Tag: teach with EPIK

Last week we brought you the first installment of our teacher interview we did with Mary McCusker, a teacher that dropped everything in New Jersey to head to South Korea to teach English. Read the rest of her excellent adventure here.

Mary McCusker is currently teaching for EPIK in South Korea through Reach to Teach. She has kindly shared with us her experiences and pictures in an interview. She had so much to say about her experiences that we have made this into a two part interview.

Reach To Teach would like to welcome all of our EPIK and SMOE teachers to South Korea for the August 2015 Orientation! Learn about our EPIK arrival process for teachers.

The best kind of teachers are the ones that can recognize their mistakes and grow from them. After all, teaching is a huge learning curve, even the most experienced teacher can be presented with a new situation in which to grow from. Getting feedback from students is the best way to see where you are going wrong, but gaining that feedback isn’t always easy especially in a country like South Korea where challenging authority is often culturally inappropriate.

It wasn’t too long ago that I, like many others, trembled at the thought of standing in front of a crowd of strangers. Now I do it for a living. Not only that, but half the time, those strangers are kids.

The education system in South Korea is changing, and the thing about change is that it takes time to perfect. I learned this the hard way and it’s greatly impacted my year as an English teacher in The Land of The Morning Calm in many positive (and sometimes not so positive) ways.

Meeting the teachers before they head off to orientation for the February 2015 EPIK session is the final step before the adventure begins!

If you are applying for the EPIK program you are probably terrified about how the EPIK interview will go. Here is some advice from Neysha Bauer, an EPIK teacher who has been through the process before!