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 …