Free Republic

South Korean tutor Kim Ki-Hoon earns $4 million a year, according to Amanda Ripley, writing in the Wall Street Journal. He earns the near equivalent of an average NBA player’s salary by teaching English – primarily via paid Internet video – in the nation’s omnipresent hagwons, or private, after-school tutoring academies. This $17 billion after-school learning market has helped turn South Korea — a majority of whose citizens were illiterate sixty years ago — into the second top-performing country in the PISA global test of academic excellence (far outstripping the U.S.). Moreover, notes Ripley, South Korea’s 93% high-school graduation rate...

Bad times at home keep English teachers here June 15, 2009 Alexis Cuperus, an American living in Korea, says she won’t be going home this year, and maybe not the next year either. Teaching English in the city of Jinju, South Gyeongsang, Cuperus had planned to head back to school and seek her teacher licensure in Texas next March. But, like many expatriates here, fear of sinking into debt without a job to help dig her out have led her to re-evaluate. “I’m definitely in the boat of many English teachers in South Korea,” she says. As North America continues...

<p>The New York Times' Sunday profile of accused dirty-bomb terrorist Jose Padilla reports, at age 14, he was involved in a fateful armed robbery. Padilla's accomplice fatally stabbed a Mexican immigrant, and Padilla kicked victim Elio Evangelista in the head "because he felt like it," records say.</p>