… is the beginning of sentence you know was written by a moron. It’s part of the sole comment on this article, about a Bangladeshi man who apparently killed a Korean woman half his age, which concludes with the police still trying to figure out why he did it. The comment is a priceless example of Korean netizen commentary. After claiming that Koreans need to start putting electronic bracelets on Southeast Asians in Korea–despite the fact that crime rates are much higher across the board among Koreans than non-Koreans here (this morning’s news had a litany of horrors, such as …
Category: teaching in Korea
So What Next?
Given that I agree with most of this: … I am asking myself: what next? It’s not just problems in education that have me wondering this, of course: there are other things afoot that have me checking the escape hatch to this orbital sat, making sure my suit doesn’t have any leaks, because hard vacuum is a bitch. But for the record, I think the problems are systemic to education everywhere, but the parts that are exacerbated in Korean education are especially hard for me to reconcile myself with. A colleague in another department I was talking with told me …
고드 교수
Yesterday Miss Jiwaku had fun searching for references to me on the Korean internets. She found a lot of stuff about my relationship with SF, and participation in various events in Korean fandom (including a blog connected to the new Fantastique website that apparently was translating some posts of mine about Korean SF), but the only reference she found to a student writing about me was this one. Something about a student asking me the difference between thesis and hypothesis, and telling a student, “No, you don’t have a thesis.” The funny thing is, I swear I remember the inquiry, …
The Danger of A Single Story
It’s been a busy day and I have miles more to go before I sleep… miles of grading to do, that is. Tomorrow, I’ll be making an attempt at sauerkraut, inspired by The Mad Fermentationist’s attempt (making, bottling), but for today, I’ll be digging into student work. Thursday night is the session of the Presentation Contest that I and a colleague will be judging, but tomorrow I’m off. More grading, some mazering (yes indeedy, that means meadmaking) and sauerkraut-making, and a trivia contest with some friends. Might as well get as much fun in as I can prior to the …
Like Magic
I had a student in my office last week who said something rather saddening. She was, of course, one of an endless parade of students who don’t know how to formulate a thesis, don’t know how to ask a fundamentally interesting question about the world, or rather, who haven’t been taught how one does so, but is now being required to demonstrate such skills… or so I thought. And I thought, it’s not their fault, but it does make me wonder and worry about how useful what we’re teaching them. We’re, in the collective sense. How coherent our curriculum and …
What Are We Fighting For?
Joanna Russ, the feminist critic and SF author, penned a book titled the same thing as this post. Complete the sequence: 20th… 21st… 22nd… Anyone whose English is reasonable–to the point where they are in a position to be holding forth on how to teach English–ought to be able to complete that sequence. Say, the organizers for a conference on new techniques in TEFL? When I see “Oct. 23th” as the date given on the webpage for such a conference, I pause and say to myself, “What are we fighting for?” On the bright side, I’m on at 5:00pm, so …
Abjuration
The wailing, the howling at every doorway, At every face seen, “Oh, sallow-cheeked bastard, Obeisances, now, I demand of you!” and amid Hundreds of books, all read, you deign to lecture Me thus? That I may do this, that I oughtn’t to say That? That you have decided this defect of my blood– In the narrow, empty chamber of your head–means I do not care, I could not ever understand? You dare To tell me what words I may and must not speak? You moron, piss-stain down the front of your pants At the slightest hint of disagreement; you are …
Whose Fault Is It?
Chris in South Korea calls Korea’s English education system psychotic, and his post here ends with some very sensible ideas on what needs to happen for it to become not-psychotic: Make English tests related to actual speaking and comprehension ability, not the ‘ability’ to pass a test. These are the hardest things to test, admittedly, but there are ways to test via a neutral third-party. Someone with no connection to either student or school – perhaps a third-party test center that connects to a call-center of trained native English proctors / testers. Indeed, a real step forward would be to …
I Don’t Get It Yet? Pal…
Just before Chuseok I met this guy on the subway; I was in a bad mood, because I’d wasted a bunch of time (because not one but two institutions were completely and utterly disorganized and inconsiderate). I was on the way home from that, and this guy introduced himself to me on the train. I did not want to talk to him at first, but he was nice, so I explained my situation. Which was a rant I won’t inflict on you now, but involved the usual disorganization and short-sighted stupidity one comes to expect from the Kafkaesque bureaucracies so common …
What’s Your Class’s Constitution?
I have something neat going on in one of my classes, and I wanted to post about it. One of the papers I wrote this summer was about the critique I believe is implicit in a couple of the creative projects I worked on with students in 2008-2009 — a comic book about the Goose Dad phenomenon, and a faux-documentary critiquing the cultishness of English education (and of the TEFL industry) in Korea. My argument is that while the narratives my students created was explicitly a discussion of the effect of TEFL on Korean society, it also contained a parallel, …