1992-1993Rhea S. Suh

Rhea S. Suh

ETA :: 1992-1993

Baeksok Middle School

This past fall, I had the opportunity to visit Seoul again after nearly 20 years. My trip brought back so many memories of my time there as an ETA from 1992-1993. The old Korea I knew was still there in part, but the new Korea was overwhelming in its modernity, pace, and palpable sense of opportunity. As I explored both the new and the old, I was reminded of the biggest lesson that I learned from my ETA year: Expect the unexpected.

I arrived in Seoul with high expectations of myself and of the newly-created ETA program. As I launched myself into teaching, I was determined to be the best English teacher possible, capable of imparting on my students an uncanny ability to pick up the language. In less than a month, my expectations were quickly diminished.

My students were adorable, but sometimes a handful to manage. As a recently-transplanted New Yorker, I thought I could handle anything. Anything, except as it turns out, the pranks of the eleven-year-old boys in my classes. I also had a difficult time with the pedagogy. There were so many students per class and so many classes per day, I found it difficult to tailor the lesson plans, let alone learn individual names. Before long, I grew more and more frustrated and struggled to try to establish some meaningful improvement in the English of my students. I had expected to have a complete command of my classrooms, my students, and their ability to master the English language. Instead, I was frustrated and my students seemed bewildered.

One day, I sat down with some students who were having lunch to talk with them. My presence made them nervous and many stopped eating, so I tried to coax them out with some simple questions about their lives and suggested that they ask me questions about my life as well. After about ten minutes of back and forth, one young girl named Au-rum told me she was sorry. “Why are you sorry?” I said. “We are all sorry because we are not good students for you,” she replied. It was unexpected and such a shock. Inquiring further, I learned that a lot of them felt badly because during my classes it was clear that I was frustrated and anxious. I had inadvertently let my high expectations for myself become a stressful experience and barrier to learning for the students.

It dawned on me that it was more important to make the English class fun, memorable, and something that could catalyze further years of study than it was to perfect a lesson plan around vowels, idioms, or sentence structure. And from that day forward, my experience in Korea became more successful as I made the day-to-day life for my students and myself more enjoyable.

I have often thought back on that lunch and the simple lesson it imparted. While I had expected to fill my year teaching important lessons to my students, in the end they were the ones who taught me about the value of unexpected smaller moments of joy, connection, and learning.