Global Language Institute

Global Language Institute was located right near Kangnam subway station (a one-minute walk), just off the main strip of Kangnam Daero. It was a five-story glass building sitting along a tiny side-road. The front desk was to the left of the main doors, and the foreign teachers' desks were located to the right. Yep, that's right -- we each had our own desk to work at. This impressed me greatly.

Similar to ULI, the students at Global were mainly adults. I think the youngest students I saw there were high school kids, but mostly we had university students and business people. Kangnam, being the financial center of southern Seoul, had many business people looking to improve their English. Of course, there were about a dozen hagwons like Global in the vicinity of Kangnam Station.

The schedule was typical: first class began at 6:40 AM, the second class was usually at 8:30, and if we had a third class in the morning, it would run from 10:20 - 12:00. Then we'd be off until the evening. Normally, I would have one evening class, from 7:30 until 9:10. Fulltime work at Global consisted of three classes, and if we did a fourth class, we got paid overtime worth about 600 000 won. It was pretty sweet.

For the beginner levels at Global, we used the Side by Side series of books. I think we had about three or four levels of Side by Side, and then the students moved on to a series of books created by the school, although I can't remember what they were called. I didn't like those books very much, as they involved a lot of reading that tended to bore the students. As would be the case everywhere I've taught, I heavily supplemented the curriculum with my own chosen materials.

The classrooms at Global were fairly small. You could fit about ten people comfortably, although we had maybe fifteen students on occasion. Sometimes, we had as few as four or five students in a class. There was a whiteboard, and we could use a TV once in a while, but other resources were minimal. This was just the start of the Internet age in Korea, and Global didn't have any computers. Luckily, we had Web Village next door to surf and to look for materials to use in the classroom.

The manager when I started was Mr. Lee. He seemed like a good guy, from what I remember, but he left during my year there amid some personal problems. The new manager was Mr. Shin, who was cool enough to come out drinking with us on occasion. Global also had the requisite cute front desk girls. They didn't speak English much, and since I never bothered to learn Korean with any real enthusiasm, we mainly smiled at each other and left it at that.

One other point of interest is that we had a beer pub in the basement of our building, Cass Town. This made it very easy to enjoy a cold one after work. It was one of the things I liked about working as a teacher of adults -- going for drinks afterward.

So that's what Global was like. If you go to Kangnam (now Gangnam) today, the Global building has changed completely. The hagwon isn't even there anymore. Over the last few years, it has been a Chinese restaurant/bar, a PC room, and probably many other things. I don't even know what it is right now, but it isn't glass, and it sure ain't shiny.