My second life
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By Choi Tae-hwan
"What are you going to do now?" This is the question I have been asked many times recently since I submitted my application for my retirement in November last year. Can you guess what I answered whenever I was asked? At first I was at a little loss as I never thought about it. But later, I could say to myself, "I just want to build my new and second life," which means "I am really eager to do what I want to do because my life was tied to my job and so I couldn't do what I wished to do."
The official document that showed I was on the list of teachers for retirement made me feel relieved and pleasant and reminded me of what I have done as a teacher for decades. The trouble I had when I worked for a trading company for three years made me make up my mind to quit that job and start a new job as an English teacher. I couldn't express how happy I was when I started to teach English at a high school as I was crazy about English. I was so excited and happy that I could do whatever I wanted to do with English such as studying grammar, researching teaching methods, and doing extracurricular activities for pop song-based teaching and learning methods with students and a native English teacher.
I had a golden opportunity to work for a public school twelve years ago. I did my best to provide various special English programs such as a pop song contest, an English only zone, a skit performance contest, and a golden bell. What I felt happiest with while I was performing the English programs was when I was stuck at a student training center in the countryside for three days because of heavy snow.
I was shocked when I started to teach middle school students because they were quite different from high school students. I had another golden opportunity to start to teach as a master teacher, which gave me a chance to realize the other side of a coin of teaching and learning in instruction. I was so satisfied with my job as a master teacher for four years as I was lost in researching and providing a variety of innovative teaching models for student-centered classes focusing on their learning rather than teachers' instruction skills such as learner-centered instructions, flipped classrooms, and "Havruta" literally meaning "a partner for asking, answering, talking and debating." What is last but most important to me is to contribute more than 250 essays on my life to English daily newspapers and share them with readers for more than 25 years.
Whenever I hear the question "What do you plan to do now?" not only was I reminded of that I did my best as a teacher in high and middle schools, and as a master teacher for years, but also I repeated to myself, " I want to create a second life where I can learn more Taekwondo than I did 20 years ago; learn how to play guitar; do volunteer work by helping students from poor families learn English; and translating Korean novels into English.
What is more important to me than such future plans is my life of both farming and English works of translation; and writing novels in my countryside house which I moved to six years ago.
As far as my second life is concerned, I hope it will be full of joyful and happy daily moments which will be brought about by my early retirement.
The writer was an English teacher who retired at Jeonnam Middle School in Gwangju.