Restoblog

You might laugh, but the first time I went overseas to teach ESL the internet wasn’t very popular. In those days you found an ESL teaching job in the newspaper, usually an ad put there by a stateside recruiter hiring for multiple schools. If he didn’t have a job that suited you, you had no job.

Usually, you just took whatever he had.

Since then, of course, the internet has become the place to go for ESL job hunting. Now you have a wealth of choice.

Maybe too much. It’s hard to tell who to trust when you’re on the other side of the earth and can’t see their face. Sorting through it all, choosing a job, and packing up to move to a new country requires a leap of faith that may or may not work out. I get a lot of them, or their parents, asking me “what it’s like over there” and “is this job any good?”

And the ESL job listing sites that exists, exist to serve their clients, the schools looking for teachers. I can’t blame them. The schools are paying the bills.

But the whole idea behind Restohof is to turn that on its head. It’s an ESL job site that exists to serve the teachers and the job hunters, the uni students fresh out of school, looking to go overseas and who don’t want to get fleeced.

It’s the rate my rack of the ESL industry, but it’s also a community building tool. At the simplest level, if a job looks good, you click the + symbol and give it a “GoAhead” for the next surfer. If it looks rotten, you click the + and give it a “Grudge”

But it’s not as democratic as one vote per person, and your account means something besides your username and avatar. The longer you have been a member, the more weight your vote has. The more you vote, the more weight your votes have. This formula is constantly being tweaked, depending on how the site is used.

The idea is that senior, experienced members serve as the wizened veterans that they are, and that new users trying to sway the system have less pull.

As for the meaning of the name Restohof, when I was in Korea, many bars that served food described themselves as a “restohof.” I always thought this was a great word, a mashup of the French word “resto” (restaurant) and of the German word “hof” (literally “yard” or “courtyard,” but used by Koreans as shorthand for “beer-drinking place”).

In the end you have a word made up of French and German that looks like English, but is totally and distinctly Korean, foreign, and new.

Struck me as an apt metaphor.