Greg of Not Another EFL Blog recently posted an essay on what events led him to live and work in Thailand. Today is the anniversary of an important event in my life’s journey, so if Greg will pardon me for borrowing his idea, I thought it would be a good time to tell my own story.

Five years ago today, October 10, 2001, my life took a dramatic turn. Events were set into motion that brought me to where I am right now. Five years ago today I was fired from my job.

It was my first day back to work after a short vacation. When I entered the office building in downtown Portland where I worked, I found the call center manager and the human resources director sitting in the coffee shop downstairs, which seemed unusual. I had been friends with the manager and I made a joke about how she had resorted to hanging out with the HR guy in my absence. They didn’t laugh.

Losing your job sucks. It sucks anytime, but things were especially uncertain around this time. The American economy was in a deep freeze, and it was extremely difficult to find work. More importantly though, I was no longer interested in doing the kind of work I had been doing. My liberal arts degree wasn’t serving me so well. French majors aren’t so much in demand, especially ones that weren’t that good. With few exceptions, the only jobs I had ever done were customer service related. Nearly all my jobs since college were in call centers, the Mcjobs of the new economy.

For the next nine months I collected unemployment from the state of Oregon, worked temp jobs here and there, watched TV, ate too much, drank my 401k, and generally wondered what the hell I was going to do with my life.

Along the way I hatched numerous plots and schemes, looking for a way out of my funk. For a short time I considered working as a professional French to English translator, until I discovered most people who do that sort of thing are native bilinguals, or at the very least better French speakers than I was. An addiction to late-night re-runs of ER got me thinking about going to nursing school. That fantasy ended when a friend who was an actual nurse asked me whether I’d be able to catheterize an elderly female patient. A passing obsession with baking bread had me considering baking as a vocation. Deciding that more education was the answer, I applied to Oregon State, where I intended to get a second bachelors degree (political science this time) and go on to law school, the idea being fueled by West Wing this time, if I remember correctly. It turned out I was maxed out on my student loans, so there was no way I could get any funding to go back to college. I did however get my acceptance letter after I’d been in Korea for a month already.

In June of 2002 I went to a bridal shower. Yes, you read that right. I went to a bridal shower for my friend Cyndy, the same friend whose wedding I performed the day before I left for Korea later that summer.

At the shower, I asked Christine, one of Cyndy’s roommates, about some other friends of theirs who had recently left for Korea. They were doing fine, she said, having a good time and saving their money. She then suggested that maybe I should think about doing the Korea thing as well. Although teaching in Korea had been suggested to me before, I had never seriously considered. I assumed you had to be a qualified to get a job. Silly me. She assured me it was amazingly easy to get employment in Korea, with all kinds of perks like an apartment, airfare, and bonuses that I have now come to take for granted as part of a standard contract, but which seemed pretty cool at the time. She said if I wanted to know more I should look at a certain website. (If you know anything at all about EFL, then you know which site I’m talking about.)

Even then I didn’t think I was serious about it. It was just a new idea to entertain, like any of the other hundred other career paths I considered. I knew how these things worked. I’d toy with the idea, maybe even get mildly obsessed with it for a time, then eventually lose interest and move on to something else.

Later that night though, as I looked over the ruins of the past several months, and faced the bleak prospects of the months ahead, I reached a mental breaking point. It’s impossible to describe what it’s like to look into the black abyss that is your life and think, “well, anything has got to be better than this.”

Can I just stop here to editorialize for a minute? Many in the EFL community are very sensitive about dispelling the notion that English teachers in Asia are losers who came here as a last resort because they were unable to find work in their own countries. I would totally be sensitive about that too, except that when I came here I was a loser who couldn’t find a job in my own country. English teaching was a last resort for me, at the time, and I’m not ashamed of that. EFL gave me a second chance to do something useful with my life, as I hope you’ll see. Anyway, on with our story…

Around 2am I fired up the computer, typed in the address Christine had given me, and began browsing for jobs. I applied for four jobs I found in the listings, and within a day had received offers for three of them. Few questions were asked. None of them wanted to interview me. The most pressing question on their minds seemed to be, “How soon can you get here?”

I didn’t jump at any of those first offers, but continued to apply for positions for the next few weeks. Then one day a job in the town of Gimcheon that offered a motorcycle as part of the package caught my eye. Though I had never once ridden a motorcycle in my life to that point, the offer seemed just kooky enough to suit my style. I first arrived in Korea on August 12, 2002.

As a teacher that first year, I sucked. I had no idea what I was doing, but gradually, I began to realize the hogwon was also clueless. As far as they were concerned, I was doing a great job. To them, I was fulfilling my main contractual obligations, which seemed to be show up, be foreign (read: white), and speak English. My role as a teacher and they way I’m perceived by my employers and students is an issue I continue to struggle with, even now. Back then though, I just knew that I was dissatisfied. My job was extremely frustrating at times, but I really enjoyed the relationship I was developing with my students, and liked teaching just enough to know that I wanted to be better at it.

It was not romance but economics that led me to take my CELTA course in Bangkok. The course is simply cheaper there than in other places where it is offered. The others in the group may not know this, but I was scared to death for most of the course. Ok so it wasn’t a semester at MIT. It was still one of the most intense things I’d ever done to that point in my life. We had a really good group though. We pulled together and got each other through it. That isn’t to say we were the best CELTA group ever or anything, but I’ve since heard stories of training groups that broke out in fistfights and stuff like that, so I think were did pretty well over all.

Since that time I returned to Korea for another year, then fled to Russia, where at least my training would be appreciated. It was. I’m a much better teacher for having taught in Moscow, but at the end of the contract I finally decided to return to Korea yet again.

Now I’m in a public middle school in Seoul. Some things in my life could be better, but over all it’s going quite well. A lot of other things have happened along the way that have gotten me to this point, but I do believe the fundamental shift that put me on this path happened five years ago today in that coffee shop in Portland.

Labels: EFL teaching, life in Korea, personal history