Whose idea was this?

In addition to the "why did I come here?" story, there's another side to the "teaching English in a foreign country" bit: why would anyone pay to fly a foreigner out here, provide them housing for a year, give them a fairly generous salary, and then fly them back with a month's severence bonus just to teach English to Kindergarten and elementary school kids?

In two words: Korean parents.

Korean parents contribute to and are affected by a number of factors. First, there's a general social fear in Korea of being "left behind." This fear, as a motivational force, has a tremendous impact in the private education sector, as parents are increasing willing to pay huge sums of money for after-school programs to supplement their kid's public school lessons. Can't be left behind....

Second, the Korean school/work system is highly competitive. Like in Japan, the best jobs are given to graduates of top universities, which accept only students who've performed extremely well on the nation-wide college entrance exam. The English section of the test is pretty significant, so there's a definite need for students to have strong written English skills.

While public schools can handle that well enough, their programs seem to focus on that one aspect of English to the virtual exclusion of listening, speaking, and writing. (After all, why waste time learning stuff that's not on the test?) Parents send their kids to English hagwons that employ foreign teachers to "fill in the blanks," so to speak.

Lastly, there's a certain prestige to speaking English well. As the lingua franca of the international business world, employees who can speak English have an advantage over those that don't. Korea's unemployment rate for people under 30 is about 10 percent (three times higher than the overall rate), so if you want to give your kid an advantage, sending them to an English hagwon is the way to go.

All these factors add up to a situation where parents here clamor for better and better education for their kids. To satisfy demand, hagwon directors (or owners, as most are actually franchises) import foreigners to add prestige to the hagwon (as well as teach the classes). Hook them up with a Korean teacher partner and a curriculem and you're just about ready for business.

So although it costs an arm and a leg to keep me and the four other foreign teachers here, the fees for my hagwon seem to be enough to keep the academy in the black. I would never have thought it possible to make a living by teaching English without any kind of certification, but apparantly just being a native speaker is good enough.