The wailing, the howling at every doorway, At every face seen, “Oh, sallow-cheeked bastard, Obeisances, now, I demand of you!” and amid Hundreds of books, all read, you deign to lecture Me thus? That I may do this, that I oughtn’t to say That? That you have decided this defect of my blood– In the narrow, empty chamber of your head–means I do not care, I could not ever understand? You dare To tell me what words I may and must not speak? You moron, piss-stain down the front of your pants At the slightest hint of disagreement; you are …
Tag: teaching in Korea
Whose Fault Is It?
Chris in South Korea calls Korea’s English education system psychotic, and his post here ends with some very sensible ideas on what needs to happen for it to become not-psychotic: Make English tests related to actual speaking and comprehension ability, not the ‘ability’ to pass a test. These are the hardest things to test, admittedly, but there are ways to test via a neutral third-party. Someone with no connection to either student or school – perhaps a third-party test center that connects to a call-center of trained native English proctors / testers. Indeed, a real step forward would be to …
Daniel Pink’s The Adventures of Johnny Bunko… in Korean.
I’m not sure how applicable the good common sense in this book is for the Korean job market, but Pink’s advice seemed good to me when I read the English version. It’s available in Korean, and I’d recommend it for whichever students come to you with career questions. If nothing else, it gives a message other than the ones they seem most likely to get from the (often misery-inducing) advice of their friends and families.
What’s Your Class’s Constitution?
I have something neat going on in one of my classes, and I wanted to post about it. One of the papers I wrote this summer was about the critique I believe is implicit in a couple of the creative projects I worked on with students in 2008-2009 — a comic book about the Goose Dad phenomenon, and a faux-documentary critiquing the cultishness of English education (and of the TEFL industry) in Korea. My argument is that while the narratives my students created was explicitly a discussion of the effect of TEFL on Korean society, it also contained a parallel, …
What The Zen Cowboy Said
Caveat: I know zilch about horses. But I think this says something worth saying, just the same. Been a long time in coming, too. # You wonder, how could a cowboy be so much like the zen monk in that strange book your auntie from San Francisco sent you? He rides up as the sun is coming up, serene on his old stallion, a faint half-smile on his face, and dismounts. Hoisting the saddle off the horse’s back, he rubs the horse down and smiles at you. It’s the only greeting he ever gives anyone, but friendly enough. You ask …