Why teachers go to Korea

By Lyman McLallen

For several years, he taught English composition at the two-year colleges in the city where he lived in Tennessee and in the surrounding towns in Mississippi and Arkansas.

The community or “junior” colleges as they used to be called were glad to hire him and others who had mostly studied at the local universities and were willing to teach two or three courses a semester for modest pay but no benefits. Because the work was only part-time, he worked at four different institutions within driving distance of each other so he could make enough to live.

The community colleges hired a lot of teachers as “adjunct instructors” which was a fancied-up way of saying they weren’t on the regular faculty. In fact, most of the teachers at those schools were part-timers.

The community colleges didn’t have to pay for insurance or other benefits for the part-timers. And though the part-timers should have known better, many of them still hoped the day would come when they could hire on as regular members of the faculty at one of those schools.

But if they would have looked around, they would have known this was never going to happen. Community colleges all over America and even the small private colleges and big state universities relied on part-time teachers for much of their teaching, especially for the freshman and sophomore classes that were often packed with as many as 40 or 50 students each. Hiring adjuncts for the bulk of the teaching drastically cut down on expenses.

As for him, he kept teaching at the community colleges despite the modest pay because he enjoyed helping the students who took the classes he taught learn how to write readable sentences.

He thought the students should have been taught how to write in high school but few of them who came to his classes could write at all. He hadn’t learned how to write in high school and when he went to college he flunked freshman English twice and would have flunked it again except that he was lucky enough to wander into the classroom of a teacher who wrote and published magazine articles and who was patient with him and helped him figure out how he could write a readable sentence.

He remembered how amazed he was when he saw that other people could read his sentences and understand them and maybe even delight in reading them (or so he imagined). He wanted the students in his classes to be amazed in the same way, so he worked at helping them learn how they too could write readable sentences.

But he didn’t like all the driving he had to do to get from college to college. He ended up spending a lot of his pay ― more than he wanted to ― for gasoline, oil changes, new tires and repairs to keep his old car running. He figured he spent as much time in his car as he did in the classroom, time he wasn’t being paid for. But if he wanted to teach at the community colleges, the driving was part of the job.

Most of the students at the community colleges came from the city or from the small towns and farming communities in the region. They came from working families, and they also worked, mostly at manual labor jobs to pay for their schooling and keep themselves together.

Many of them were the first in their families to attend college, even though it was only community college. Most of them had little or no idea what to expect in the classes they signed up for, but they believed going to college would help them get better jobs, and this is where they started, in his classroom where he was trying to teach them how to write.

Many of the students worked at FedEx at the airport on the “sort” that took place every night. Hundreds of planes loaded with packages flew into the airport from all over the nation. Young people who went to school by day worked at night unloading, sorting and then loading the packages onto other airplanes. After the sort was finished before the sun came up, the planes would fly the sorted and reloaded packages to other parts of the country and deliver them later that day.

Many of the young men and women came to class in the morning sweaty and tired, still wearing their dark purple and bright orange work uniforms because they came directly to class from their jobs at the hub.

When he was an undergrad, his life was one of ease compared to theirs because he didn’t have to work. But he was making up for it now.

Teaching more than 30 hours a week at four community colleges and driving another 20 hours going from college to college was surely wearing him out but he didn’t know what else he could do. He didn’t figure he was much good for doing anything but teaching. He didn’t even know what he had to do to get a job doing something else. He liked being a teacher, he just wished it was stable and paid a little more.

For a long time, he’d noticed the ads for educated and experienced teachers who were native speakers of English and willing to work in Korea at universities there. He’d never given much thought to the ads before but lately they started catching his eye.

The ads promised decent money and good benefits on renewable one-year contracts. Looking over the ads, he saw he qualified for the teaching jobs. He even had an advanced degree which, the ads stated, paid more than the base contracts paid. It sounded a lot better than the rut he felt he was stuck in, so he decided he’d try his luck going to Korea.

McLallen taught at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and Korea University. He works as a copy editor at The Korea Times.