An American Teacher in South Korea

Once upon a time, many years ago, I lived in South Korea and worked as an ESL teacher. For those who don't know, being an English teacher in Korea is one perfect solution for those recent college graduates who have no idea what they want to be when they grow up. I was one such college graduate.

I took my first job in Korea based on an internet ad for a recruiter out of LA. After we negotiated the terms of the contract, I mailed my passport, he mailed me a ticket, I met him at the airport, he handed my passport back to me and I was off to the Land of the Morning Calm, a moniker which has a pitious pathos in light of recent tragic events.

After one year at Yongha Sagae Hakwon or English World Institute, I made the much envied transition to the coveted life as a university lecturer at a university near Seoul. It was everything that I dreamed of! Fifteen teaching hours a week on a beautiful, mountainside campus with 5 MONTHS VACATION! That's right, we worked only two 3 1/2 month semesters per year with the rest of the time spent travelling and working on the next, great American novel, presumably.

It was here that I realized that I love to teach, especially something I know like conversational English....it's so easy to be an automatic authority on a language that you were born to speak. But, there were times that students challenged me to reach outside my own comfort-zone and to describe rules of semantics and syntax that I didn't even have words for. Paul was one such student. (The students all took English names the first week to help me call roll, which was written entirely in Korean Hangul characters.) Paul wanted to be a cartoonist. So, when he asked to do his midterm project on cartooning and when I became the ingratiated subject of the project, here was the result. Paul got an A on the project and in the class.