Sometime in late 2013, on the subway back to Gangnam I was staring at an advertisement and trying to figure out what its letters, syllables and words meant. I must have looked like a befuddled foreigner because a couple of young men offered to help me. One was named Simon, and the other was Anthony. It was a pleasant enough encounter for us to agree to visit the CNN coffee shop for more chatting. We were soon joined by Anthony’s girlfriend, Kate. Simon was a student in Boston, Anthony was working on a master’s degree in sports management at Seoul National University, and Kate had plans to enter a Japanese college. As we sat nursing our Americanos, Anthony asked me to tutor him in English. I agreed to do so, but somewhat reluctantly.
In the almost 8 1/2 years I have been in Korea, I have had a ton of students—not including those at LIKE School in Daegu. I am talking about people I teach in my apartment or sometimes in coffee shops. Most of them have been solo, but sometimes in couples, and once there were three. Twice I taught informal classes to Korea National Open University students. The going rate is 30,000 won per hour. I left behind three students when I came to Seoul in February 2009. Otherwise, the rest of my students have quit. They moved away, they got a new job, or they had some other change in the circumstances of their lives. Most of them just plain quit. They wanted to learn the easy way. Apparently, I was to pour “English” into their heads and they would passively receive it. This assumption irked me greatly, and whenever one of them quit I made no effort to change his/her mind. Goodbye and good luck!
I do not seek students. If I wanted to, I could have a student here every night of the week. But I neither need the money nor want to see any others come and go. More to the point, I have a life of my own. I accept new ones only if they assure me they want to learn and are willing to actively participate. (Needless to say, I have been so assured numerous times only to see the process repeated.)
Anthony, to his credit, has been different. With the rarest of exceptions, he has rung the doorbell of room 301 at the Yesung Life Officetel every Thursday night for more than two years. He had clear goals—to finish his master’s, improve his scores on the GRE and TOEFL, and gain admission to an American university for the purpose of earning a doctorate. I might as well admit that I’ve helped him quite a lot. Our classes never end after one hour, no charge is made for time expended on editing his writing assignments, I’ve reformatted and revised his resume, I’ve edited dozens of letters and academic papers he has written, I’ve met with him outside of class for some fairly intensive studying, and I’ve advised him about any number of issues. He’s a smart guy, but I have been alive more than twice as long as he has and thus have more experience.
Frankly, I was not sure he could win acceptance at a major university in the USA because the odds are against it. Most applicants are politely turned down. Then there was the matter of getting good numbers on the aforementioned tests, the GRE and TOEFL. Tony took both of them repeatedly and kept coming up a bit short. Five times he took the GRE. He would take it and fail, take it and fail. He enrolled in several hagwon courses designed specifically for GRE takers. He met often with a friend to improve his math abilities, whereas English was my area. I can hardly tell you all the things we did to boost his chances. For a very long time, he slept little, spent long hours in the library at SNU and sought every legal way to get those numbers up.
They were never quite what they needed to be, but he went ahead and applied to a dozen or so schools in the USA. Would any of them take him, even the lowly ones? As a matter of fact, yes. On February 10, 2016, the University of Arkansas made an offer. Wonderful, fantastic. Anthony was going to be a Razorback! I went to Amazon.com and bought him a cap featuring the familiar hard-charging hog. That was rendered moot when, 16 days later, Indiana University made an offer. He said no to Fayetteville and yes to Bloomington.
Anthony has repaid me by doing favors, and we have been together in settings that did not remotely pertain to English education. Thrice I have visited his family's tuna restaurant, Jinwoori. Along with Bomin Paik, we attended the opening baseball game at the Gocheok Skydome, he came to both of my book publication parties, and he was part of the group of people who, on August 15, 2015, joined my excursion around Seoul to commemorate 70 years of freedom from Japanese domination. He has been peripherally involved in my Jikji campaign and also took the photo that adorns the cover of A Seoul Miscellany.
As of this writing, Tony will depart in a few more months. He has thanked me repeatedly for the contributions I have made. While his gratitude is taken, I remind him that he did the actual work—not me. He gambled and won, although he is looking at four years of rigorous graduate study at IU. Around 2020, he will return to Seoul with a nice, shiny diploma, and I will be calling him “Dr. Kim.”
Add Comment