The last week of the fall semester classes brings up another group of questions, this time perhaps more big picture ones.

The conundrum: Who am I teaching? Or more specifically, who should I be teaching?

During training, there was plenty of talk of different student ability levels. Beginner. Beginner-Intermediate. Advanced. The theory (and true to reality) was that there was a wide range of English language ability in Korean classrooms, especially in speaking, given that the testing system deemphasized conversation skills over reading, writing, and a smidgen of listening.

What the orientation neglected to do—or didn’t know how to do—was decide which “level” to use with the students we encountered in the wild wild east of a classroom we attempted to manage. And so we largely fended for ourselves, testing different speaking speeds, lesson topics, unit goals, and instruction methods, and assessment types.

By the time fall conference came around in mid-October, I’d settled on a balance between managing uncomfortable blank stares lacking comprehension with my stubborn unwillingness to dumb down the curriculum too much. Sharing with other Fulbright teachers revealed that many of us were struggling with that balance, forcing us to put these labels on groups of our students: beg-int, int-adv, advanced, and so on. With mindsets that assessed our students by the average of whole chunks of them, we departed with new ideas and in invigorated sense of purpose and drive. We channeled our enthusiasm to teaching lessons that included as many students as possible, alternatively slowing down for students who wished to catch up and speeding up to keep the more fluent students motivated.

The constant improving and practice certainly aided my teaching confidence and classroom demeanor; yet there was many a time where the combination of befuddled stares from confused students and yawns from others waiting for their peers to grasp the simple instructions. This fundamental question of to whom I should be focusing on nagged at the back of my mind.

The final speaking test I assigned and administered over the course of a month further underscored the spectrum of both ability and interest in even trying to learn. Some students refused to answer any of the questions I had given them two weeks to prepare for, while others worked diligently and struggled to demonstrate what little they knew through extra effort, and still others barely prepared at all yet responded effortlessly to the questions, speaking with clarity and near fluency.

It was clear that I was serving some students perfectly—others not so much.

Informal conversations outside the classroom with more fluent students certainly helped improve their skills, and coming up with interactive games that pulled (tricked?) some students into caring about learning spoken English, if only for a class or two. The base question was still unanswered: Who should I be teaching?

While the Fulbright Korea program was established as a diplomatic exchange between Korea and the U.S., it is not explicit in its credo in relation to teaching, leaving it open to some interpretation. But the underlying diplomatic motivation, “designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries,” suggests that, moreso than nurturing stronger English speaking skills, the core motivating factor for the Korea program is to leverage the facetime in the classroom to facilitate a better image of Americans—and by extension, America—in the minds of young Koreans.

If anything, even if I were to teach my students absolutely nothing in the classroom, if their image of the U.S. and its citizens was greatly improved, then Senator Fulbright’s original message would have been nominally fulfilled. More than sharing English language learning, which is a natural byproduct of the program, the underlying original mission is clearly diplomatic, over the academic. The English teaching serves as the key to unlocking the doors of Korean primary and secondary schools.

Acting as a proxy diplomatic agent (is contractor a better word?) was certainly not the occupation I expected to be placed in. But then again, neither was being a teacher ever something I saw in the cards. What I was prepared by college to do, however, was conduct economic and statistical analysis. I haven’t forgotten that approach during my time abroad.

In the venture capital world, most investments do not result in outsized returns; in fact, a large percentage of seed funding will never be repaid, written off as a risk of investing in such a volatile assets. But to make up for these relative duds, good and great funds will strike it rich with investments in eventual unicorns—the Facebook’s, Apple’s, and Amazon’s of the world. One well-timed unicorn explosion can redeem an entire portfolio of shoddy investments.

If a school—with it’s infrastructure, human resources, teaching knowledge, and administrative staff—is the venture firm, then the students must be the investments; perhaps the most volatile asset class of them all. In fact, a large chunk of intermediate economics is built upon the Cobb-Douglas production function that says that the output of entire nations is dependent upon labor (human work hours) and capital (machines, equipment, and infrastructure). Thus, since humans provide the work, and someone has to think of and create the machines, humans are at the source of the growth of nations.

Take me, for example. By the time I graduated college, about $450,000 worth of education investment had been poured into me—and that’s in pre-inflation dollars (and pre-scholarship dollars, good lord). Luckily for me, the investment team leading the fund—my parents—will love me regardless of whether I give them a 1% or a 1000% return on investment.

With this in mind, where—and how—should I be allocating my time, energy, and resources into for my students? Fulbright’s diplomatic mission points towards seeking the happy medium, where the greatest number of students can understand and process the material. This form of “teaching to the mean,” however, comes at the clear cost of those towards the top and at the bottom, and especially the top—the more fluent kids—who would benefit by far the most from targeted teaching from the foreign teacher.

But that’s not what I signed up for; I’m not here to conduct an economic forecasting analysis on the student potential of another country, and certainly not here to implement my own hubris-driven interpretation of which students could use my teaching the most. At the same time, my statistical and emotional gut urges me to focus on only the students who both want and need to be stimulated the most—those at the top of the speaking ability curve. These are the ones who actually need English to complement their outsized educational aspirations—the ones who would rather be challenged to strive for complete fluency rather than be bored by a lesson that teaches to the common denominator. These are the ones who want the greater investment and will ultimately return the most—in business, politics, education, medicine, and every other industry.

That’s not to say that all students lack inspiration; that not just anyone can be driven to learn to speak this difficult language. But speaking with Korean—some relatives, others teammates, others fellow teachers—often results in the same statement from them: “I felt like I didn’t need English for my daily life and won’t ever really travel to America when I’ve barely vacationed around Korea.”

The vast majority of them are right—they’re not likely to need it. Their lives are locally and culturally centered around tightly knit Korean communities, focused on building personal relationships with the native Koreans around them. Not every native Korean is wired that way, as evidenced by the questions I received after a talk I gave at the girl’s high school next door about dreaming big and reaching higher than those dreams. Like my English classes at Youngsaeng high school, many students slept and others stared blankly at me. But a few were rapt in attention, asking questions during the Q and A session about how to maintain big dreams, how to work towards going abroad, and even how to stay motivated in pursuing their dreams even as others told them to think smaller.

In terms of overall impact, investing in these students—the ones dreaming the largest—would clearly have the greatest gross impact. These specific high schoolers needed English to match their globally-oriented goals and the most motivational attention. Of course, doing so to the fullest would come at the expense of teaching to the entire class’ ability level. But it still left me thinking—was the quest for educational “equity” that served Senator Fulbright’s diplomatic mission well coming at the expense of truly enabling the top students to reach their sky-high potential? Is this a parallel situation to the secondary effects of the No Child Left Behind legacy that devoted resources to all but failed to fully capitalize on the talents of star students?

And now begins a two and a half month long winter vacation—Korean winter breaks are similar in length to American summer breaks. At the end of the vacation tunnel comes an interesting opportunity to put these thoughts to the test temporarily: a three-day winter camp for the top test-scoring incoming freshmen. Maybe then, these lingering questions will be better sorted out.