I Teach English at a Hakwon

I teach English at a hakwon.

In Korea, a hakwon is a private academy where students come in the afternoons and evenings to study subjects they are already studying during the day.

 

My students are twelve to fourteen years old.

 

It’s not as glamorous as some of the other places I’ve taught in Korea. Certainly not as glamorous as teaching at Yonsei University’s Foreign Language Institute (FLI), which, for all practical purposes, was a uni-hakwon—a university hakwon. And certainly not as glamorous as teaching business majors from around the world at the SolBridge International School of Business.

 

But in some ways, this job reminds me of my earliest days in Korea.

 

Back then, I also taught at a hakwon—ELS—but the students were adults from all walks of life: office workers, college students, engineers, people trying to improve their English for work or travel.

 

Teaching twelve to fourteen-year-olds is different.

 

It requires a different set of skills. And a lot more patience.

 

These days, the big thing in Korea is teaching debate. The old style of English education—“This is a pen”—has long disappeared. Now the language of the classroom sounds more like a university seminar: “I agree with the resolution.”

 

Over the years, I’ve watched English education in Korea change shape—from the colorful conversation books of the early days, to junior TOEIC study guides, and now the language of debate. Each generation seems to study English in a slightly different way, chasing whatever skill the moment demands.

 

The schedule can be brutal.

 

Four days a week, I work from two in the afternoon until ten at night. Two of those days I teach four fifty-five-minute classes; the other two days I teach five.

 

It’s a demanding schedule for teachers. But sometimes I think about the kids sitting in those desks. English class is only one stop in a long afternoon and evening of studying.

 

In Korea, the school day often doesn’t end when the school day ends.

 

If I were in my twenties, fresh out of college and newly arrived in Korea, it probably wouldn’t seem so bad. In fact, back in 1990 at ELS, I taught five days a week, six hours a day—two hours in the morning and four hours at night.

 

But age changes the way you see a schedule like that.

 

Now there are twenty teachers packed into a staff room that is a far cry from the spacious private offices I once had at SolBridge. By the end of the evening, many of them look drained, worn down by the long hours and the quiet pressures that come with hakwon teaching.

 

At a hakwon, teachers are sometimes at the mercy of the mothers who want the very best for their children. In many ways they are the real power behind the entire system. They are the ones paying for it.

 

There is something slightly ironic about that.

 

Some of these mothers were not even born when I first came to Korea. And it is entirely possible that years ago, they too sat in a small classroom somewhere, studying English in a hakwon much like this one.

 

In some ways, I have come full circle to my early days in Korea. 

 

But these days, I tend to question more what kind of value am I giving to the kids I teach? 

 

At ELS or Yonsei, the answer felt clearer. English opened doors for those students—studying overseas, working internationally, and watching a film without Korean subtitles. I could see the practical difference it made in their lives.

 

But when I look at a fourteen-year-old who already spends most of his or her day studying English, math, and science, I sometimes wonder.

 

Am I really making a difference? Or is this simply another evening class in a long chain of evening classes?

 

Some days I’m not sure.

 

But once in a while, a student struggles through a sentence, searching for the right word. The grammar isn’t perfect. The pronunciation wobbles a little. But the thought behind it is real.

 

And when that happens, the classroom changes for a moment. The language stops being an exercise and becomes something else—a bridge between one mind and another.

 

Maybe that’s what teaching has always been.

 

Not the textbooks or the test scores or the debate resolutions. Just the quiet passing of language from one person to another, the slow and invisible work of helping someone find a voice in a world that grows larger every year.

 

If that happens even a few times along the way, perhaps that is reason enough to keep walking into the classroom.