The
Association for Teachers of English in Korea has released its guidebook on the internet today. The 350-page book is titled
The English Teacher's Guide to Korea: Living, Working, and Thriving in Korea Sparkling, and is an excellent resource on pretty much everything you'd need to know while living and working here: how to use a Korean-language ATM, how to hire a moving company, what to do if you run afoul of the authorities, how to be effective in the classroom, and how to be successful in the teachers' office, among others topics. I endorsed it on the back cover and will endorse it again here as the best guide I've seen for foreign English teachers in Korea, a compendium of information that you'd normally have to spend hours sifting through
misinformation on the internet and other half-assed guides to get.
It's available online in chapter-by-chapter segments as .pdf files, and will be available in print next Saturday. Definitely take some time to look through it [
update: but unfortunately the links are broken, so you can find the files via Chris's blog]:
Introduction and Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
8 comments:
I have several friends from Hawaii who are planning to go to Korea to teach. I'll have them take a look at it.
Some are Asian-Americans (but not Korean-American). I wonder if the guide adequately addresses their situation. My Internet has been spotty all day, so I haven't had a chance to check.
I would be interested in placing this in my shop for customers to pick up. Can you put me in touch with whoever it is who is distibuting the print version?
I don't see anything official about this on the ATEK site--I wanted to ask them if it was OK to repackage the files in a single ZIP for redistribution via my teaching blog (with links to ATEK and all, of course--it's just that downloading the links one at a time this morning was tedious and also very slow, some kind of connection problem with their website). It should be OK according to the Creative Commons license on the book, but I feel like it'd be nicer to ask. ;) I'm not sure if I should e-mail someone randomly there or wait until they've made an announcement about the book ...
Hey Brian,
Chris in South Korea here - you totally scooped me on this wonderful resource - now it looks like neither of our links are working... Any idea what's up?
Hey Brian,
I took the liberty of uploading the PDF files to a third-party uploading/downloading service. If any of your readers can't access them on ATEK, check out http://chrisinsouthkorea.blogspot.com/2009/03/english-teachers-guide-to-korea.html for all the links :)
ATEK's whole site is down. I suspect it had to do with the site migration. I've emailed and texted our webmaster. When he wakes up he'll likely cry, then do a rain dance and see if we can't get it going again.
Everyone, the book is CC licensed, so you can distribute it at will (non-commercially) as long as you properly attribute the work.
--Tony Hellmann, principal author, The English Teachers Guide to Korea
Thanks for the reassurance, Tony, and for all your hard work. I'm going to post it at talktotheclouds.com shortly.
I actually find this 'guidebook' redundant and copying other people's work. It also smacks of desperate people trying to gain support for an organization already proven to be amatuerish and its founders as unqualified for this kind of work.
There is nothing contained in this book that cannot be found in better sources who are qualified to work in this arena and who do not have a hidden agenda or ulterior motive.
ATEk is NOT needed and not wanted and in this world wide economy this is the wrong org., the wrong people, and the wrong time . One does NOT bite the hand that feeds them and the Koreanpeople have the right to make their own laws despite what ATEk thinks or likes.
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