Barefoot in Korea 2015

In 2015, I moved to South Korea to teach English. At the time, it was not an obvious next step.

I had been exposed to a familiar path. Business school, early career optimization, incremental advancement, one that many people around me were already following with confidence. It was a coherent plan, and by most measures, a sensible one. The pipeline from university to work was clearly laid out.

But I felt the pull, or really, yank of something different. Not rebellion, no, I wasn't trying to make a statement. It was refusal, Korea became the first deliberate step away from that default. I give a lot of credit to a movie that came out right before I graduated, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty". I found a lot of myself, fantasizing about an exciting world that I only read about, and this was my opportunity to take a step outside of what I knew.

I taught English in a hagwon, or private school, you needed a teaching certification to teach in the public schools. The work required structure, patience, and adaptability, often in the absence of clear feedback or shared assumptions, there was quite a bit lost in translation. I was teaching English, but with the majority of my students between the ages of 3 through 8, it also felt like babysitting. I had no experience teaching English, and very little experience with young kids.

Language barriers and cultural differences meant that progress was slow and uneven, with every week of instruction being an experiment into what worked and what didn't. Authority was limited, and improvement depended less on instruction than on observation and adjustment. Much of the work happened between lessons, watching, listening, and learning how to be effective without control. I think my students were learning English at the same rate I was figuring out how to put an effective lesson plan together.

Korean  BBQ with all the banchan

Choosing Korea loosened my attachment to pre-approved trajectories, which provided it's own challenges down the road. It also gave a deep confidence in myself to be able to operate outside of the track that was so well laid out for me,

I was the captain of soul for the first time. 

It made later decisions such as Peace Corps, nonprofit work, and other various trades feel less like deviations and more like continuations of a deliberate orientation toward experience, responsibility, and earned judgment. It was my first deliberate step after university toward a life lived deliberately, a life lived curiously.