By Jason Buchanan
Photo Courtesy of Jason Buchanan
Coming from Seoul, South Korea, Professor Kyunghwa Michaels has been teaching Japanese, Korean, English as a second language here, and a foundation class, at Snow College for six years now. Starting her career in South Korea studying Japanese language and literature and then obtaining a bachelor's degree in said study. Upon completing that she went to Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan to work on her graduate degree. While working on this degree she was doing a foreign exchange student program. When Ms. Michaels finished her graduate degree and moved to Portland, Oregon to start her teaching career. She started teaching Japanese at a high school, Mt. Hood college, and Cuyahoga community college in Ohio. Professor Michaels says if there’s anything she wants her students to learn it’s that “By learning a language we can learn from those cultures.” and “That there is not one way to define things.” When she is not teaching or working on school work she enjoys video games and when the semester is going the semester is going on she watches play-through videos on YouTube so she can still enjoy those games. You can find her office in the Humanities building in room 100-D.