The Positives of Foreign Students Around (And How to Maximize those Benefits in Korea)

Posted on May 4, 2008
Filed Under East Asia, Korea, education, esl & other teaching, pol |

I’m in the middle of a pile of essays in my composition class, in which approximately one out of four students is from China, and an incident in class last week came up that I wanted to post about. (I was grading the essay that we discussed in class crit last week, which I’ll discuss in a moment.)

I posted last week about the violence that broke out in Seoul among Chinese students at the Olympic Torch/Free-Tibet rally. As Brian in Jeollanam-do noted, the Korean government’s handling of the situation has been, in some cases, disappointing, for example declining to issue an arrest warrant for a Chinese man who apparently was

…kicking and hitting a 49-year-old Korean protester with a Chinese national flag, and hurling concrete tiles in a clash between Chinese students and anti-Chinese protestors during the Olympic torch relay in Seoul last Sunday.

Not because he didn’t do it, or evidence was lacking, but because “he was repentant over his misdeeds… [and] his chances of fleeing the country or destroying evidence were slim as he lives in a campus dormitory.”

Let alone the double-standard — any white Westerner who engages in open violence, even in self-defense, would get clanged as soon as possible — there’s a certain stupidity to this: failure to crack down as promised will only give the take-home lesson that it’s okay to engage in mass violence in public again whenever Chinese students feel like it.

All that said, I have to add that having students from another culture and ethnic background, from another educational system, and so on is excellent for my Korean students. Not only do these kids not speak or understanding Konglish, but they also raise the bar for courses in a lot of cases. (Actually, my experience suggests Taiwanese students raise the bar even farther!)

Sometimes odd things happen in class, though. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

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