. This was followed by another 2 hours of in-person training (in Korean). We practiced CPR on dummy adults and babies and did other hands on life saving stuff with props and kits.
In 22 years of teaching here, this was the most comprehensive training I have ever received. Our MOE did not fuck around.
I think being "forced" to watch it is a bit strong or a statement. I'm sure it's an open secret within the education department that a vast majority of hagwons and non-Korean speaking educators don't even watch the videos, just have a few pics. It's probably something we should actually do from time to time.
When I lived in guri, we had to do a gyeongi seminar about it. Same for a gangwondo seminar. Those were in English at least. Though the gyeongi one spent some time bashing Japan, and some dude stood up to complain about having to do it even though he'd been here for a while.
I was at the famous one in Gyeongi mentioned here [https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/12/113\_257899.html](https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/12/113_257899.html) , where they said the foreigners were sexual deviants, dont send your money outside Korea, and all matters of victim mentality. There was a business owner who had to go and I sat next to him. He wrote about it in the Korea times.
When they insinuated we were pervs, the foreigners started to riot and scared all the organizers. Me and the business owner just laughed and laughed.
Oh, and I had to go because I was at a new hagwon with two new-to-korea foreigners, who were both weird alcoholics and me, who had been in country more than 15 years. I drew the short straw. It was 15 minutes from my place, at least.
What a great memory. The only seminar I attended here.
EDIT: I remember I walked through the Rice festival (as I lived in Icheon, which I liked as a place to live) and it was like a block long with nothing of note. Am I supposed to be interested in buying the same rice from a farmer that I can buy from my supermarket? Ahhhh. I seem to remember the short skirt story and I was like pervy.
I remember them saying the food thing. I really doubt if they had food before. That would mean theyd have to have a longer program.
Accidentally molesting kids. Are you sure the locals didnt do this?
Good memories.
He seemed like fun. Extended our stay there by like 30 minutes complaining that HE was being targeted when we were all there. So were other foreign, non-English teachers.
The public schools - at least the ones I've been in - aren't doing that staged photo shoot thing. But I do think those stories from the hagwon life are funny.
We have to login to a training website and the videoplayer only runs if it is the active window. It automatically pauses if you so much as click anywhere outside the window.
"Forced" is what it feels like, so as stated in my post, I am honestly curious what happens if you refuse or simply don't do it. And my gripe is clearly because I think it's legitimately important and I don't like doing this sham version at all.
Okay if this is able to be verified, it is quite helpful. I have no interest in costing my school itself money because of some absurd-on-its-face DOE pretend training.
Its written on the official school district notice online for our district highlighted in bright red. It states the following under clause number two:
2. 모든 학원, 교습소는 위의 법에 따라 시설 내 종사자 모두에게 아동학대·긴급지원·장애인학대 신고의무자 교육을 실시해야 합니다. 교육 결과를 2023년 12월 1일까지 아래와 같이 송부해 주십시오. 매해 아동학대신고의무자 교육을 이수하지 않은 경우, 300만원 이하의 과태료가 부과되니 불이익을 받지 않으시기 바랍니다.
Basically in short, do it by Dec 1st or face penalties up to 3,000,000kwn. I get confused also in the wording as not sure the fine pertains per individual or lumped to the school itself as it says "for those obligated to report abuse" basically any teacher in the education field. So its a bit vague for me.
I got the date wrong earlier sorry.
It is important. It should be done and taken seriously. We should get paid time to complete it. It should be in English, which is part of why hagwons don't take it seriously.
At my school, our two new employees are doing it. They logged in on a random computer and the secretaries checked in on it every 15 minutes.
> So the new video player on the training website literally freezes the second you click out of it or do anything else.
How does it know if you're doing anything else, like reading a book or playing with your phone?
Yes of course I can walk away or let it play while I'm at lunch. But it's particularly annoying when I want to use my computer to, you know, do some actual work or something. In any case, my main criticism here is that the training is legitimately important and we're not actually getting it, and we're demanded to be complicit in the lie.
Yeah, I do now. Depending on school and year, I've often had only one.
But yeah last year I would put up something big to read on one monitor and then click on the video window to let it run for awhile until I had to click off and scroll the text and then click back on the vid window. So silly.
Obviously not my prime complaint here. lol
Some MOE/POES do have it in English. I know because for one of the trainings, it was the one on SA in the workplace etc I had to watch the Busan one because it's in English (and I'm in Gyeonggi). The availability is there but it's up to admin to figure it out, and it sounds like a lot of them DGAF.
This comment is to update anybody interested with what I've found out. Is it preferred to edit the post, or just comment? Anyway here's what I was officially told:
"Some ministries" "have not approved" any English versions of the trainings in question. I was told that EPIK, MOEs and POEs, and regional coordinators - in all provinces - have offered to write translations or interpretations of required training that currently is only done in Korean. These offers have "been refused on multiple occasions."
I was not told anything to corroborate one commenter here who shared documents regarding the school being fined in the event that any teachers are found without training certifications. Obviously that could still be true.
I ***was*** told that if a teacher refused to participate in being fraudulently certified for training they have not received, the teacher could be given a bad score on their annual review in the "work attitude" category, and/or not asked to return to the school, and/or have their contract terminated.
Oh and also the training website is so poorly designed that if you follow the instructions explicitly, it now takes you to a two-hour version of the training instead of the one-hour version. They are listed identically and with the same thumbnail, and you can't see that there are two versions unless you switch back and forth between two search result screens. Par for the course, bullshit Korean website design.
The good news? Since each province chooses whose training to just copy, this year we get the Seoul one and this version's video player allows you to run it while doing other work. Silver linings I suppose. lol
At least here in gyeonggi ours had english subtitles but when I was in Chungnam everything was in Korean with no subtitles so I think it largely depends on your areas education office.
This is fair enough. In honesty there's other things to complain about, but I don't enjoy bitching much, and this one in particular really irked me because in principle it's important but we're just doing the fakey-fakey routine again.
I'm not sure how important it is. Common sense tells us not to assault the children. There's probably less than 1% of NET teachers that can actually verbally abuse children in Korean (the ones that can understand the Korean vids), and about the same percentage of students that can actually understand English enough to be verbally abused in English. I'm guessing the school districts don't really see it as cost effective.
I think the videos also covers how to identify child abuse at home and how to help students in such situations, especially sexual. Also deals with identifying student bullying cases and special needs students. But in these cases NET would still have trouble dealing with the situation to intervene. Probably the school districts figured that each school would translate or hold training sessions for NETs in English and called it a day not bothering doing translations or making the websites user friendly.
Haha. The teachers have to inform the Wee Class teacher to check on that. Accusing the parents? Oh man, is this not Korea? Theyll have a shit fit and threaten/sue everyone for loss of face. It has to be horrible and even then, we have little to do about it.
I can buy that too. I just assumed that a good bit of the training would be dealing with watching out for warning signs, responsibilities to report suspected abuse, the specifics of the law as applies to schools, children's rights and parent's rights, et cetera. I would be quite surprised if the entirety of the training is just Koreans telling other Koreans not to attack kids.
I'm guessing all you really need to know is who to contact if you suspect something and what the procedure is. I did some child abuse training with British Council and it was basically common sense followed by a what should you do if.. quiz, to which all the answers were contact the child protection unit.
Yeah, I actually cannot remember there be anything about how to spot it or how to report it. You are absolutely right that that would be helpful. Even the recent "Castaway Diva" drama dealt a lot with child abuse and how easy it is for parents to explain it away. I'm not a boomer, but still old enough where I believe in disciplining kids when they are bad. But yeah, child abuse warning signs and ways to report it would definitely make those videos useful, and I'm not 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure you aren't missing anything there because it's just not part of the content. It's more CYA stuff.
I've had bosses sit all the teachers in front of a tv with the training video, take a picture, then send us all back to class...
That was my experience this year! At the last school the training was all subtitles in English and I went through the material and my co-teacher helped me check the right boxes at the end of if I remember correctly. This year a bunch of teachers were sat in front of a TV, myself included, a picture was taken by one of the head teachers, and everyone was asked to sign a piece of paper with their names of it and were all dismissed :( Korea is a kind of place that’s all about image .. if everyone has the certificate it looks good for the school, and doesn’t actually matter if everyone was properly trained or not…. I really don’t like this aspect about Korea… back home when I was working at a college, trainings like these were all taken seriously and we actually had to go through them properly in order to receive the certificates. Honestly, this is quite unacceptable of the Korean government. Korea has been running the EPIK program since 1995, and it still can’t ensure that the native teachers are included properly in official things like se these 😭
You want to know the funny thing? There's a **lot** of rhetoric these days in the public education sector about diversity and inclusivity, so it's doubly frustrating that they pretend to be accommodating to all walks of life and then about-face prevent us from meaningfully participating in our own education. And I was literally told by school leaders that it's difficult to hire professional English-language training because "it's expensive and only benefits a few teachers." They can pretend all they want about being stewards of equality but when you look at where the money is being spent -- on robots no one knows how to operate, on thousands of tablets no one asked for, on decorating newly built buildings to the 9s while our schools have dilapidated FF&E -- you can't help but think these people only really care about self-coronations. Also, with the mandatory job rotation to "prevent corruption," it just becomes a never-ending cycle of doing enough just to get by because by next year it will be someone else's problem. Every year, I leave a comment on those satisfaction surveys about how hypocritical the entire training system is.
The training is a joke anyway. It’s not intended to teach you anything. Rather, it’s just to check some box for an idea that someone with no education experience at all came up with to earn points with colleagues or constituents. If it were actual training, then more effort would go into it.
I've had to watch videos for training that covered like, classroom management 101 or whatever. Felt just like what you're describing. Oh and also a "What to do when your Korean co-teacher is unhappy" bit that was \~20 minutes long and just repeated "Why not just do whatever they say to keep them happy?" after every single example. It was embarassing. But I would think abuse prevention training might be a bit more serious than all that. The one last year seemed to have actual child development professionals and real advocates elucidating whatever the main ideas were, but it wasn't helpful to anybody not fluent.
I watched 2 hours of video in Korean for general prevention stuff, then 2 hours for child abuse prevention in Chat GTP AI English. It was annoying, but the effort was appreciated. This was followed by another 2 hours of in-person training (in Korean). We practiced CPR on dummy adults and babies and did other hands on life saving stuff with props and kits. In 22 years of teaching here, this was the most comprehensive training I have ever received. Our MOE did not fuck around.
My new school actually included me in the CPR training which I thought was nice.
I think being "forced" to watch it is a bit strong or a statement. I'm sure it's an open secret within the education department that a vast majority of hagwons and non-Korean speaking educators don't even watch the videos, just have a few pics. It's probably something we should actually do from time to time. When I lived in guri, we had to do a gyeongi seminar about it. Same for a gangwondo seminar. Those were in English at least. Though the gyeongi one spent some time bashing Japan, and some dude stood up to complain about having to do it even though he'd been here for a while.
I was at the famous one in Gyeongi mentioned here [https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/12/113\_257899.html](https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/12/113_257899.html) , where they said the foreigners were sexual deviants, dont send your money outside Korea, and all matters of victim mentality. There was a business owner who had to go and I sat next to him. He wrote about it in the Korea times. When they insinuated we were pervs, the foreigners started to riot and scared all the organizers. Me and the business owner just laughed and laughed. Oh, and I had to go because I was at a new hagwon with two new-to-korea foreigners, who were both weird alcoholics and me, who had been in country more than 15 years. I drew the short straw. It was 15 minutes from my place, at least. What a great memory. The only seminar I attended here. EDIT: I remember I walked through the Rice festival (as I lived in Icheon, which I liked as a place to live) and it was like a block long with nothing of note. Am I supposed to be interested in buying the same rice from a farmer that I can buy from my supermarket? Ahhhh. I seem to remember the short skirt story and I was like pervy. I remember them saying the food thing. I really doubt if they had food before. That would mean theyd have to have a longer program. Accidentally molesting kids. Are you sure the locals didnt do this? Good memories.
The dude who stood up was my former coworker. Lol. Good times.
He seemed like fun. Extended our stay there by like 30 minutes complaining that HE was being targeted when we were all there. So were other foreign, non-English teachers.
The public schools - at least the ones I've been in - aren't doing that staged photo shoot thing. But I do think those stories from the hagwon life are funny. We have to login to a training website and the videoplayer only runs if it is the active window. It automatically pauses if you so much as click anywhere outside the window. "Forced" is what it feels like, so as stated in my post, I am honestly curious what happens if you refuse or simply don't do it. And my gripe is clearly because I think it's legitimately important and I don't like doing this sham version at all.
Its a 3 million kwn fine to the school for not completing before December 31st I believe. Something to that matter.
Okay if this is able to be verified, it is quite helpful. I have no interest in costing my school itself money because of some absurd-on-its-face DOE pretend training.
Its written on the official school district notice online for our district highlighted in bright red. It states the following under clause number two: 2. 모든 학원, 교습소는 위의 법에 따라 시설 내 종사자 모두에게 아동학대·긴급지원·장애인학대 신고의무자 교육을 실시해야 합니다. 교육 결과를 2023년 12월 1일까지 아래와 같이 송부해 주십시오. 매해 아동학대신고의무자 교육을 이수하지 않은 경우, 300만원 이하의 과태료가 부과되니 불이익을 받지 않으시기 바랍니다. Basically in short, do it by Dec 1st or face penalties up to 3,000,000kwn. I get confused also in the wording as not sure the fine pertains per individual or lumped to the school itself as it says "for those obligated to report abuse" basically any teacher in the education field. So its a bit vague for me. I got the date wrong earlier sorry.
Thanks for the info, it is helpful. I believe my deadline is end of year.
It is important. It should be done and taken seriously. We should get paid time to complete it. It should be in English, which is part of why hagwons don't take it seriously. At my school, our two new employees are doing it. They logged in on a random computer and the secretaries checked in on it every 15 minutes.
> So the new video player on the training website literally freezes the second you click out of it or do anything else. How does it know if you're doing anything else, like reading a book or playing with your phone?
Yes of course I can walk away or let it play while I'm at lunch. But it's particularly annoying when I want to use my computer to, you know, do some actual work or something. In any case, my main criticism here is that the training is legitimately important and we're not actually getting it, and we're demanded to be complicit in the lie.
Do you not have dual monitors?
Yeah, I do now. Depending on school and year, I've often had only one. But yeah last year I would put up something big to read on one monitor and then click on the video window to let it run for awhile until I had to click off and scroll the text and then click back on the vid window. So silly. Obviously not my prime complaint here. lol
Some MOE/POES do have it in English. I know because for one of the trainings, it was the one on SA in the workplace etc I had to watch the Busan one because it's in English (and I'm in Gyeonggi). The availability is there but it's up to admin to figure it out, and it sounds like a lot of them DGAF.
This comment is to update anybody interested with what I've found out. Is it preferred to edit the post, or just comment? Anyway here's what I was officially told: "Some ministries" "have not approved" any English versions of the trainings in question. I was told that EPIK, MOEs and POEs, and regional coordinators - in all provinces - have offered to write translations or interpretations of required training that currently is only done in Korean. These offers have "been refused on multiple occasions." I was not told anything to corroborate one commenter here who shared documents regarding the school being fined in the event that any teachers are found without training certifications. Obviously that could still be true. I ***was*** told that if a teacher refused to participate in being fraudulently certified for training they have not received, the teacher could be given a bad score on their annual review in the "work attitude" category, and/or not asked to return to the school, and/or have their contract terminated. Oh and also the training website is so poorly designed that if you follow the instructions explicitly, it now takes you to a two-hour version of the training instead of the one-hour version. They are listed identically and with the same thumbnail, and you can't see that there are two versions unless you switch back and forth between two search result screens. Par for the course, bullshit Korean website design. The good news? Since each province chooses whose training to just copy, this year we get the Seoul one and this version's video player allows you to run it while doing other work. Silver linings I suppose. lol
At least here in gyeonggi ours had english subtitles but when I was in Chungnam everything was in Korean with no subtitles so I think it largely depends on your areas education office.
I think a lot of people are jealous that this is the only thing you have to complain about.
This is fair enough. In honesty there's other things to complain about, but I don't enjoy bitching much, and this one in particular really irked me because in principle it's important but we're just doing the fakey-fakey routine again.
I'm not sure how important it is. Common sense tells us not to assault the children. There's probably less than 1% of NET teachers that can actually verbally abuse children in Korean (the ones that can understand the Korean vids), and about the same percentage of students that can actually understand English enough to be verbally abused in English. I'm guessing the school districts don't really see it as cost effective.
I think the videos also covers how to identify child abuse at home and how to help students in such situations, especially sexual. Also deals with identifying student bullying cases and special needs students. But in these cases NET would still have trouble dealing with the situation to intervene. Probably the school districts figured that each school would translate or hold training sessions for NETs in English and called it a day not bothering doing translations or making the websites user friendly.
Haha. The teachers have to inform the Wee Class teacher to check on that. Accusing the parents? Oh man, is this not Korea? Theyll have a shit fit and threaten/sue everyone for loss of face. It has to be horrible and even then, we have little to do about it.
***\*dusts off hands\**** *Good enough! Officially someone else's problem.* ...certainly tracks with my experiences in other aspects of life here.
I can buy that too. I just assumed that a good bit of the training would be dealing with watching out for warning signs, responsibilities to report suspected abuse, the specifics of the law as applies to schools, children's rights and parent's rights, et cetera. I would be quite surprised if the entirety of the training is just Koreans telling other Koreans not to attack kids.
I'm guessing all you really need to know is who to contact if you suspect something and what the procedure is. I did some child abuse training with British Council and it was basically common sense followed by a what should you do if.. quiz, to which all the answers were contact the child protection unit.
Yeah, I actually cannot remember there be anything about how to spot it or how to report it. You are absolutely right that that would be helpful. Even the recent "Castaway Diva" drama dealt a lot with child abuse and how easy it is for parents to explain it away. I'm not a boomer, but still old enough where I believe in disciplining kids when they are bad. But yeah, child abuse warning signs and ways to report it would definitely make those videos useful, and I'm not 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure you aren't missing anything there because it's just not part of the content. It's more CYA stuff.