Nowon Campus - Anonymous employee TOPIA Education Employee Review

Typical Korean, antagonistic management style. The director watches all the teachers through CCTV on his monitor. If you do something he doesn't like, such as sit on a desk or even lean against a wall, you will hear about it, but not directly from him of course. The students could be awful sometimes, but I felt sorry for them more than anything - they are ultimately the victims of this broken education system as they have no choice but to attend this horrible, prison-like institute. The curriculum is of horrible quality, outdated, dry, and unrealistic beyond belief in what it asks of the students. The foreign teachers are expected to teach formal debate skills to students who are barely able to string a sentence together. Toxic atmosphere in which all the Korean teachers seem very miserable and backstabbing, except for when they are on the phone with the moms which is when they put on their fake smile and pretend that they love their job. Tiny windowless classrooms with fluorescent lighting that feel like prison cells. Foreign teachers are often overlooked, and seem to be viewed as more of a prop to make the school look more "global," rather than being seen as actual assets. In some ways this is a good thing, because the workload is much lower for foreign teachers since they are expected to be completely incompetent (which is not always inaccurate, unfortunately). However, being viewed as a replaceable object gets pretty old, and dehumanizing over time.