After my more advanced course in Speech & Drama met today, and I showed the students a few tricks about getting the audience to relax and feel sympathetic to a speaker, one of the girls in the class asked me, with a big friendly smile on her face, How do I control my audience’s mood? While it sounds like a scary question, it’s quite understandable as a question coming from one of the higher-level students, and if you knew her you’d probably guess she doesn’t mean anything as Manchurian Candidate-esque as real mind-control. You don’t just need to know she’s …
Category: teaching in Korea
One Thing I’m Really Wondering
I don’t mean to be nasty about this. I really am wondering. So are most of the people I work with, and most of the foreigners I know personally in Korea. So if anyone can offer me some explanation, it would be very nice. I have found that that during the summer months, Koreans’ sense of a comfortable working temperature is, in general, on average, close to my sense of a comfortable working temperature. Sometimes I’ve preferred it a little cooler, and sometimes it has been Koreans I’ve worked with who preferred their office environment a little cooler than my …
OhmyNews International
While I still don’t have a lot of sympathy for those caught for teaching in Korea illegally, OhMyNew International’s carrying a story called Prison Diary of an English Teacher which at least has me thinking that the way people are handled after being caught leaves much to be desired. But of course, it’s not the first time a ridiculous incarceration has happened in Korea — see the section of the documentary “If You Were Me” dealing with the story of Chandra Gurung, a Nepalese woman who spent over half a decade in a mental institution in South Korea because (a) …
Elementary Camp — A Horde of Childe
Yes, we would be able to mount a Childrens’ Crusade or something. I’m not kidding! It’s now all Elementary School-level classes, with the Middle School camp program being canceled by City Hall, apparently to make way for the new English Village program in the city. Last I heard the numbers were roughly 150 elementary school-aged kids, divided between 11 teachers. It will definitely have to be split into upper and lower level groups, or, perhaps, split in two different ways, sometimes split ABCDE/FGHIJK (such as in academic competitions), and sometimes split ACEGIK/BDFHJ (as for drama day, so two classes of …
Sobering, But, Well…
John Taylor Gatto knows a thing or two about the American school system… and, I’d argue, his points translate to all kinds of other school systems. Here are a couple of worthwhile, angering, stirring essays: The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher How public education cripples our kids, and why
Writing Your Own Reference Letter
I guess this is normal practice at a lot of Universities, here, or so I’ve hard from other teachers. You write your own reference letter and then email it, and it gets printed and stamped by the person who is or was your supervisor. I suppose it’s one way to make sure you get the reference letter you want, but it’s odd. Doesn’t this result in other people basically knowing you’ve written your own reference letters? Doesn’t it mean that people all read them knowing you’re writing about yourself? I find it kind of interesting, though, since, as a blogger, …
Robert Lowth, thou art mine enemy
Finally, the evidence against the prescriptivists that I have longed for all these years is here, in the biography of Robert Lowth (provided by Wikipedia).
Conversational Moments I Want To Remember
Gord: Wait, is this a multiple choice question? Lime: No, choose only one answer. I’ll be quite happy when I can make such an interpretive error in Korean. I mean, when you think about it, if it’s an unknown term, her understanding of “multiple choice” makes sense: you would choose multiple answers, rather than just one “correct” answer. Fascinating little turn of conversation, and just shows how potentially counterintuitive terminology (like idioms and other features of language) can actually be. Another example is pronunciation I was trying to get right earlier. I encountered the word “꼬마” and discovered it means …
The Book Hocker and the Real Percentage
Well, I can’t REALLY complain, I got a new book to scam exercises from, but I tend not to enjoy the kinds of “presentations” that some guys make which really consist of them hocking books. I can usually tell within a few minutes of silent scanning whether or not a textbook will be useful to me or my students, and all the talk in the world won’t change how I perceive my students’ needs. Of course, it might be thatI’m generalizing about students and that in fact, many classes could sort-of handle the kind of text we looked at today, …
At What Price English?
The best speech I saw at the KOTESOL conference this weekend was one that a lot of people seemed to skip, one that a friend said he wasn’t all that interested in, but which I found fascinating and explanatory of a lot of things I’ve seen in Korea. It was Language Policy and the Construction of National Cultural Identity, delivered by Amy B. M. Tsui, from University of Hong Kong. Professor Tsui discussed the history of English study — encompassing English as a foreign-language subject of study, as well as English as a MOI — that is, as a medium …