I helped adjudicate a speech contest today. It hurt. Okay, I was paid for the time, but the rate was negligible considering that what I was paid for was precious time from my life, which I cannot and will not ever ever get back. Plagiarism is very much alive and well, even in the relatively good school where I work. The other foreign prof I work with and I had been talking last semester about a crackdown on it, and some of our Korean co-workers agreed, while others didn’t think it was fair on students who, ostensibly, “don’t know better.” …
Tag: teaching in Korea
Bamboozled Redux
I just watched the Spike Lee movie again, and I gotta say, it really got me… again. I don’t get what people had against this film. The only thing I can think is that it cuts close to too many uncomfortable, sad, embarrassing truths on (all?) sides, maybe? I see those cartoons, those skits, the long set of clips at the end of the movie, and then I think of how blacks, whites, and other people are portrayed in the media in the country where I live, and I wonder: will my students get what the hell I am talking …
Wasn’t it Erasmus…?
Wasn’t it Erasmus who said that whenever he got a little money, first he bought books, and then, were there a little left over, food and clothes? Yes, it seems it was, well, sort of. It’s a mangled quote always attributed to him, at least, and we like it that way, don’t we? Well, I used to be like that. No longer am I quite so spendthirft with books, nor even so much of a hoarder as I used to be, but after several hours of packing — mainly books — I am convinced that the most considerable part of …
ESL Teaching and Ultraviolent Fantasy Life: An Interview With Richard Morgan
Richard Morgan is an SF writer who works with extremely violent plotlines and vicious, tough characters. But when I listened to this interview with him that I learned something very interesting about him: he used to be an ESL (EFL) teacher in Britain. In fact, he attributes the extreme violence in his writing to his work as an ESL teacher. He talks about the kind of necessarily suppressed rage that one feels when one is confronted with bigotry, celebration of evil crap like Hitler and the Holocaust, and all kinds of other disturbing things that, well, frankly, are all too …