"I was a healthy young man of Korea even after getting out of the army. But after becoming disabled because of an accident, I truly felt the hardships that disabled people have. I want to become a teacher who can feel what disabled students feel, and give them hope and courage."
Shin Geun-seob (32) passed the state examination in February of this year and has started off on his path as a special education teacher. Mr. Shin has just began his dream as a teacher at Daegu Sungbo School of Special Education, which is the nation's first public educational institute for students with physical disabilities.
Mr. Shin enrolled at the YU Department of Special Physical Education in 2003 with dreams to become a special education teacher. In 2008, as he prepared to return to school in his junior year, he got into a car accident and was paralyzed from the shoulder down and had to stay in the hospital for four years. After repeating a cycle of returning to school and taking leaves from school because of his injury, he finally graduated in February of 2014, 11 years after enrolling. And two years since graduating, he made his dream come true.
Because of his sudden disability, he gave up on his dream of becoming a teacher and only returned to school to communicate with the outside world. In the spring of 2013 when he was a senior, he went on a student-teacher program at the Daegu Sungbo School of Special Education and experienced another turning point in his life.
"I attended school with the dream of becoming a special education teacher who could give dreams and courage to the disabled, but when I became disabled, all I felt was despair. But while teaching and mixing in together with the disabled students during my student-teacher program, I learned and felt many things. A senior who helped me told me that I could feel a common ground better than other teachers and that I taught them well, and that I should really become a special education teacher. What he said led me to come this far."
He is a new teacher who has worked for just three months and made his dream come true. But he said that in reality, there were many difficulties. Mr. Shin said, "I believed that I had to invest more time than any other test-taker while studying for the state examination for becoming a teacher, and I worked really hard." He added, "I have to spend a lot of time and prepare for classes even now after becoming a teacher so that I can teach the students as much as possible. There are still some difficulties when I have to show them examples or show them something physically. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I need to do to help students understand better."
Mr. Shin visited YU on a warm sunny day on the 10th. He came to visit his professors and juniors. Mr. Shin said that he would not have been able to achieve his dream if it was not for the professors who acted as his mentor and his school mates who contributed a lot to help him.
