rudder wrote: ↑November 17th, 2021, 10:02 am
When Americans were surveyed if they'd rather speak in front of an audience or die, they often chose death as their preference. Gee imagine only $1600 USD per month to do something worse than death! And to think most countries pay waaaay less than that!
I looked online and $1600 when I started work in South Korea was $2903 or so in today's dollars. Housing, travel to and from, and insurance was taken care of. I came home, paid off my student loan debts, and bought a car.
A lot of English teachers were making up to $35 an hour teaching extra private courses, too. I did not even mention that. One American English teacher I had met in South Korea worked in Japan for a year and went back to the US and bought a house with his earnings.
But the English school salary plus housing is not that bad if you compare it with being homeless or paying rent out of $1000 a month.
This site says the average studio rents for $1691 in the US
https://www.rent.com/research/national- ... -analysis/ if I skimmed it right. I must live in a below average rent area. It's $2017 for a three bedroom. That comes out to about $672 a month if you share with two roommates. And the pay is around $2,000 a month plus housing and benefits now, not
These jobs, for example, pay around $2000 a month, typically with housing, medical, and some have a pension program.
https://www.eslcafe.com/postajob-detail ... lpagesize=
It's not a bad job for someone single who wants to live overseas. The classroom hours are (or were) 20 to 25 classroom hours a week. If you get a teacher's manual for the book and study carefully and plan it out, the manual gives you a lot of ideas for teaching the class.
When I was there, it was pretty easy to make friends with students, and some of the expats there are looking for expat friends to hang out with. I should say 'foreigner' since that is (or was) the term used there rather than expat.
Some of the jobs in that list are looking for MA TESOL or teaching certificates.
You may be right about $1600, because this job pays around $1692, but seems to have a lower threshold for qualifications:
https://www.eslcafe.com/postajob-detail ... lpagesize=
So let's add even the very low-end $1692 salary to the $672 and you get$ 2364. Times 12 is $28K. At the low end of the normal 2.3 to 2.5 million won pay range, with that housing figure, it would be the equivalent of $31404 a year. That's not great, but it beats being homeless, and it beats $1000 a month. It brings a single man to a point where he can save money. Private lessons could double or triple earnings, too. And it is quite an experience. To get a better idea, you have to figure in South Korean tax rates. I think it would be 15% of taxable income, but with on exemption, and I do not know that worked. I think they cut a little out of my check.
I just read online they usually take 3 to 5% out of a teacher's check. This is a page on some of the prices of food there that appears to be from last year.
https://www.globalprice.info/en/?p=sout ... s-in-korea
If you are comparing no job or comparing $1000 a month versus working in South Korea as an English teacher, you end up with more as the English teacher without the side income for private classes.
Americans can also exempt up to some amount around $90K of overseas earned income on their US taxes. But if Biden is doling out the cash or there is some other benefit at that income range, exempting taxes paid to South Korea is another choice that might not exempt one from getting tax refunds back.
When I was last considering international job possibilities, I would run a spreadsheet comparing job and cost of living scenarios to the US, subtracting out housing costs and taxes at each location.
ESL money was okay for me until I got to the point where I had two of my kids kids that I wanted to give an English-language education and one of them had started preschool. I went back to grad school at that point, for a number of reasons.
The money is fine for a single person.. It's also probably a lot less depressing than camping out in a motel in a foreign country not meeting people for the 'happier abroad' experience. It is not hard to make friends with the students. A lot of the students who study English like to know what it is like in a foreign country, to practice their English. There might be a pretty girl in the class who likes her teacher. (By girl, I am thinking of college students. Some might actually still be teens, which is Tsar's thing.) If not, it is (or was) their culture to match people up on blind dates. It isn't for everyone. One would have to be adventurous and flexible to live abroad, be professional, and reasonably articulate.
Standing in front of a classroom is unnerving. I had almost forgotten about that. I had a part-time job where I had to make presentations. I could feel my heartbeat and my throat closing up practicing my presentation in front of five or so co-workers, and gradually got over the stage fright. I had just a little left when I started in the classroom.
Since then, I have spoken in front of as many as 500 or so people, present in the room, without feeling that feeling. I do not feel stage fright when I teach classes nowadays. That can be scary for some people, but it can diminish if you do it often.
The split schedule was tough, especially during jet lag recovery. But there is plenty of time during the day for a teacher to do something productive like do an online business or teach English to someone, or learn computer programming, learn Korean, date a college student, etc. If Tsar can get his head on right about girls, his desires, his motivation, etc., this kind of job might push him into a situation where he could easily have a bit of a social life.
There is also something about status, standing up in front of the class and teaching people, especially in a teacher-honoring culture, that might give him a little status in some girl's eyes over there, maybe a nice sweet virgin girl, legal, but on the young side. I am not sure how likely it is for a Korean girls parents to be down with her marrying a foreigner, but a number of English teachers...and soldiers... over there have married Koreans.