Here are a couple of real gems from an essay I graded today, which was a crusade against fast food: “If you eat out someone everyday, you can lose your relationship.”“Everyone must eat their homes.” Obviously, from a essay near the bottom of the grading pile, but still… amusing.
Category: teaching in Korea
What Have You Learned in This Class?
There was a chorus of amused laughter today when I handed out the preview for the final exam in one of my classes. The text consists of two questions: one, mandatory, and the other a choice from three possible topics. I decided to mention only the possible topics for the questions of choice, but to reveal the whole question for the mandatory one. Which, in essence, was the same as the title of this post: What have you learned in this class? This question was, of course, followed by two paragraphs of elaboration, but none of it too challenging: just …
Take Anything You Want
This has got to be the weirdest “pro” English lesson I’ve ever seen: And this Korean dorm-made response is even weirder.
Gaaa!
So my students blew everyone away with the scenes from their plays on Friday night. Now I know why: they practiced those 2-minute scenes like mad, and neglected the remainder of their plays. Which means now they have one week to master the other 18 minutes of their plays. Oh, and one student has done that very annoying thing that some students do, and that it seems someone, every semester, does when others are depending on their participation. She’s decided to stop showing up for rehearsals, both in-class and out-of-class. Luckily, another, very talented student has agreed to cover her …
Surprises Galore!
I asked some students to compare the Korean and English languages. Stupid me, I should have know that this would provoke all kinds of weird knee-jerk claims that Korean is somehow “superior” to English. Weird because, if you know anything about language (and I’d imagine someone who majors in foreign language study would bother to learn about language too), you know that there aren’t more and less “primitive” languages, or that “better” and “worse” aren’t really objective qualities of languages. (A language might be better for some purposes, but this does not make it a better language in essence.) It’s …
Weirdest Line Yet
Okay, here’s the weidest line yet, in the fifth of five dramas I’m editing for my students: (Kelly, Erin, Nurse3 are flapping their chops in a lounge.) I’m pretty sure that someone out there has a very weird idioms function in his or her dictionary.
The Superiority of Hangeul
Yep, having collected the majority of those assignments from my writing class students, it turns out that more than one group decided to write about how Hangeul is superior to English. When you ask people to compare and contrast something, it’s interesting how some immediately feel the need to prove that whatever they feel is theirs is absolutely superior.
Play Editing
I’m currently editing the plays that my students have written, just to tidy up the grammar and, occasionally, to ramp up the suspense and/or tension in a few scenes. Among the very colorful language in a few of these plays, the most shocking to me was the following: Mike: Damn, you dirty bitch… I’ll teach you to talk to me like that… (He grabs Trish by the neck and strangles her to death.) No need to worry that it’s sexist: everyone in the story has a nasty streak, and almost everyone dies, I think. It’s looking that way, anyway. Some …
Ask, Receive
Lately, I have thought about asking whether anyone reading this site knew of films about Indians that are not Bollywood films. What do you know? Bruce Sterling recently posted a link to filmholic, where I found links to some titles! Easy as that! And worth viewing, for a first pass, isthe film linked here, which is “Pria”, a story about an Indian-Canadian girl who tries to lose her accent in order to meet the boy of her dreams. I’m considering playing it for students who worry so much about sounding like a “native speaker”.
You Spent HOW MUCH?!?!?
Lost Nomad links to an article that says that Koreans spent 15 trillion won on English lessons last year. And that the results aren’t really showing. Eeek.