I didn’t know until this week, but both Corey Haim and Gary Coleman died this year. Which means little to me, except that when I was searching for other things, these two cases came up in Google again and again. Zenkimchi on the internationalization of Korean food, and how the guys claiming to spearhead it are going wrong… all a case of not knowing their market, and having things backwards. My rule about Korean restaurants isn’t quite the opposite of his title — the best Korean restaurants aren’t always the cheapest, though he’s right that the worst are usually the …
Tag: education
A Letter to a Teacher
The other day, I wrote a letter to a long-ago teacher of mine. He was my English teacher back in high school, and he was, finally, pretty great. I don’t know why, at the beginning of things, he was convinced I needed to be booted out of class. But when things finally turned around, they went great and I learned a lot from him. The reason I wrote the letter was because, a few months ago, a complete prick retired. The complete prick was another teacher of mine, and he was unrelentingly, unabashedly, and rather straightfowardly, a complete prick, at …
Teacher Competence & Textbook Design
The interesting thing about textbook publishers in Korea is that they need to consider the competence of the people who will be using their books. As anyone who lives in Korea can guess, thisis most crucial for the TEFL industry; despite the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of native English speakers teaching English in Korea, there are also hundreds of thousands of non-native speakers teaching English. And since the method for selecting people for teaching jobs doesn’t seem to prioritize skill or ability in the subject they’ll be teaching — at least not when it’s English — and …
Gecko Tape? Oil-Defecating Bacteria? Spider Silk Construction Materials?
These are the kinds of things that end up in 8th grade conversational English textbooks when you let an SF writer do some of the content. (The spider silk was actually suggested to me: I just riffed on the theme of biotech.) It also happens to say a lot that anyone besides an SF writer could look at content like that for such a textbook and say, “Yeah, sure, why not?” Heck of a world we’re in, folks! But you know, biotech is at least more interesting than, “This is my sister. She is five years old.” Or some of …
Shepherds and Sheep
Those of you who knows your Canterbury Tales well don’t need the exact line I’m thinking of in that title, so I won’t give it here, since it would be overstatement. Or, well, no, not really, but it would be not-nice understatement, anyway. I’m struck, in reading the work of schoolteachers who are trying to write an English text for students of the level they teach — and trying is the word, indeed in a couple of senses — that maybe some of the content just shouldn’t be in there. The problem isn’t total incompetence on their part. A lot …
Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind by Gerald Graff
This is, basically, an excellent book. Make a gift of it to those you know who are decision makers in departments. Read it if you want to help make things better for your students. More for those who want details, as well as my reflections on a few of the things I learned reading it, but for most of you who are teaching in departments (in Korea) where students actually have enough English to learn, you know, academic stuff, or for those teaching in the mother tongue of their students: trust me! Order it! Go! Now! University EFL teachers in …
Using Technology in Classrooms
You know, I always find it interesting how people like to talk up the idea of using technologies in the classroom to help students “learn in new ways.” The fact of the matter is, learning in new ways is exactly what is making classrooms look increasingly obsolete. At least, classrooms as we know them today. Often enough, teachers seem to think so deep inside the box you sometimes wonder whether they even feel its cardboard walls anymore. For example, the computer in the classroom. Very often when I see computers in classrooms, I see them used either as a portal …
Fairness, Competition, and Roll Call (Plus Festivals and Sports Days)
Only one of the people who was supposed to lead a discussion in my morning Listening & Speaking class was there when I arrived to start class. (And I was a minute late myself!) I asked, “Are we having discussions today? Who is leading today?” And nobody said a word, so I went ahead and had someone take attendance, and then went off on a discussion tangent, about taking attendance in class. Earlier this semester, one of my foreign students wrote an essay about the abolition of roll call in University classes. Regardless of the essay’s strengths and weaknesses, some …
The Positives of Foreign Students Around (And How to Maximize those Benefits in Korea)
I’m in the middle of a pile of essays in my composition class, in which approximately one out of four students is from China, and an incident in class last week came up that I wanted to post about. (I was grading the essay that we discussed in class crit last week, which I’ll discuss in a moment.) I posted last week about the violence that broke out in Seoul among Chinese students at the Olympic Torch/Free-Tibet rally. As Brian in Jeollanam-do noted, the Korean government’s handling of the situation has been, in some cases, disappointing, for example declining to …
The Rip-Off
Some weeks, things really do raise my hackles. It’s the concatenation of all kinds of things that are probably universal, but which in Korea are much more in-your-face or more, I don’t know, commonly accepted. What’s hitting me more and more is how the atmosphere of acceptability impacts negatively on individuals and on society in general. That’s what I’m focusing on now, here in this post.