After a rather long hiatus, I'm back with an update on my latest adventure: South Korea. As those of you who looked at my tumblr blog from my time in the Middle East know, I went back and forth with this decision for quite a while. Originally, I had been planning on coming to South Korea last August...and then it was this past February...and now here it is April, and I am (finally) here. I really needed to think about why I was planning to go to South Korea and if it was the right thing for me to be doing at this point. One of the biggest dilemmas for me was intellectual: do I really believe that I am qualified to, and should be, teaching English in South Korea? Not exactly. I am in no way qualified to teach in the United States, so what makes my teaching in a foreign country not only permissible, but dare I say desired? I have no interest in being a teacher- I never have. Kids drive me nuts. Don't get me wrong, I have strong opinions regarding the education system in the United States, and a tendency to read about it for pleasure (I watch movies like The Lottery for fun, and read education blogs, and articles in my free time) which, I blame on my Mama and her inability to separate work and home. (Anecdotes about little kids being naughty, sneaky, inquisitive, compassionate, and downright hilarious paired with equal parts ranting and bafflement at the absurdity of education policy comprises the majority of dinner table talk at my house.)
That said, as much as kids drive me nuts, I love them. The most fulfilling job that I have ever had was taking middle and high school girls backpacking for the first time. And while I am perhaps not as outwardly passionate about the English language as I am about backpacking, I am passionate about the value of a second language, so having the opportunity to help kids become fluent in English while at the same time learning about Korea from them is pretty hard to pass up. And while I think that the ideal way of learning a language is finding yourself entirely immersed in it through living somewhere that it is spoken, short of that, the next best thing in a classroom setting is hearing it from a native speaker and being forced to use it to communicate and converse with them. Had my high school Spanish teacher been a native speaker, not only would she might actually have taught us something, but she certainly wouldn't have taught us that ello was the word for he/him. (It's el...not ello). I could go into much greater depth with my pondering about the meaning of my being here, but I suppose when it comes down to it the short of it is that I'm here, I will be here for at least the next year, and qualified or not I'm going to spend hours of my day teaching Korean students English. And so it begins- my next great adventure.
That said, as much as kids drive me nuts, I love them. The most fulfilling job that I have ever had was taking middle and high school girls backpacking for the first time. And while I am perhaps not as outwardly passionate about the English language as I am about backpacking, I am passionate about the value of a second language, so having the opportunity to help kids become fluent in English while at the same time learning about Korea from them is pretty hard to pass up. And while I think that the ideal way of learning a language is finding yourself entirely immersed in it through living somewhere that it is spoken, short of that, the next best thing in a classroom setting is hearing it from a native speaker and being forced to use it to communicate and converse with them. Had my high school Spanish teacher been a native speaker, not only would she might actually have taught us something, but she certainly wouldn't have taught us that ello was the word for he/him. (It's el...not ello). I could go into much greater depth with my pondering about the meaning of my being here, but I suppose when it comes down to it the short of it is that I'm here, I will be here for at least the next year, and qualified or not I'm going to spend hours of my day teaching Korean students English. And so it begins- my next great adventure.
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