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 …
Tag: education
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.