Former UHS Staff Member Experiences North Korea
Having spent the fall semester of the 2012-2013 school year as a staff member at Urbana High School, educator Jane Gallagher soon decided that she had all the experience she would need before setting out to teach where very few foreigners had even set foot before: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Known in the west as North Korea, Gallagher spent three months in the nation’s capitol, Pyongyang, teaching English speaking and listening courses to graduate students at the only privately funded university in the country.
It was an experience she would never forget, and as one can imagine, was in many respects far removed from Gallagher’s experience teaching American teenagers.
“For one thing, the students are always so respectful” said Gallagher, “and they are much more formal. They all wear a suit and tie, and the undergraduate students all wear red ties, because that is part of their uniform. They always stand up when I go into the classroom, and they won’t sit down until I tell them too.”
Also, according to Gallagher, students have more leadership roles in the classroom than they do in the United States, rotating in and out of several positions weekly: “there is a monitor, who is monitors everyone, there is a vice monitor, who monitors the monitor, and then there is a chairman, who reads the newspaper to all the students before I arrive.”
A true lover of Korean culture, Gallagher began to teach herself Korean one day in high school out of curiosity on a dull day in her small upstate Illinois town. When Gallagher heard that a teaching job in the DPRK was available for an American, she applied instantly, and to her surprise got the job. “I was so excited when I heard,” said Gallagher of receiving the offer.
Her three months in country were some of her life’s most memorable, from hiking the DPRK’s beautiful countryside on outings to visits to Mounsoday, the DPRK’s enormous multi-statue equivalent of the Statue of Liberty, to just plain fun and exciting conversations with her students and staff.
Relishing the thrills and challenges of teaching, Gallagher found the challenge of teaching English in the DPRK absolutely thrilling, and despite her student’s sometimes being late to class due to intensive outdoor labor projects or political defense lectures, Gallagher had a great time, and in her estimate, taught her students a lot of English, and a lot about her country as well.
When asked what her favorite day during her time in the DPRK was, Gallagher was faced with a tie between her last day, when all her students came out to show her their appreciation and love and Kim Il-Sung’s birthday, where she had “quite possibly the best meal of my life. It was amazing.”
One thing, however, that proved to be very hard later for Gallagher was the amount of homesickness she encountered, not so much in herself but rather in many of her students: “One thing that I thought was really neat was the way that they valued their family. That is an important part of their identities, and the students really miss their families not being with them… that sometimes is hard to watch.”
All told, Gallagher had a blast teaching in the DPRK, and plans on going back to teach another semester very shortly.
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