One Coin, Two Sides: An Addendum

By the way, in case it sounds like I was only talking about other people in yesterday’s post, I wasn’t. Even in the specific subject of writing for kids, I’m as guilty as anyone, though of course I end up crusading against the madness of Kitty Farmer, and in league with the likes of Ms. Pomeroy: Here’s some proof: A couple of years ago I collaborated with a colleague of mine (Haeyoung Kim) on a series of educational books titled Reading Street. (I posted about the books when they first came out, here.) One of the artists who contributed to the …

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One Coin, Two Sides: Children’s Literature and Censorship

So, I’ve been working with a Korean writer who is trying to branch out into writing kid’s books in English, and to writing fiction. So far, she’s mainly written nonfiction stuff–educational books–but now that she’s in Saigon, she feels like she has the time and freedom to branch out into fiction. It’s been pretty interesting to go through the basics with her, week after week, because so much of what’s true of kid’s fiction is true of all fiction. Characters, motivations, story problems… they’re all there. Kidlit is sometimes a little more directly allegorical, and sometimes is a little more …

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Celebrity Suicides, Netizen Trolling, and the “Success” of the Real Name System

In 2006, when I moved from where I used to live to the place I live now, I changed jobs, and suddenly I was able to understand what my students were trying to say about current events in classes. I taught a lot of conversational English and composition-type courses at the time, which meant I began to pick up on news and online memes in Korean society, because students would be repeating claims, arguments, and points almost verbatim. One of the earliest of these memes that I encountered was related to the “Real-Name System,” a then-proposed (and since-implemented) method for …

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Why South Korea is Considering a Gaming Curfew

My friend Florence Chee, who does smart-people theory about communications, mentioned on her twitter feed that there’s buzz in the air again about South Korea’s slow, loping movement toward a gaming curfew. The article she linked notes that it’s not just “extreme cases” (of the same kind that were routinely used to demonize Dungeons & Dragons back in the 1980s — guys kills his mom for being scolded to stop playing and then kills himself, for example) that justify the move, but also the more moderate example of kids who simply play all night, and therefore can’t concentrate when they …

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Webster’s Is a Threat to Children Everywhere: Burn Down the Libraries; Ban the Internet; Return to the Dark Ages!

Making the Twitter rounds: Moronic parents demand Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary be banned from schools. Moronic school board complies. (Okay, maybe just temporarily.) (Another link here.) Yup, it seems some parent noticed a definition for “oral sex” in the dictionary, freaked out because their fourth/fifth grader might look up that word and see something “graphically sexual,” and then asked the school to ban the book. The thing about people like this is that banning one book is never enough. If they manage to ban one book, the next thing you know they’re going to be making blacklists and rooting through …

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