R-E-S-P-E-C-T

No matter how much Koreans pretend the standards for work are improving for Native English teachers, the truth is that there are very few, if any, checks and balances. Here, you are subject to the system, a system of too much power in the wrong hands. Therefore, rules are bent, broken, and ignored, at will, by Korean schools and Korean co-teachers.

I believe in fairness and respect. It’s not a profound and difficult concept in the 21^st century. I’m very educated. I didn’t go to Korea to be treated like crap. I went to Korea to make money to pay off school loans, learn how to teach well, learn about Korean culture (since I’m half Korean), and I wanted to travel to nearby countries.

I successfully paid off my student loans. I learned virtually nothing about real teaching, even though I had 6 co-teachers (mid-career) working in the same room with me for a year. This is because your co-teachers will put no effort into actually teaching around you and you’ll get no real teacher training in Korea. I learned how to visually stimulate students with power point slides, etc, and keep them occupied in other ways. Did I teach them some English? Yeah, I did. Was I effective? Now, that’s the right question. I was more effective than a Korean teacher, yet felt abysmal considering that I knew I could have been a lot better given the opportunity. I learned how to pretend to be a teacher in Korean theory. I learned how to endure the madness of Korea and all its sleaze.

Korean culture is a joke. It’s old, it’s boring, it’s fake, and very few still want to actually see it. I’d compare it to a hillbilly amusement park; the rides suck, but nobody’s intelligent enough to know better. The museums and temples are the worst I’ve seen/been to. They mostly aren’t real, most were burned down and recreated so they have a oh-so-artificial look to them. Along the same vein, Lotteworld, an indoor amusement park is also a really bad place to go unless you really want to waste your time and money in a virtually roller coaster-less amusement park that’s very much not geared toward adults.

Korea is not a hotspot destination at all. If you go to the travel section of any bookstore you’re lucky if you find a book on Korea among the volumes of larger and more frequently offered books on other destinations. Korean language is almost never offered as a course at universities as well. Korea is being forgotten by the world; it has much to do with Korea’s own attempts to keep anything foreign out for so many years.

Unlike most counties trying to learn English, Korea is one of the very few, if not last, countries that allow people without teaching certificates to babysit er… teach.