Life at a Korean law firm, or at least my journey to it (part 2)
By Jacco Zwetsloot
I’d touched down at Kimpo Airport on a balmy Saturday evening. The following Monday, after some confused phone calls, a needless trip back to the airport, followed by an emotionally draining visit to Seoul Custom’s House to retrieve a suitcase I’d sent ahead, and an excruciatingly long but well air-conditioned drive southwards in a mini-van arranged just for me, I made it to Cheongju, where our 10-day orientation program had already begun without me.
There we received introductory lectures on Korean history, language and culture, and did some tourism, but learned very little about what we were actually expected to do or where we would live in the city or county where we were to work for the next year.
KORETTA was only in its second year in 1996, and there still wasn’t much in the way of “detailed programmatic specificity,” to quote Kevin Rudd. It was up to each local Office of Education and co-teacher to decide what to do with us.
I ended up in the newly urbanized city of Paju, in the northwest of Gyeonggi-do. My New York housemate Amos and I were the only two native English-speaking teachers in the area. The Paju Office of Education sent us for two months at a time to schools to assist local English teachers ― Amos at high schools and I at middle schools.
In the mornings we taught classes of about 40 young students each, and in the afternoons we would meet a class of teachers from various schools, and either discuss and develop teaching techniques, or work on their English.
There was already an established curriculum through which each English class had to work in a school year, but this did not make allowances for much deviation in the form of native speaker assistant teachers. Large class sizes in small classrooms were not conducive to communicative activities.
Most students had never seen a non-Korean person in real life. Some teachers were not always comfortable having their English abilities laid open to comparison, and felt it best to leave the room shortly after the lesson began, while others saw the best use of a native speaker teacher was as a kind of living cassette recorder, to read aloud the text for each lesson.
It would be fair to say that this all led to a less than optimal learning experience.
Amos and I shared an apartment in a place then spelled Kumchon, immortalized almost 12 years later in the viral song “Kickin’ it in Geumchon.”
In mid-1996, we were the only two visible foreigners, with limited knowledge of Korean language or cuisine, no internet, and nobody to talk to or eat with but each other, so we made the best of it ― until we stopped speaking. At age 23, a fresh graduate and only child, I must have been quite annoying (perhaps little has changed).
Amos, 61, was set in his ways, and wasn’t afraid to let me know about it. We quickly discovered that we had very little in common, apart from a belief that we were both in the right in any matters of dispute.
To avoid conflict, I spent a lot of time either in my own room, or outside the house, studying Korean, eating mediocre hamburgers or still unfamiliar Korean cuisine, and watching movies. It wasn’t a happy time, and every day I crossed off the dates on my calendar, counting down to the expiration of my contract, when I could return home or move on elsewhere.
In my next blog post, I will reveal how I came to be tear-gassed on my 23rd birthday, during what was arguably Korea’s last great summer student riot season.
Jacco Zwetsloot works for HMP Law as Director of Business Innovation
The thoughts expressed in this column do not necessary reflect those of HMP Law