advice to a first-year expat teacher in Korea

I wrote the following on Reddit to a first-year teacher in Korea who feels he failed after he'd been called "boring" multiple times:

I started off teaching French in an American high school for two years before moving to Korea to teach paying adults at a hagweon. That proved to be much better work in terms of the students (I discovered I was a better fit for students of college age and above), but the administration at my first hagweon was a nightmare. The Korean boss asked me to find pretty students in my class that I could, uh, introduce to him (I never did this). I ended up suing that boss after he tried the typical hagweon tactic of firing me in my eleventh month to prevent me from receiving the severance pay that all teachers were supposed to receive at the end of a twelve-month contract. I won my case, then I stupidly went to teach at two more hagweons, quitting both.

I began to realize that hagweons tend to attract a lot of freaks and losers from the expat community; sure, there are a lot of good eggs, but there are so many bad eggs, quite a few of whom have no idea how to teach and are looking for a quick buck so they can skip over to Thailand or the Philippines for sex tourism. (Again, not all expats, but a lot! And this was pre-pandemic.) The Korean bosses at these places aren't much better, and in the end, they care only about money, which translates to student re-registration to preserve their customer base. And re-registration doesn't happen unless the expat teacher—whether competent or not—is entertaining, a dancing monkey.

A so-called "boring" teacher (i.e., one who's serious and actually cares about education) isn't an asset, and in hagweons, pretty much all teachers are replaceable—just interchangeable cogs in an ever-churning machine. The myth of the serious Korean student and the high value placed on education in Korea was shattered for me thanks to my hagweon experience, and I now wonder why so many American education experts continue to talk up the so-called "Asian system." The Asian system is a joke—all rote memorization, and no culture of discussion or debate. Education is merely about getting a piece of paper on the way to securing a job that provides decent, steady income and lifetime security. People in East Asia basically aspire to become drones. Is that harsh? Am I skipping over the complicated human reality when I say all this? Yeah, a bit. But it's also largely true. And Korean young adults aren't stupid: the term "hell Joseon" has become a current way to describe the drone's life in South Korea. You, as an expat teacher, are simply a quickie roadside attraction as the student barrels his way past test after test to get into a decent high school, then a decent college, then a decent job.

You probably learned a lot about Korean culture during your year of teaching in Korea, and one thing you may have discovered is that, while the Japanese have a reputation for an almost British level of politeness (with exceptions, of course), Koreans are pretty blunt-spoken and often rude. They'll tell you it's because they care, but that's bullshit: they're rude to strangers as well. They won't hesitate to body-shame you if you're fat, and there's still plenty of racial prejudice there, especially if you're black. Times are changing, ever so slowly, but the situation is still hard to swallow for many expats.

I ended up leaving the hagweon system to work in a university (Sookmyung Women's University, my mother's alma mater: I'm ethnically half-Korean) in 2005, and that was like night and day. Maybe it's because I ended up in a unigweon (a university hagweon), but the students appreciated me, I got consistently high teacher ratings every semester (95% and above), and my Korean bosses were reasonable professionals who cared about education. Sure, there were financial concerns even in unigweons, but $$$ wasn't the biggest priority. I taught at three different universities, and while each place had its pitfalls, no university job was as bad as working at a hagweon.

That said, I'm back at a hagweon in Seoul now, but the difference is that I'm no longer teaching: I'm a content creator who works in the hagweon's publishing wing, and I've got a truly decent income as I help create textbooks. One of my projects was a comprehensive grammar course, so I can literally say I've written the book on grammar.

A lot of expats follow something like my trajectory. They start off doing shit work at a hagweon or a public school, then they move up to uni work (where you can be a lot more creative), then they figure out something else to do while staying in Korea. Some of them pick up language skills (a thing I highly recommend; without language skills, much of Korean society will forever remain closed to you), make Korean friends, and even find a Korean spouse, which can be both amazingly fulfilling and amazingly complicated (especially when it comes to paperwork).

So living in Korea can be an adventure. It's all about your attitude, your willingness to learn from past mistakes and to try new things, and your ability to get up after falling down. I've written two books (of no real significance, but writing them was entertaining), learned Korean up to high-intermediate level (Mom was Korean, but she never taught her kids; I picked up more Korean in college than I ever did at home), enhanced my cooking skills, and walked across South Korea four times as of this writing (see one blog here). Korea has endless opportunities for those with ears to hear and eyes to see. Because you're a foreigner (I assume), Korea will also shovel a ton of shit into your mouth, but you either accept that and forge ahead, or you give up and go home.

Are you a boring person? Koreans might casually label someone as boring according to their own scatterbrained, attention-deficit standards. Korean society, these days, is full of multimedia distractions, and even if you catch someone's attention in class, you probably won't hold it for long, and that's not really your fault (unless you truly are boring as shit!). If you feel you need to work on some aspect of your personality in order to appeal to younger kids, you might think about altering your teaching approach and not your personality.

Learn how to hook kids by presenting them with a mystery, a problem, a conundrum—preferably one at their level that they can solve with a bit of effort. Divide kids into teams to create a competitive spirit (keeping in mind that competition can be a two-edged sword; when it's healthy, it's OK, but when it becomes all about winning, it gets toxic). Gamify, gamify, gamify. Kids need time to be free, to scream and run about, but they also respond to purpose, goals, and structure—which games provide. Students appreciate the clarity of well-defined rules so they know how to act (and how not to).

Simply by adding these sorts of motivators to your class, your teaching will become more interesting. Ask, don't tell. Question, don't lecture. The Latin roots of the word educate mean "to draw/lead out" (ex ducere). Education is less about being a dispenser of information and more about evoking what already lies dormant inside the students. Trust me when I tell you this: lecture is the worst form of teaching. That's boring. Lecture encourages passivity, even if you require the kids to take notes or to (heh) "listen actively." Don't lecture. Ask, ask, ask. Interact. Engage in dialogue. Push the kids. And get them to use their bodies to learn things. Have them put stuff together, make them work in groups and interact with each other, give them a task that they'll need to show the results of by the end of class or in the next class. Keep the learning student-centered, not teacher-centered. Task-oriented, somatic, and student-centered—that's the trick. Much better than lecture.

If you're working within a Korean system that doesn't allow you much pedagogical creativity, quietly look around for a place that appreciates innovation—somewhere that you can flex your mental muscles and try out new ideas. As you plan your curricula and teach, treat each of your lessons as a riddle to be solved: how do I get my students to learn today's topics?

And if you've finished your year and decided not to renew at whatever place you were teaching, maybe take a sanity break, do some (possibly illegal) private work, research your next teaching prospects, and plunge back in. Korea's a small country, but it's got a million little nooks and crannies waiting to be explored. Don't be one of those expats who gravitates to the foreigner district (in Seoul, that'd be Itaewon) and sits on his ass, speaking in English to other expats, getting drunk and going nowhere in life. I pity most of those people. They come to Korea and don't bother to learn anything. They're completely incurious about the culture they're in, and I wonder why the hell they're even in Korea. They learn barely enough Korean to fumble through a taxi or cash-register transaction, and it doesn't occur to them that maybe they should try harder. A lot of these expats are English teachers who, theoretically at least, think that their students ought to learn English. Shouldn't the same apply to the teachers themselves? Shouldn't they be learning Korean? After all, if they're in Korea, then Korea is feeding, housing, paying, and sheltering them. The least they could do is show a little interest in (and gratitude toward) the country that's keeping them alive.

Sorry for the rant, but I've been in Korea for nearly nineteen years, and I've seen truckloads of valueless foreigners pass through. If you're planning to stay in Korea for the long haul, I'm begging you: don't become one of the valueless ones. Korea will kick you in the teeth, as you already know, and local racism means you'll never be totally accepted among Koreans no matter how good your language skills get... but the country still has its charms, the Korean friends you make can be wonderful, and in my opinion, at least, the good definitely outweighs the bad, which is why I've been here this long.

Kevin Kim, Think Like a Teacher

Unfortunately, Reddit wouldn't let me post the comment because it exceeded a 10,000-character limit that I didn't know existed. Well, at least I can post my thoughts here.