REPORTED!
(Am I doing it right?)
I can understand this for something that is not language teaching, but, admittedly based only on my experience with TEFL, it seems hard to believe that people without teacher trainer qualifications would be hired for language teaching. As mentioned by RightWrong, to get a job in a decent language school teaching ESL, you should have a CELTA at least. Universities in England won’t usually touch you unless you have a CELTA and years of experience - preferably a DELTA or Trinity Dip as well. (Unless you get lucky like I was and happen to be in the right place at the right time and have your CELTA course leader vouch for you.)
If this is not the case in US universities, then I very much stand corrected.
I thought about this, but it is kind of on topic and relevant (especially since they could not have contacted Supertanker via PM).
It’s on topic and relevant, but “where do your kids go to school?” is a spooky question from a complete stranger. Makes sense in context, but…
Yes, there is that.
Lum, you can teach yourself Hangul in an hour or two tops. It’s without question the simplest writing system in the world - I learnt it before taking a trip there earlier this year. I might not really know any words beyond “kimchi” and “soju”, but it made my life easier when reading signs/menus etc.
The romanisation of Korean is one of the most confusing things you’ll come across, so I highly recommend making mastery of Hangul the first thing you do.
Off topic from learning Korean, but at least in most traditional academic fields that I’m familiar with, there’s very little formal “teacher training” in grad school and hiring at most colleges and universities, while often taking into account your experience teaching, rarely if ever looks into or requires any such formal teacher training. When I was getting my doctorate I had a grand total of one course on pedagogy, and it was hardly “teacher training,” but more a survey of philosophies of learning and a history of the university model in general. Most of my colleagues also had similar experiences–they were taught jack all about actually teaching, as when you get a Ph.D. in the humanities (at least when I got mine) it is assumed that you’re going to research and stuff like that, and that teaching will just somehow “happen” and you’ll be good at it based on your expertise. That might be changing now, but I haven’t seen much evidence of it yet.
My experience with language courses in graduate and undergraduate programs echoes this–the instructors were generally Ph.D.s in the language, and they had about as much teaching training as any other Ph.D. The TAs were often native speakers who may or may not have been working on doctorates in the language they were teaching. But in any case, no one I had for Russian or Arabic or German had any training as a teacher per se.
Anecdote, mostly, I know, but I’m just saying that AFAIK universities and colleges don’t necessarily look for any evidence you can actually teach when hiring full-time faculty. Ironically, they’re much more likely to look for such evidence in adjuncts. Your best bet might well be to get a class from a talented adjunct!