History: I started
An American Teaching English in South Korea
(ATESK) around May of 2000. I had a couple of reasons. The initial one was to save time and effort.
Since Margaret had left for Korea in February of 2000, she'd been writing home regularly. I'd been
typing in her handwritten letters and scanning her photos, then emailing them to her friends and
family. I thought that building a webpage would be easier. (Ha!)In 1999 Margaret had gotten unhappy in her job here at home, and she started looking for something better. One night I was working at the computer and she sat down next to me with a newspaper clipping. It said:
Margaret had studied Korean in college (20 years ago) and even had a Korean pen pal for a while. But this was a surprise. Since I was on the computer I ran a search with the keywords "English Teaching Korea." What came back was mostly slick recruiting jabber and not-so-slick personal websites on Geocities and the like. I skipped right over the recruiters, and what I read in the personal websites was not very encouraging. So I tried to talk Margaret out of going. But it was too late. Twenty years worth of interest in Korea kicked in, and she sent the letter and resume. Weeks went by. Just about when I thought it had all blown over, Margaret got a phone call from Mrs. Lee's brother. He lives about an hour from us -- he's the one who had placed the newspaper ad. Margaret met him at a nearby chain restaurant. A few days later she had a phone interview with BLI's director. The phone rang a few more times, fax machines hummed, pens scratched on paper, and it was a done deal. I was still pretty rattled by all the horror stories of broken promises, run-down housing, unheated classrooms, loony directors, and unpaid salaries. But Margaret's intuition told her that BLI would be a good place to work. She was right. I was wrong. So I had a couple more reasons to put up this webpage -- as penance for trying to talk Margaret out of what turned out to be a great experience for both of us, and as a counterbalance for all the negative Korea teaching pages on the web. Why are there so many doom and gloom stories about teaching English in Korea? We think there are three reasons.
So should you teach there? The only way you can decide that is by learning as much as you can about what Korea and ESL teaching are like. We've tried to present both the good and the bad here on ATESK. It's up to you to figure out which way it balances for you. I will tell you this: Margaret says that teaching in Korea is the best job she's ever had. She loves Korea -- she considers it her second home. She has good friends among Koreans. She probably would have stayed if she hadn't had such strong connections to the US (fortunately she says I'm still one of them, even though I did try to talk her out of going to Korea). Margaret and I think that if you have the right kind of attitude, teaching English in Korea might be a job you can enjoy too. So, what kind of attitude do you need?
It's not for everyone, but it might be for you. Who we are: Margaret loves textile arts -- spinning, weaving, and dyeing. She raises sheep and angora rabbits to provide raw materials for her hobby. She has a bachelor's degree in general studies with concentrations in medieval history and old English literature. According to the personnel office at the the large state university where she studied, this degree doesn't qualify her for any job on campus. It does, however, qualify her to teach in Korea. I like to write and tinker with computers. I sing in a symphonic chorus and enjoy medieval music, science fiction classics, and alternative energy (Margaret and I own electric cars, and someday we hope to "go solar"). My degree is in broadcasting, and it does qualify me to work at that university. I'm a music director and assistant program director for their public radio station. Both of us grew up in the 1960s and 70s, so we're just about a full generation older than most people who teach overseas. Margaret was born in West Virginia and raised in Maryland and Ohio. I was born and raised in Ohio and have lived in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Virginia. We both love to travel and like to think of ourselves as citizens of the world, but in all honesty we are very much products of our upbringing. To some extent that affects what we write about here, and how we write it. If you're from Canada, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand or some other English-speaking country, I hope some of this information helps you anyway. We'd like to internationalize this site more, so if you're from one of these lands and you're teaching in Korea (or have in the recent past), we'd love to have you write an article or two for this site. You can even just provide some information if you don't want to write a full article. Interested? Please contact me. Qualifications: I'm probably not the person most qualified to write about Korea and hagwon teaching -- I just like to write. My sources are my visits to Korea, my reading about it, and of course Margaret and other teachers. If you disagree with something I've written, please let me know. Romanization: I'm pretty fast and loose about Romanizing Hangul (that is, writing the approximately equivalent sounds to Korean words in western characters). I more or less use the older McCune-Reischauer system, but tend to make up something which looks about right when I don't have an official M-R Romanization at hand. Neither of us has made much of an effort to learn the new Romanization system that Korea adopted in 2000. Privacy: This site doesn't use cookies or collect any personal information. I use a tracking service, Extreme Tracking. This service logs your IP address and referring page for statistical purposes. I do this mostly to make sure I'm not wasting my time writing all this stuff, that people actually do read it. The IP address and referrer information is available to me for about 24 hours, but I don't really do anything with it other than occasionally tell Margaret, "Hey, we got a couple of visits from New Zealand today." Extreme Tracking also logs other statistical information, such as your browser type and screen resolution. This helps me with site design. Please see Extreme Tracking's privacy policy for more information. Sponsorship: I personally pay all the hosting costs. ATESK does not carry any advertising and never will. It has no commercial relationship with anybody, including recruiters, and never will. If you'd like to make a donation to help pay the hosting costs, please contact me. (Nobody has yet. Sniff.) Copyright: All the original content published in the ATESK web site is protected by copyright. Unless otherwise noted, these pages are ©2000-2003 David Roden. All rights are reserved. Reproduction by any means, including but not limited to electronic and print media, is prohibited without permission. Please contact me for more information. You're welcome to link to these pages for nonprofit, noncommercial, public information purposes. I'll try not to change their location unless I have to, which should help prevent broken links. If you do link to a page, I'd appreciate it if you would also link to the homepage. Technical: I've tried to design ATESK to look good and load quickly. I support the objectives of the Viewable With Any Brower Campaign. ATESK is written so it displays correctly on any HTML 3.2 graphical web browser. I use frames, but provide alternate noframes html. If you despise frames, just navigate from the site map. You don't need Java, Javascript, or plugins for ATESK. If you have a really old browser, it might need a helper application for the JPEG images. All browsers will need the Real Audio player for the audio clips. But even if you skip these, all of ATESK's text content will still be readable. I make sure that even Lynx can read ATESK tolerably. ATESK is currently hosted by Ald.net Services Inc. (Auldhaefen Internet Services). Ald.net uses FreeBSD operating systems and Apache web servers. Our mirror site, English-Korea, will eventually be an independent one dealing more with basic issues and less with Margaret's experiences. It runs on a commercial host, ATL Networks. These pages are maintained with the following software tools:
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