The Owner...

Guri Wonderland is owned by "Mrs. Lee", she is a pleasant enough woman who tries her best to speak English. For Wonderland teachers she was relatively generous in taking us out for a couple teachers dinners, although this seems to be a fairly common practice so truly, the generosity was "relative".

However, I had a friend who worked at CDI and really absolutely hated her. Hopefully I can get that friend to chime in and really take a gouge at Guri Wonderland and the Mrs. Lee owned hagwon's.

While I wait for that, I stumbled upon a piece from an author at (again) Dave's ESL who was quite negative towards CDI in Guri. The author wrote:

I know there are numerous CDI threads so I'll make this one short. I know some people love working for CDI and some people hate it. They are individual establishments and CDI Guri is on the low end of the spectrum. The owner is a liar and will do whatever it takes to make life miserable for you and save a buck (sound familiar?). To put it in perspective, the school has had 17 teachers fill five teaching positions over the last 9 and a half months. All twelve who have left, have left on bad terms with the owner. I can go into the details of why it is a horrible place to work but the statistics should speak for themselves.

Teaching for CDI is not a bad gig in general. You get paid well (in my eyes), it is easy to teach the material, and the students are genearlly motivated. When you agree to work for them, you must understand if you are hired at a branch or a franchise. Avoid the franchises unless you know about them first. Guri is simply a franchise to avoid.

Again, I'm not writing this for revenge, I just would not want any teachers to endure the difficulties that I have had to endure in dealing with these people.

The last paragraph is something I want to highlight and what I want to be the theme for this blog. While it will indirectly have a revenge hint to it, the fact is, I want my fellow foreign teachers to have positive experiences in Korea. I want them to come home and have nothing but good things to say to their family and friends. I don't want to hear from someone who heard from someone who knows someone about how bad Korea is because of an isolate incident. I want everyone to have a positive experience. And if all the ex-teachers of Korea come forward with our terrible stories, which invariably will detract people from working at these specific schools, possibly there will be a day when these stories become less and less.

That's my dream.