English Teaching in the Big House

Do any of you English teachers out there get paid this well?

The prison, near Camp Stanley, houses 1,600 South Korean prisoners serving sentences of fewer than five years for less serious offenses. However, most of Smith’s 30 students are serving longer sentences for more serious crimes. They are brought to the prison to attend her classes and kept separate from the other inmates, according to prison officer Kim Gwang Jo.

Smith, who makes about $30 an hour tutoring the inmates and said she never went near a prison before coming to South Korea about a year ago, doesn’t think there is danger in spending time with the violent offenders.

That is some pretty good money to be made teaching prisoners. Apparently the prisoners are really well behaved also:

“I’d be more hesitant to do it in the States. In an American prison the inmates hoot and holler and scream. The South Korean inmates don’t act like criminals. They act like gentlemen. They never say anything that would be rude to me in English. I don’t see them as criminals and I never ask them what their crimes are,” she said.

Maybe some of you English teachers out there need to start looking at the prisons for work. Good pay and well behaved students even though some of them are murderers. It has got to beat teaching a bunch of bratty kids.

The Uijongbu prison sits adjacent to Camp Stanley. You can often hear the prisoners singing cadence in the prison from inside of Camp Stanley. Plus you get a really old school feeling to see prisoners in chain gangs working out in the adjacent rice paddies all day with guards with shotguns guarding them. That has to stink literally.