The Chronicle of Higher Education has a very interesting piece titled There is Such a Thing as a Stupid Question, and while some would think it’s more applicable to a classroom in which students and teacher interact in their shared mother tongue, I disagree. There are, in an EFL classroom, questions that are helpful to students, and questions that hurt students. More importantly, the idea that we can teach students to ask (and answer) the questions that will help them really progress is one I’ve written about before. I feel slightly vindicated seeing it written about in this way by …
Category: KOREA
Simon World :: It’s Not Easy Eating Greens
A recent study in Hong Kong showed that vegetables imported from China had ridiculous amounts of pesticides, deadly amounts, in fact. I wonder how stringently the vegetable imports are checked when coming into Korea? And, I wonder about pesticide levels on Korean-grown foodstuffs. Anyone know? Because I for one know that horribly deadly pesticides are widely available here… stuff that’s banned in North America, for example. Via Simon World
Where To Download Movie Trailers
After spending some time looking for a useful video clip with a nerd depicted in it, which was long enough to have students pick out ten physical, verbal, gestural, or other traits that marked a character as a nerd, and realizing this was frankly impossible within the DVDs I have in my own collection, I realized that the perfect medium would be a movie trailer for a film about a nerd. After searching in vain for a long time for a place where I could actually download the trailer files themselves (it’s better not to be dependent on streaming media …
Wondering what it’s like to be a minority
If you are, go read this post over at I Have Seoul. [The blogger is, I think, from Saskatchewan just like I am, by the way!] It’s not always like this for me in Korea, but it’s like this just enough to develop a bad attitude, if you don’t watch yourself. I notice it at least once every time I go sit down on the subway. I’m starting not to care anymore, but, you know, you still notice, and still sort-of care. And don’t forget, white people have it relatively good as far as minorities in Korea. But I still …
Korean Robot Nannies
Here’s more on that.
Englishie Movie About Korean Royalty
Apparently a co-production between a US and a Korean film company is set to make a dramatic film about Julia Mullock, the woman who married the last crown prince of Korea. The film is supposedly going to be a “mainly English-language feature”.
Merry Christmas
This is a short post I’ve forgotten to put up many times over, so now I’m finally doing it. For a long time, one of my most commonly-used sarcastic remarks has been to wish someone Merry Christmas. To those who claim that Koreans don’t get sarcasm, I tender my disagreement. When used sarcastically, most students understand exactly what I am saying. It doesn’t matter what level they are, or what their sense of humor is like. In a low-level class, one’s first use of “Merry Christmas,” in a sarcastic sense never fails to get a round of laughter. I’m sure …
Yellow Dust Fever
Today was the worst Yellow-Dust-From-China day I’ve seen yet. The whole city was smoggy, to a degree comparable to the smoggiest I saw in Gurgaon — which was shocking at the time — and everyone I saw responded to it. The people climbing the stairs at my station, on the way home, dragged their feet as if they were fifty years older than they really were. It was awful. Lime advised me to go to a pharmacy and get a face mask for my trips outside, and of course, like a dope, I said it wasn’t for me. I mean, …
Who’s Your Worst Enemy?
Reading the title of this post at Mingi Hyun’s page, S. Koreans Say China is the Greatest Threat in the Future, it feels like seeing Luke Skywalker eyeing Boba Fett and saying, “You know, that guy, he’s the one I’m worried about, guys.” And this, with Darth Vader standing in the background, lightsaber at the ready. sigh
Language Log: O grammar books, O now your virtues show
On Language Log recent mention was made of English teachers in America who think “the” is an adjective. It can be worse, so so much worse. A few days after arriving in Korea, where I was hired expressly to teach English, a co-worker who’d been hired at the same time as me asked what a verb was.