I have a friend who is starting graduate school this fall, in Asian Studies (with an emphasis, presumeably, on Korea).
He sent me a message marking the milestone of his starting graduate school. I was deeply moved by his message, and although I'm not always comfortable "bragging" on this blog, I just feel really grateful for his gratitude (if that makes sense). He wrote, addressing me,
I know I've said it before, it was you more than any single person I met personally, who was responsible for where I have ended up today. Life is a series of adventures and stumbling around from thing to thing, and it is a great fortune to meet good people along the way, who, some believe, are placed there for a purpose. You showed me that Korea, being in Korea, can be intellectually challenging, a great puzzle to unravel. I was quite ignorant after that first year, but have made great strides. It's all come to this.
I suppose this is the same feeling of accomplishment that I get when I feel like my teaching is successful.
In fact, I had a moment like that with one of my students yesterday, too. Grace had come into my classroom momentarily to ask me some quick question about where I'd placed a student's paper. I answered quickly, and Grace ran out and back in and said she found it, and thanks. It was a quick exchange, but entirely between native speakers, so full of the typical elisions and fast speech that I mostly have learned to avoid when speaking at work to my students or Korean coworkers.
Anyway, one of my very long-term students, Hansaem (I've taught her for four years, now), said something to the effect of, "That was so amazing!"
I laughed, and asked her what she meant.
She said, "well, you and Grace, two foreigners, talking English. So fast. And I understood everything."
"I guess that means you have learned some English then," I observed somewhat drily.
"I guess so," she answered, looking pleased with herself.
I understand that feeling of excitement when you understand something in a language you're trying to learn. So I felt pleased, too.
I experienced another difficult staff meeting last night. Why is my patience so thin about the issues that come up, lately? I feel as if there has been a substantial uptick in parental complaints about my "too loose" classroom style, and these are hard for me to have to confront. Philosophically I believe in a "loose" classroom (by which I mean playful but also forgiving from the standpoint of both academic and behavioral shortcomings), and my personality inclines me toward it too, but Korean parents are almost all hardcore disciplinarians, and they don't even get why a "loose" classroom might have benefits from a pedagogical or child-developmental standpoint.
I can't win those arguments, and in fact I'm rarely presented with an opportunity to even try to present my case. I think Curt has tolerated my style for as long as he has because he, personally, does see the benefit of it – he's remarkably progressive in his methodological inclinations – but he's not much of a salesman for it, and as with many business owners, he will let the winds of customer preference push him around. More crucially to my own issues, all of the other staff at Karma rigidly lean in the "anti-loose" direction – including the other non-Korean teachers. I stand alone without support, amid proliferating demands that I adopt a more rigid classroom management style. I can do this, but doing so tends to lessen my enjoyment of teaching – and as I've said many times before, I ain't in this for the money.
I’ve not been working very hard these last few days – I’m in the second week of my “naesin vacation” – that break in my schedule when I have only elementary classes because the middle-schoolers are engaged in their intensive test-prep schedule. So I have a 50% class load. I think I benefit from this – it gives me a chance to “recharge” between the harder push during the regular schedule. Nevertheless, I’ve had a rough couple of days. Not from overwhelming teaching load but essentially for affective reasons – I just have been feeling negative about my work lately. I’ve been working at Karma for 5 years. That’s the second-longest I’ve ever held a single job, and certainly Curt is now the person who’s been my boss for the longest continuous stretch of time in my life, by far. Yet Wednesday night I sat in a staff meeting on the topic of student placement for the next term, feeling like no one really gave a damn what I had to say, or what my opinions were about the students or about what we should do. I feel like I am dismissed for being too demanding, in one moment, then dismissed for being too lax, in another moment. This is dissonant. I realize it boils down to different cultural perceptions, not just just about appropriate teaching methodology but about more fundamental questions on how child development is conceptualized and how teacher’s roles are defined. Then yesterday I had an interaction with a coworker that reinforced this feeling of dissonance. The very complicated background to this is a problematic student who goes by Ken. He is not academically inclined, and he is morbidly shy. Several months went by before I got any kind of sustained utterance out of him of any kind – even in Korean, not just English. In fact, he’s not that far below level in terms of his English ability, but his penmanship is atrocious, so I would describe his issue as being one of “intense communication avoidance” – by never speaking on the one hand, and by writing illegibly on the other. Anyway, Ken nevertheless is not in any way handicapped. In testing, he tests at level, as long as there’s no production component (i.e. only short-answer writing and no speaking). Ken has one additional habit that is annoying: he frequently tries to “cheat.” I put that word in quotation marks because in fact, it has the feel of an elaborate ritual. He expects and intends to be caught. He makes these little cue cards with information he could use on a vocabulary test or speech test, and he almost flamboyantly mimes through a process of placing them somewhere “out of sight.” The theatrics of it convinced me, early on, that instead of being hard-nosed about it, I should try for a different kind of approach. I decided to accept it as an invitation to a conversation, and, remarkably, it has in fact worked out exactly that way. He makes and places his cue cards, I inevitably find them and ask him what he’s doing, and at first he would say “nothing,” or some other monosyllable. But then he started adding things. “I need more time [to prepare].” “No, I need that.” This might seem trivial, but I’m a language teacher first, and what I saw was that here he was, actually using English to communicate. So these little exchanges have emerged between us. I will answer, something like, “Oh, you’ve had lots of time.” “No, I need more.” “Why?” “To study. There’s too many words on this list.” You see? He actually knows spoken English pretty well, and here was a communicative situation where he felt safe and compelled to demonstrate that by interacting with me. So with respect to what you might call the “moral dimension” of the cheating issue, I decided to just let it be. It was a kind of game, I rationalized. Perhaps that’s all it is, I don’t know. I would tease him, saying that if he put as much energy into studying as he put into creating his cheat cards, he wouldn’t need to cheat. He would smile with a kind of secret satisfaction. He understands what I’m saying, but just studying is not an interesting approach for him. As long as this was a “game” confined to our class, which didn’t disrupt my interactions with the other students, I guess it’s no problem. But last night another teacher caught him cheating. And she asked me if I knew he did that. I said, “of course, he tries, all the time. But… it’s complicated.” You can imagine the conversation that followed. I was faced with a wall of blank incomprehension as I tried explain all of the above. “But it’s just… wrong. How could you let him do that?” My point, and my defense, is that I don’t let him actually cheat. I always catch him. That’s how it works. But the other teacher had no sympathy for the idea that I was using it as a means to engage with and draw out an otherwise voiceless student. In retrospect, of course, I have to second guess myself. Was it wrong of me to do this? The theatrics of his “cheating” always made me assume he meant to be caught, which meant that I assumed the same thing happened with the other teachers. But then, there arises the situation of a teacher who is too dense to notice. What then? Who’s been irresponsible? Me, for allowing the game, or her, for not noticing Ken’s “performance?” I don’t have an answer, but what really has me depressed is the “wall of incomprehension” vis-a-vis my intended communicative approach, as it underscores the feeling from Wednesday’s meeting that my opinions and notions of pedagogy are fundamentally unwelcome.
When I tried to talk about the problem with Helen, the elementary section director, she was just as incomprehending. A little more sympathetic, if only because she’s become used to these weird cultural mis-matches, with me, but in the end she was mildly disapproving and, more significantly, completely dismissive of the whole thing – which redounds on my feelings about the meeting, that my opinions and ideas are ultimately sufficiently alien to my coworkers that their main way of dealing with them is to ignore them.
It’s not that I’m left second-guessing my fundamental beliefs about pedagogy or what makes for best practice in interacting with kids – I still hew to the essential idea summed up in the aphorism that “kids learn from what we do, not from what we say.” I therefore insist that haranging and getting angry at kids for bad their behavior is not just useless, but is teaching them exactly the wrong thing – even while admitting sometimes I am guilty of it, too. This is to say, it teaches them that haranging and getting angry are appropriate social responses. Yet anyone familiar with Korean society will realize that this is, obviously, in fact a belief broadly held in Korean culture. And that is because that’s universally how kids are disciplined.
The real issue, which is causing me distress in the present moment, is just a kind of despair with respect to the idea that I could ever, truly, adapt. The thing that I should emphasize is that I could easily have the same problem in some school in some other conservative cultural setting, including in the US. I recognize that this isn’t really about Korea. It’s about my own stubborn instance on difference, and my own maladaptive alienation.
There’s no conclusion. It’s just the anecdote. Life goes on. [daily log: walking, 6.5km]
I guess someone golfing in Florida encountered a different type of water hazard.
Mainly, this is interesting to me because of my "alligator" brand with my students. I showed some of them this video.
My students often ask me, "why do you like alligators?" to which I typically, and cryptically, respond: "because you like alligators." In fact, I don't really care about alligators. They're just a kind schtick I use, with my students.
What I'm listening to right now.
The National, "The Daughters of the SoHo Riots." From their Alligator album, of course.
Lyrics.
I have your good clothes in the car So cut your hair so no one knows I have your dreams and your teethmarks And all my fingernails are painted
I'm here to take you now
You were right about the end It didn't make a difference Everything I can remember I remember wrong
How can anybody know How they got to be this way? You must have known I'd do this someday
Break my arms around the one I love and be forgiven by the time my lover comes Break my arms around my love Break my arms around the one I love and be forgiven by the time my lover comes Break my arms around my love
I don't have any questions I don't think it's gonna rain You were right about the end It didn't make a difference
I'm here to take you now Out among the missing sons and daughters of the Soho riots Out among the missing sons and daughters of the Soho riots I'm here to take you now
How can anybody know How they got to be this way? You must have known I'd do this someday
Break my arms around the one I love and be forgiven by the time my lover comes Break my arms around my love Break my arms around the one I love and be forgiven by the time my lover comes Break my arms around my love
Last week, I gave a speaking test to my Newton1-M cohort. The topic I’d given them was the humorous “woodchucks should chuck wood” proposition that I’d had success with before.
Here they are, giving their own reasons why woodchucks should chuck wood.
Here are the texts of their speeches (since they are hard to hear). I made major corrections to the grammar of their draft speeches, but the ideas, reasons and examples are entirely their own. I had made the requirement that they each include the original tongue-twister in their speeches.
Jerry
Hi, my name is Jerry. There is a question, “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” The answer is, “A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.” I think this is wrong. I have a reason, too, which is that the woodchuck’s teeth are not strong enough to eat wood. A beaver has strong teeth, that’s why it eats wood. A woodchuck has weak teeth. If a woodchuck ate wood, it would get hurt. Do you want a cute woodchuck to get hurt?
Angela
Hi everyone, my name is Angela. The question is, “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” And we all know that the answer is, “A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.” I think woodchucks should wood if they could. I have one main reason for this. Woodchucks like wood. Woodchucks like brown colored things. I saw a woodchuck. The woodchuck said, “I like wood!” So it’s a good situation. I think woodchucks should chuck wood if they could. Thank you for listening.
Mark
Hi, my name is Mark. We’re debating about woodchucks. “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.” Personally, I think a woodchuck shouldn’t shuck wood even if they could, because wood is not delicious. According to a survey of many cute, furry woodchucks, 90% of the respondents said that wood is not delicious. Therefore for this reason I think a woodchuck should not eat wood, even if they could. Thank you for listening to my speech.
Ysabell
Hi, my name is Ysabell. My team is the PRO team on this debate, which has the question, “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” The answer is, “A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.” I think woodchucks should chuck wood if they could, because their name is WOODCHUCK! I have a friend whose nickname is “Carrot.” She likes carrots. I disagree with my opponents, who say woodchucks shouldn’t chuck wood. It’s not true. How can the name ‘woodchuck’ not be true?
Jenny
Hi, my name is Jenny. Some student asked the teacher, “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” The teacher said, “A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.” I think this is wrong. I think woodchucks shouldn’t chuck wood. Today, when I went to school, I met a woodchuck. I asked, “Do you like wood?” The woodchuck said, “No, I don’t eat wood.” Look, everyone, the woodchuck said it, itself, and I heard it directly. Woodchucks shouldn’t chuck wood. They don’t want to.
Julie
Hello everyone, my name is Julie. We are debating about woodchucks. The question is “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” The answer is “A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.” I am on the PRO team on this proposition, because if we try it, maybe wood actually tastes good. Some wood can be delicious. For example, sugar cane is a kind of wood. It is very sweet and delicious. So I think I agree with this idea. Thank you for listening.
One of my new classes is a Tuesday special "activity" class for our lowest-level, youngest class, a combined "Basic" cohort. These kids are essentially "pre-Phonics" and I'm mostly focused on getting them comfortable with a classroom conducted in English and doing fun games and vocabulary review for the online materials we're using.
There is one girl, a 2nd-grader, who has a quite distinctive personality. Her English name is Hailey. She has a preternaturally deep voice for a child of any gender, and sometimes hearing her talk can be disorienting, as she can sound almost like an adult if you pay attention to the tone of voice and not the content of her words. This dissonance is augmented by her tiny stature.
Either because of this, or for whatever other reason, she is also fairly behaviorially mature for her age, and a little bit bossy with her peers, but strangely staid and polite with adults. She actually likes to sit and pay attention quietly in class. When we were playing a game, yesterday, she was copying down words from our last exercise, practicing her English Alphabet letters. She suddenly raised her hand and asked to go to the bathroom (in Korean). After making her repeat the request in English, I let her go.
After she came back, she resumed her writing, and I let her – I run a fairly loose classroom anyway, and far be it from me to force a child to participate in a game when she'd rather practice writing.
Then suddenly my coworker Helen popped her head in the classroom and said the class was too noisy. I assumed this was because there were some prospective customer-parents in the lobby, and having a loud, raucous classroom is not a great sales pitch – at least not in Korea. So we ended the game and went on to a more structured and quieter activity.
Later, Helen told me that in fact, Hailey had stopped by the front desk on her way to the bathroom, and had complained to her about how noisy the class was, and had requested Helen to come tell the class to quiet down.
I found this truly funny. I have never had a 2nd grader complain about a too-loud class, before. I didn't even think it was possible.
Last Tuesday, during my new Basic반 cohort (with 1st and 2nd grade elementary, beginning-level students), a student named Gloria came to the class. The thing is, Gloria does not belong in that cohort – she's pretty smart and anyway she is much farther ahead in English, currently being part of Grace's CS cohort. But for some scheduling reason, Gloria is stuck attending on Tuesdays, when Grace's CS class doesn't meet, so she got slotted into the Basic class, as being the only age-appropriate alternative.
I think she's a little bit resentful of this, but she participated well with the other kids, and I felt like she wasn't upset about it. It is an easy class, at the least, for her. Then, at the end of the class, she kind of surreptitiously handed me this note, below. Just the fact that she has the level of ability to compose such a note puts her at a much higher level than the other students in the Basic class.
To transcribe, it says:
Hi ~ Teacher It's Gloria Theacher BaBo. Thank Thank you. o I'm Claber. ok! - Gloria –
The word "babo" is Korean. It means something like "dummy" or "stupidhead." The word "claber" is a misspelling of "clever."
It was cute, anyway. I like the black cloud over my head, in the portrait. Did I really say that?
Yesterday, I went into Seoul in the morning. I really don’t do that very often, anymore – I wasn’t even able to remember the last time I went to Seoul on a weekday morning. The reason is that my friend Peter is back in Korea (again!) and we met for lunch, before I rushed back out to Ilsan and back to work. I was happy to see him again – he’s starting graduate school in the fall at Johns Hopkins, and is trying to consolidate his Korean Language skills in the meantime – he’s long ago far outstripped my ability, which leaves me feeling both proud and jealous.
Anyway, my main observation is that working after what should just be a relaxing jaunt into the city for a few hours was remarkably exhausting. I guess I just don’t have the stamina I used to – it makes me feel geriatric and decrepit.
Work, yesterday, was a challenge, anyway. Too much alternation between having to be the “heavy” teacher one moment, because kids aren’t being responsible, and having to reassure them the next, because they’re fragile and burst into tears when things get too hard. To be honest, I personally don’t feel the desire or need to be the “heavy,” but it’s essentially an external requirement of the job – in hagwonland, teachers who never play the “heavy” get criticized for being “too easy” or being only entertainment. The stereotypical Korean parental expectation is: “if my kids are having fun, they must not be learning anything.”
I really like teaching, but I regret that in all my different incarnations as teacher, I’ve always felt so constrained by external requirements that don’t match what I have as my idealized concept of what it means to be a good teacher. I don’t work well with those constraints. Other talented teachers are better at somehow sticking within the external constraints and still managing to stay true to their teaching philosophy, but I think maybe I’m too erratic or something, to be able to navegate that difficult path. It’s really the same problem of finding “moderation” or the “middle way” that plagues most aspects of my life. I’m either too much or too little. [daily log: walking, 6km]
I have student who goes by the English name of Vona. She is a middle-school student in my TOEFL-style speaking class. A while back, we were trying to answer a question from the book with one of the TOEFL-style 45-second "personal experience" speeches. The prompt was: "Describe the most difficult decision you've had to make in your life."
These poor 8th graders were at a loss, of course. 8th graders don't like to think about this kind of thing, and most of them are pretty sheltered, anyway, so they haven't had to make a lot of difficult decisions in their lives, so far. Several talked about things like whether to study for some specific major exam, or not, as being their difficult decision.
Vona spoke fairly coherently for 45 seconds, which is an accomplishment for her. What was her most difficult decision?
What to eat at the restaurant. The menu has too many choices.
The thing is… I suspect this may, in fact, be her most difficult decision. Such is life in among the upper middle-class in Seoul's northwestern suburbs.
Of course, it is well known that Korean speakers struggle with the phonemic character of the "L-R distinction" in English. In fact, Korean possesses both sounds (at least, approximately, and with some caveats vis-a-vis the retroflex character of the English R), but in Korean the distinction is not phonemic but instead allophonically complementary.
If the above paragraph is gobbledygook, that's OK. I'm just being a linguist.
My point for this blog post is that sometimes my students make humorous mistakes. My student Cody was trying to give a debate speech about why zoos are not good for animals, and he was trying to say that life in a zoo is boring for animals, but his pronunciation consistently and clearly rendered "boring" as "boiling" – this is not just an L-R mistake but I think he was genuinely confusing the two words. Added to this is the typical "agent/patient" confusion typical with Korean learners of English (i.e. "The sea lion is bored" being rendered as "The sea lion is boring.").
I was struggling to explain to him the difference. Finally, on a piece of scrap paper, I sketched a zoo with bored animals, and then added a boiling sea lion. This seemed to get the message across – even though I received a lot of criticism for the quality of my sea lion. I agree it's a pretty implausible sea lion, but he is clearly boiling.
Since I teach debate, I sometimes have the situation where students express views or even “facts” with which I don’t agree or which I dislike. Only with the most advanced students have I ever tried to go into the realm of evidentiality and “sourced” arguments – mostly I focus on using debate as a means of expressing opinions using English and without regard to the veracity or even acceptability of what they’re saying. Also, since I often make students “switch sides,” I can hardly complain if they end up coming up with some implausible argument for a position which they wouldn’t have chosen in any event on their own.
The below, however, is not one of those cases – the student chose the position apparently sincerely, and furthermore, I can sadly say that the opinions he echoes are quite widely held. Most interesting, vis-a-vis the question of immigration to Korea, is the seemingly circular argument that foreigners should not come to Korea because, since Koreans are racists and nationalists, immigrants would therefore have a bad experience here. It boils down to: “Don’t come here because we don’t like you, and so it would be bad for you to come here.”
Still, perhaps the most bizarre are the beliefs about how dangerous foreigners are. Yet this kind of thinking is hardly unique to Korea – just look at the American discourse around immigration, and such views are easy to find.
There are many people who are coming from other country these days. Korea can develop by accepting these kinds of people, but there are many people in different opinion that disagree about accepting these kinds of people.
People who are coming from another country have different religions. IS which is one of the most dangerous groups of people in the world have the Islamic religion. They are very dangerous, so most people do not like to live in the same country with them. Korean people often eat fork after work, but Islamic people can not eat pork. Hindu people can not eat beef, so they can not join in the Korean company dinner. Many people who are coming from other countries can not live with Korean people.
There is the wall between Korean people and foreigners. This wall is called nationalism. Korean people express a very powerful nationalism. For example, Korean people do not like black people because they think that black people make scary situation. Korean people are also disregard immigrant workers who are coming from Philippines or Vietnam. Immigration is harmful for foreigners.
Foreigners make crimes. American soldiers make crimes almost once a week. They kill many Korean women and rape them. Chinese are psycho. Chinese kill Korean people, cut into their bodies and also they eat human meat. Foreigners are dangerous to live with.
In conclusion, immigration is sometimes helpful but not always. Foreigners have different religion and make many crimes. Korean people also have nationalism, so foreigners can not endure it. People should know that immigration is not always good for our country.
I can say that among my students, such views as these are not that common – just by virtue of being a middle-school student who is in the top quartile of English ability (such as is the case with my students, since I don’t teach the lower levels) means that one’s views of things like globalism and internationalism are probably moderate. Nevertheless, in the broader public, I can also say that such views are probably more common than anyone would like to admit.
“While the secret knowledge is only available to some members of the society, there is an ideology, an ethics, and a phenomenology of ignorance that is shared, to some degree, by all.” -Jonathan Mair
Last week, because of my little surgical event, I missed a few days of posts to my "work blog." As I was catching up on these posts, yesterday at work, I noticed I had reached 1000 posts on my work blog.
Compared to this blog, I think for most people my work blog wouldn't be very interesting. Then again, this blog isn't that interesting, either.
The "work blog" is not really a blog, at all – I'm just using the blog format (which I'm comfortable with) as a way to post a sort of "diary" about each class that I teach. My students, their parents, or my fellow teachers can consult it to find out answers to burning questions like, "what's my homework?" or watch the kids doing one of my videographed speech tasks. Indeed, although it's a minority, I have many students who use the blog to find out their homework or to watch their classmates embarrassing themselves for my camera. The Korean web portal I use as a platform makes the blog accessible to the students even from their ubiquitous smartphones.
Since sometime in the Spring, I've been diligent and faithful about posting an entry for each class I teach – if only to minimally write, "We had class. No homework." Normally, there is at least a sentence about homework. On about 20% of posts, there is some collateral, i.e. a video embedded or a scanned image of some student work – although sometimes I get a little bit behind (as I am now), so the most recent blog entries sometimes contain little place-holders "" where I will insert video when I get around to posting them (which is not that hard but is a bit time-consuming, so it has to happen during "free time" at work, currently hard to come by).
So 1000 blog entries means, roughly, 1000 class sessions taught.
I wish we had a platform, at work, that was in some way like this but was being maintained by ALL the teachers. I think it would go a long way toward solving Karma's perennial marketing problem and allow us to establish our own "web presence" – which it's really hard to conceive of a business not having in 2016. Yet… such as it is. We don't have an IT department. I'm not personally able or willing to take on that role, in a context where every interaction with a computer or Korean website must be tackled with a dictionary (because these computers, here, they speak Korean, y'know).
I was trying to frame a debate for my HS3T cohort (9th graders) a few nights ago, where I'm doing a kind of "reboot" of my debate program since there are some new students, and the oldtimers could stand a review, anyway. I had chosen the fairly elementary (and ubiquitous, in debate curricula) proposition of whether money or passion is more important in choosing one's career.
A student, who goes by Kevin and who rarely participates (and whom I've known since his elementary years), raised his hand and said that the topic didn't make sense. I asked why. He said (I'm paraphrasing), "I have a passion for money. So which side am I on?" The other students found this humorous.
Of course this is a very legitimate point. At first, we tried to reframe the debate as money vs happiness instead of money vs passion, but that still didn't really solve the problem: one could say, in the same spirit, "Money makes me happy."
Finally, I ended up digressing, explaining that one strategy for the CON team in a debate is to "deny the validity of the proposition" – which is the sort of argument we were discussing. This made the students unhappy, though, because they felt it should be a valid strategy for the PRO team, too. So I was trying to explain that in a debate, the "government" – the PRO team – typically has a more difficult task, since they have to accept the proposition as framed, while the CON team is allowed to challenge the terms of the debate. In fact I was happy to to see some of the students relatively engaged with such a complex digression – perhaps this was even useful to the more advanced students, but those with less experience with debate just let their eyes glaze over.
Actually, I was pleased with this whole development – it's perfect for a reboot, where the topics are ostensibly "easy" but where we can go into more depth about how debate really works.
As my students know, the fact that crocodiles and alligators are different is important to me, and I always teach them.
I showed some students this video, and asked them why it was "obvious" that it was an alligator, and therefore the man's indifference struck me as truly terrible.
A transcription of the man's words: "'M sick 'n' tired of people putting these logs across the pa… Oh! That's a crocodile… or alligator. Whatever."
I'd already told them some background on the differences between crocodiles and alligators, and so after watching the video, I let them brainstorm why it was obvious to me. It took them a while, but one of them actually figured it out.
He explained, "It's in America, so it must be alligator." His thinking, which I helped him elaborate: since America is home to wild alligators, but not wild crocodiles, right?
Another student asked, astutely, "How do we know it's America?"
I said, "Well, in this case, you know it's in America, because I told you earlier. But I know it's America because of the man's accent." This gave me an opportunity to digress on the matter of different English language accents.
Last night I had my final class with my HS-M cohort (9th graders). They will be moving into the High School prep classes and I don't think I will be teaching them any more. I will miss this class. I never had a "bad" class with them. They were as unruly and sometimes as lazy as any other group of middle-schoolers, but they were remarkably intelligent and good-natured, and in the end, they are one of the best debate classes I've ever taught. They wanted to "play" during the last class, but I made them do a debate exercise where I gave them difficult propositions and randomly assigned PRO or CON positions, and with only a few minutes to prepare, they had to give little position speeches. The fact that they did pretty well with it tells me that they must have learned something. I wish I had taken video, but I'd removed the camera from the equation to help them feel less like this was a test and just show the skills they'd learned.
I've had some of them for 2-3 years now. I told them that they were a great class. I will miss that class. When I was having a bad day, having them as my last class was always a nice experience. Now my last class is likely to be the quite difficult successors to this HS-M cohort, the up-coming 8th graders.
Yesterday was a pretty horrible day at work. Very long, but also, a feeling that for all the polite listening to my ideas, they are fundamentally irrelevant to the decisions that are made. I ended up pretty upset by the time I left at 11 pm.
The one highlight – in my HSM debate class (9th graders) we had a debate on the "absurd comedy debate" proposition, "This debate is boring." Last class, they chose the topic from a long list, and I explained that in fact, it wasn't such an easy topic. It is as hard to be deliberately boring as it is to be deliberately un-boring, and both are beyond the reach of most second-language-learners such as my students.
Nevertheless, Jihoon made a very impressive effort to actually write comedy in English, combined with taking to heart my suggestion to try to "use as much vocabulary from your vocabulary book as you can – use words you never used before."
Although, because of his shortcomings in grammar, he doesn't quite pull off the kind of humor he is attempting (which demands near-perfection to be coherent, I guess), the intent shines through and over all it is some of the most subtle writing I have ever received from a student. His wordplay is clever, with a fine grasp of sesquipedalian excess in the PRO and playful alliteration in the CON.
Pro:
Hi, this is Jihoon. Debate needs logically intrinsic reasons to support. Maybe that correspond boring debate. As you know, spontaneous less debate can cause detrimental consequences, so to speak renounce to do debate but to have relentless equivocal time, like prodigious deviation. Maybe presumable reason that is straight forward to people can do the debate amusing. As a rule of thumb, what is too deep to understand can cause the fragmentation in everything. As you can see as I can see, what is seen in debate that we can see is that prerequisite of tedious debate is all in here, this class. So I think that this debate is the archetypal type of aridity debate which sparks instantaneous aging process and innumerable counterproductive facet.
Con:
Hi this is Jihoon. This debate is not as boring as some of you bored. I can prove that this debate class is not boring. Maybe the prove I provide can get approval. I hope to pose poser point to opposite’s point as a poser to point the possibility of positive point. Let me see your ayes from your eyes in the end. We can have useful usability in utility utilitarian use of perspectives about particular propositions properly after having a debate class. Some got bored to go down as a board behind me, and some got anxious that they can’t speak affirmatively as a mute like a mite in class. But think; How happy happening happens to us that we can talk, take a time together to think about topic? Have a sight and see the significant stuff of the specific side of speaking, I think this class is not that boring than we can learn from.
My students in my Honors1 cohort made their own debate topic last week, I guess in reaction to some offhanded comment I'd made as a joke. The proposition: "Jared is an alien." Unexpectedly, the class took the CON position, i.e., that I was not an alien. I think the point was that they wanted to hear me argue that I was, in fact, an alien.
One talented 4th grade student wrote a pretty good (if error-filled) analysis of the CON position.
Our debate topic today is ‘Jared is an Alien’. I’m in Con team with John and Narin. We each have five reasons so I have five reasons, too. Firstly, Jared is not like an Alien. I thought Aliens were UGLY. Then if Jared is an Alien, then why aren’t he ugly?? He’s not that hansome but he’s not so bad either…. Secondly, Aliens don’t wear glasses most of the time. Aliens have something special that humans don’t have. And that can be good eyes.. Good eyes don’t make them wear glasses. But Jared is wearing glasses. See?? It makes perfect sense.. Thirdly, Aliens do not have sugery but Jared had tongh sugery. I believe that Aliens are 10times healthier than humans. Because they’re Aliens. They are ALIENS!!!! Fourthly, Aliens don’t have hairs but Jared have many and little hairs. I think Aliens are bald. Of course some Aliens can have hairs, but most of the time it can…. Lastly, Aliens can’t be a teacher from Earth. Aliens live in a different planet. But we have to have a passport to go another countries or planets. But if Jared’s passport says “I’m an Aliens”.Then he can’t even come to Korea or other countries.. I am kinda serious about how he got to America. Aren’t you serious like me??
The other day, for an 11-hour work day, because I attended a "training" meeting for some new teaching software the Karma is investing in (called "Cappytown").
When I went back to review my notes just now, I found this written in the margin: "Sitting in this kind of meeting makes me want to quit my job."
Indeed, it was one of the most frustrating moments I've had in recent work experience, because, of course, the training, and all the software's administration documentation and online management framework is in Korean. There is nothing at all wrong with that – this is Korea, after all. But it hammers home to me just how inadequate my Korean language skill is, how little it seems to be progressing, and how utterly useless I am, outside the classroom, at my current job.
I guess, fortunately, I am considered to be valuable in the classroom. Nevertheless, it makes problematic my desire to be a true member of my workplace team, and it also is a grim reminder that for all my enthusiasm as a language teacher and as a lifelong observer of languages (i.e. as a linguist, by training and avocationally) am an utter failure as a language-learner, in this Korean incarnation.
I have been slowly working my way into a very dry and dense textbook called Task-Based Language Teaching, by David Nunan. When the intensity of work goes up, I tend to spend even my free time thinking about more work-related things. I'm not sure why this is – it strikes me as counter-intuitive.
Actually, I think it's about trying to assuage the feelings of insecurity about my teaching abilities that tend to arise during periods of work stress.
I think that the idea of "task-based language teaching" is mostly irrelevant, in the Korean EFL context – at least as conceptualized by the author and by other practitioners in the field. That can be best explained by examining this short aside that I found in the introduction to the book:
It [i.e. the just given definition of a "target task"] describes the sorts of things that the person in the street would say if asked what they were doing. (In the same way as learners, if asked why they are attending a Spanish course, are more likely to say, 'So I can make hotel reservations and buy food when I'm in Mexico,' than 'So I can master the subjunctive.') – page 2
In fact, most Korean learners will say something similar to the latter, if asked why they are studying English (i.e. not specifically that they want to master the subjunctive, but some other similarly abstruse grammatical concept). The reason is that most Korean students study English because they want to do well on certain standardized tests (e.g. 수능 [Korean SAT]). Those standardized tests are far from having been in the remotest way touched by concepts like "task-based language learning" or communicative language teaching strategies.
Farther along in the book, the author mentions the field called "English for Special Purposes" (such as English for Business, or English for Engineering) as being an outgrowth of the task-based language teaching movement.
In that vein, I'd like to propose a new "English for a Special Purpose": namely, English for Korean Students (hereby written 'EKS'). This particular special-purpose English is characterized by a slavish focus on the ancient "grammar-translation" style of language learning, and targets a profoundly non-communicative, decontextualized use of language. Just like any other special-purpose English, EKS is a real necessity for the millions of Korean students who need it. This being the case, we could have a sincerely task-based language instruction curriculum, true to the methodological philosophy, that focuses on grammar-translation and on preparing to take these tests. This is because "passing the tests" is the real-world "task" in question.
It leads to a bit of a methodological paradox… If our goal is a progressive desire to give students real-world utility from their language instruction, we should teach them using the grammar-translation style from 100 years ago, because that's what's useful to them – much more useful than teaching them how to speak communicative English as tourists or travelers or workers at large, international companies.
Recently I had a "special" class that I taught to 7th graders for a few weeks, in the context of the test-prep period. It was supposed to be a grammer-focused writing class, and because most of the students were fairly low level (although it was a mixed group and there were some high level students too), I decided to basically focus on a single grammer object: the "to" infinitive forms of English, since they are used in a lot of ways and in a lot of different expressions.
As part of this, I found myself wondering about the etymology of the "to" particle, which is most definitely not the same as the homonymous preposition by modern linguistic descriptions, but which seems to bear some weird traces of what one might call "prepositionality." Was the origin of the "to" particle related to the preposition "to" or was it a coincidence (a linguistic merger)?
It was actually a bit difficult to research, but finally I found some text that confirmed that the infinitive "to" is, in fact, derived from the preposition "to." That is interesting to me, and because it was so hard to find out, I decided to blog about it, so if I want to go back and look it up again in the future, it's in my aide-memoire blog thingy.
Here is the authoritative quote I found:
The English so-called 'infinitive marker' (or 'infinitive prefix', 'infinitive particle') to derives from the dative-governing preposition used with an inflected infinitive to express purpose. In this sense, it can be considered to represent the universally well-known grammaticalization path 'purpose > infinitive' (Haspelmath 1989; Heine & Kuteva: 247-248), whereby the preposition is desemanticized and acquires distributional properties not found with, or not typical of, noun-governing prepositions. - from John Ole Askedal, in Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory: The Rosendal Papers, page 63.
The other day, my student Sophia was talking (and talking and talking), and said something like "… If everyone don't did it… " (by which she meant "If everyone didn't do it").
So I interrupted, and said, "Wow, what was that? 'don't did'?" because normally her grammar is pretty natural sounding.
Without pause, and laughing, she said, "I said I'm hungry. Hungry makes me grammar mistakes!"
In general, Sophia is the only student I have ever had , who, despite her age, seems to be essentially learning English as a native speaker does – meaning she has no ability whatsoever to articulate any concepts of English grammar, but for the most part she gets it right. Most elementary students in Korea who study EFL, if they are good, are good because they have managed to develop some kind of explicit grammar model in their minds. From a language-developmental standpoint, the only way to develop an implicit, embedded grammar is to start at a younger age (i.e. preschool). In this sense, Sophia has a rare and exceptional linguistic talent, for which I am envious.
Unrelatedly, what I'm listening to right now.
Sun Kil Moon, "Pancho Villa." Note that the Koreanish name of this non-Korean American folk-indie singer is not an accident, but rather a reference to Korean boxer Sung-kil Moon.
Lyrics.
Salvador Sanchez arrived and vanished Only twenty-three with so much speed Owning the highway
Mexico City bred so many But none quite like him sweet warrior Pure magic matador
Pancho Villa would never rest 'Til 1925 he closed his eyes 'Til Manila stars would rise
Gozo of the Philippines, choirs and angels sing Ukulele strings play for his legend Italy had a king
How have they gone Fell by leather So alone Bound together
Benny "kid" Paret came a good way Climbed to the grey sky to raise his hands Stopped by the better man
Eyes of Los Rios cry for suns Lost on distant shores, unforeseen horrors Struck and delivered him
How have they gone Fell by leather So alone Bound together
Why have they gone Fell by leather So alone All bound together
There is a cartoon movie called Minions, which is an installment in an on-going series. I haven't actually seen this movie, but all my students know it, so I decided it might be a good jumping off place for a writing assignment. Minions are essentially what the name says – little alien-like creatures whose sole purpose is to serve comedically over-the-top villainous overlords. The writing prompt goes like this:
Last week, I woke up becase a minion came in my room. "What do you want?" I asked. He said, "You are my master. What do you want me to do?"
My student Alex, never one to be constrained by coherency even in his best moments, wrote a bizarre, vaguely stream-of-consciousness tale of nuclear apocalypse, time travel paradox, and a lot of bananas. I have transcribed his writing verbatim.
minion go to school for me. and make nuclear bomb in freetime. and put it and run away. then, school and Earth is blast. so people all die many people. and make time machien and go to before make nuclear bomb. and kill minion yourslef. and this is crazy you die in the would. Bye bye bye bye bye bye bye crazy crazy you die crazy people in the school. so you can be explode nuclear bomb, and you eat plutonium crazy fire wax salt banana. so minion is die. banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana! minion says in the would "banana!" and everyone eat banana (fire, bomb) so many people was die.
To be honest I don't quite know what to make of it. Clearly he's got some issues to work through, but I wouldn't assume he really has serious psychological problems – global destruction is a very popular theme among 5th graders. I rather like the time travel paradox, although I don't quite see what it adds to the plot. I would be curious to see him develop the story further.
My student Jiyun channeled Donald Trump, and delivered a pure ad hominem rebuttal during an impromptu debate last night. I know it's not really good debating style, but at the elementary level, I am actually happy to see students taking the initiative to use English communicatively and effectively even if it is only to insult their classmates during a debate.
I made another tongue-twister debate with my elementary Honors1 cohort, based on the "Betty Botter's Bitter Butter" tongue twister:
Betty Botter had some butter, "But," she said, "this butter's bitter. If I bake this bitter butter, it would make my batter bitter. But a bit of better butter – that would make my batter better." So Betty Botter bought herself a bit of butter, better than her bitter butter, and she baked it in her batter, and the batter was not bitter. So it was better Betty Botter bought a bit of better butter.
I think that they did pretty well. Roy, especially, actively tried to integrate the tongue twister into his debate speeches, although in other aspects he didn't do as well.
Debate proposition: "Betty Botter should not buy bitter butter for her busy daughter." The class was PRO for the proposition, while I took the CON side – off-camera. Speeches were mostly memorized.
I took my successful “woodchuck” humorous debate topic that I’d used a few weeks ago with my elementary kids and gave it to my middle-schoolers as a last hurrah before the final test-prep period of the year, which starts next week.
Here are a couple results, cross-posted from my work blog. Note that I participated in these debates, generally to even up the team memberships, as is necessary in classes with odd numbers of students.
Yesterday was one of those days when I am thankful for my job.
As I've told people many times, this job (meaning "TEFL in Korea" – in its various incarnations over the last 8 years) is the first job of the many that I've had where I often feel better about the job at the end of the day than at the beginning. Mondays are hard days – I have six classes, strung in a row with no breaks. Several of these Monday classes are in the once-a-week-and-why-am-I-trying-to-teach-these-kids-English category.
As I went to work, I was dreading it. I felt unprepared, so I went to work early. The sky was stunningly blue as is often the case in the Fall in Korea – the only season of the year when that kind of weather is common. But I felt depressed and gloomy, after yet another weekend when I felt like I had achieved none of the personal goals I'd set for myself – as minor as they may be, I still couldn't find the motivation to do them. Clean my desk? Not checked off. Go to the big store to get some supplies? Not checked off. Fix some persistent problems on my blog site? Not checked off. See what I mean?
I was gloomy. I was dreading my six classes.
I went to work, and tried to get organized, figure out my lesson plan for each class – I don't write these down, much anymore, but I always do it mentally, and without it, I go into class feeling a bit desperate. I did this, and even was in my first class 10 minutes early. The students were there and we "hung out" which I always feel is better "English Teaching" than what we do in our textbooks, sometimes, since I always try to interact with my students in English, even at the lowest levels.
The kids surprised me later, when, halfway through the class, I was happy with how they were doing and so I offered to "play a game" for the remaining 20 minutes.
"Teacher, no. Workbook." This set the tone for the day. All my classes showed an unexpected interest in actually learning. Even the advanced class, later in the evening, where they took me up on a similar "play a game" offer that comes when everyone's done well on their homework, they ended up trying to teach me to play a game that I hadn't played before – which is probably much more difficult, from a functional English standpoint, than anything they actually have to do for the class curriculum.
Well, anyway. It was a day that felt like I was teaching English. So walking home, I wasn't as depressed or gloomy.
In my Betelgeuse반 (no, I didn't come up with that name), which is a very small class currently consisting of two elementary third graders, we have been making comics about aliens. They are beginning level students – their class is the first class in our curriculum after completing the Phonics classes (Alpha, Beta – yes, I did come up with those names). I believe strongly that getting kids to make up their own stories even in the most rudimentary English is a very productive way to help them internalize new vocabulary and grammatical structures. So I essentially allow them free reign to make their own stories, providing them with the words or sentences they ask me for in order to tell them.
Here are the stories about aliens. I like the pictures – they are pretty expressive.
Some time ago, I did as I often do, and was teaching a group of students in my Honors1 cohort the tongue twister that goes:
Q: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
A: A woodchuck could chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
This is one of my favorite tongue twisters.
But I did something rather innovative with it for this class, these past two weeks. I made it into a debate.
Proposition: “If a woodchuck could chuck wood, a woodchuck should chuck wood.”
We divided into PRO team and CON teams on this proposition. Because we have five students, to make the teams even I ended up on participating, on the PRO team. This made for 3 speakers on each team, with each speaker speaking twice.
The students brainstormed ideas and wrote speeches. Then yesterday, we had our final debate. All but one student presented their ideas entirely without notes – the one relying on notes is new to the class so I gave her some leeway.
I rewrote the debate reasons that we came up with in class with cleaned up grammar and throwing in a few additional bits of humor or word-play. This can serve as a guide (but not a verbatim script) of the debate in the video above.
Jared PRO Introduction
Hello everyone. Today we are here to debate on the proposition: if a woodchuck could chuck wood, a woodchuck should chuck wood. I am here representing the PRO team, which also includes Sophia and Narin. We believe that woodchucks should chuck wood, and we are going to explain to you why we believe this. You might think this is not important, but we think that if a woodchuck could chuck wood, it must do so. First, Sophia will explain about the need not to waste other food. Next, Narin will talk about the woodchuck’s name. Finally, I will talk about the woodchuck’s cute teeth. Please, listen to our ideas, and then make a smart decision about whether to support our proposition today.
John CON INTRODUCTION
Hi, I’m John. Today’s proposition is whether, if a woodchuck could chuck wood, a woodchuck should chuck wood. Roy, Alisha and I are on the CON team, which means we don’t think that’s a good idea. A woodchuck should chuck whatever it wants to chuck, don’t you think? Alisha will talk about our first reason, which is about saving the forests. Roy will explain that wood isn’t exactly delicious. I will give our third reason, which is that woodchucks have a right to be free to chuck what they want to chuck. Please listen to our speeches, and make a smart choice.
Sophia PRO First Reason
Our PRO team’s second reason why woodchucks should chuck wood is because if they ate other food, it would waste that other food. For example, let’s say some woodchucks chuck something like fruit or chicken or pizza, or your own favorite food whatever that is. Those foods will then disappear, because woodchucks are hungry, and they will eat it all up. I don’t even want to think about if ice cream disappeared. Can you imagine, your food disappearing because of a woodchuck. Isn’t that weird? You’ll end up fighting the woodchuck. Isn’t that sad? I know this sounds really weird, but you have to understand. Don’t let woodchucks chuck your chow, let’s have woodchucks chuck wood instead.
Alisha CON Team Reason 1
Our team’s first reason is that if we make woodchucks chuck wood, that will just waste a lot of wood. Do you know how many trees are already gone? A soccer-sized area of forest is disappearing every 10 seconds! Then do you really think we should tell woodchucks to chuck wood, with the forests disappearing? I don’t think so. We already waste wood in so many other ways, for example it is not easy for us to not use paper or other non-recyclable things. So if we want to save forests, let’s not have woodchucks eat wood.
Narin PRO Team Reason 2
Our team’s second reason why we think a woodchuck should chuck wood is because of the animal’s name. Think about it. The name is “wood” plus “chuck.” Wood is wood, of course, and “chuck” can mean “eat.” So really the animal’s name is simply “eats wood.” Don’t you think that if the animal should eat something besides wood, it would have a different name? If it was going to eat flowers, it would be a flowerchuck, right? Or if it ate pizza, it would be a pizzachuck. But it’s not a pizzachuck. It’s a woodchuck. That’s why if a woodchuck could chuck wood, it should.
Roy Con-team’s second reason:
Hi, I’m Roy, and I’m on the CON team in today’s debate. We are talking about if a woodchuck could chuck wood, a woodchuck should chuck wood. I’ll tell our second reason why we disagree with this proposition. You see, wood tastes terrible. Wood is dirty, and disgusting. For example, Alvin the chipmunk doesn’t eat wood, because it is horrible to chuck wood. So woodchucks don’t have to chuck wood either, because it is terribly disgusting to chuck wood. Let them eat other, delicious foods. If we force a woodchuck to chuck wood, probably the poor animal will only end up upchucking the wood it chucked.
Jared PRO Reason 3
Hi, I’m Jared. Let me tell you my reason why if woodchucks could chuck would, I think they should. Look at this picture of a woodchuck. See, he has cute teeth. These teeth are like a beaver’s teeth, don’t you think? We all know that beavers eat eat wood. So, in this same way, I think it’s clear that woodchucks should eat wood too. On the other hand, do a woodchuck’s teeth look like human’s teeth? They don’t. Thus, woodchucks should not eat things like pizza or ramen or steak or rice. These might even be difficult for a woodchuck to eat. This is why I believe very strongly that a woodchuck should chuck wood.
John CON REASON 3
Hi, I’m John, again. Remember me? Our CON team’s last reason is that woodchucks have rights, you know. On TV, on some interesting documentary, when we see some woodchucks, maybe we see them chucking some wood. We might think, then, “well, woodchucks must chuck wood.” But think about this: we know people have rights, right? Well, animals have rights too. So whatever we see on TV, there is no reason why a woodchuck must chuck wood. This is just a kind of prejudice. Please, cast away your prejudice, and respect every woodchuck’s right to chuck what it pleases.
Sophia PRO Rebuttal
Our team has a strong rebuttal to the CON team’s idea that “wood tastes terrible.” There is a simple thing that can shoot you down. Have you ever actually eaten wood? If you have, well, then, you can say that. But I don’t believe it. Here, here is some wood. Will you eat it? Unless you will eat it, I don’t think you can fairly say that wood tastes terrible. Maybe it’s delicious. Also, you know, different people like different things. Maybe even if wood tastes terrible to you, maybe it tastes delicious to a woodchuck. Think about it.
Roy Con-team’s rebuttal:
Hi, my name is Roy. I want to give a rebuttal to the PRO team’s third reason. Jared said that a woodchuck should chuck wood because of his teeth, which are very cute. Jared is wrong, however. If a woodchuck has teeth, of course he could chuck wood, but he could eat lots of different delicious foods, too. Teeth can be used for lots of things, not just wood. Woodchucks don’t have to chuck wood because their teeth can be for lots of non-disgusting things, not only wood. In fact, I think we should help them so they don’t chuck wood anymore. The PRO team is so wrong: “wrong” times infinity!
Narin PRO Team Conclusion
Today we talked about three reasons why if a woodchuck could chuck wood, it should chuck wood. First, Sophia said it was important not to waste other food. Second, I said that the animal’s name means he should chuck wood. Then Jared explained that it was because of his teeth, which are very cute. Finally, Sophia gave a rebuttal to the CON team’s ridiculous idea that wood tastes bad. How can we know how the woodchuck feels about that? The CON team is clearly wrong, and I hope if you are woodchuck who could chuck wood, you go home tonight and chuck lots of wood.
Alisha CON Team Conclusion
We really think a woodchuck should not chuck wood. We gave three reasons and a rebuttal why we think that way. First, chucking wood wastes wood and destroys forests. Second, wood doesn’t taste very good. Thirst, a woodchuck has a right to eat what it wants. We should not force woodchucks to chuck wood. Lastly, we gave a rebuttal why the PRO team is wrong. I think if you can agree with our opinion, you will be very happy that you have paper to write on, since otherwise the wood that made that paper might have been chucked by a woodchuck instead.
I very much recommend this topic (and this type of topic) when teaching debate to elementary students. They find it much more entertaining than “serious” debate but learn the language and critical thinking skills just as effectively, I think. [daily log: walking, 4.5 km]
I was happy with some kids in my lowest-level Betelgeuse-반 yesterday.
They put on a very nice performance of an adaptation of the old "Gingerbread Man" fairy tale, using stick-puppets.
Here is the video.
I like the little songs, and I was daydreaming about making some kind of postmodern adaptation of the story. I think it would be good as a kind of background theme for an AI-goes-amuck type story.
A truly sad day: my large green plastic alligator died yesterday. He fell on the floor and broke his fat, plastic head.
He has been with me for 6 years, having been given to me in 2009 by my friend Tammy's daughter in Moorhead, Minnesota. He has worked hard in my many classes, and has appeared in many blog entries.
His head is severely damaged, and he can no longer bite children. Perhaps this is for the best. On a spontaneous whim, I had one of my writing classes write letters of condolence. They were quite touching:
Dear silly Alligator, how are you feeling. I'm so happy to heard you got hurt. You are so ugly, but now you are uglier. Your ayes are very big, but your face is very big. Your face not match. I hope you do cosmetic sugary [surgery]. I know you don't have girlfriend. You have to handsome andy ou have to diet, your weigh is 68kg. Your age is 12, but you are so fat. You have to eat vegetables. Don't be sad by my advice. It is very important for yourself. I think I'm so kindness friend. From Rena.
Here is a picture – you can see the large crack in his head. The hinge is also broken inside. He is unrepairable.
In another class, we had a moment of silence – this was the students' suggestion, not mine.
I haven't even touched my [broken link! FIXME]IIRTHW ("if I ran the hagwon") effort in more than a year. I kind of gave up on it as excessively idealistic and not relevant to my goals. But of course, the nature of my job means that I nevertheless think about it frequently.
Yesterday I was having a conversation with my boss about his constant casting-about for new, more effective approaches to curriculum.
It's odd, because I feel like we've reversed roles, somewhat, in comparison to when we first met, years ago. Back then, I thought, and argued frequently, that curriculum design was important, while he said, much to my consternation, that a "good teacher" ought to be able to work with whatever curriculum was on hand.
I resented this at the time, and took it to mean that my frustrations with curriculum were symptomatic of my not being a good enough teacher.
Yet over the last several years, I've evolved to a point where I more or less agree with the sentiment. Much to my dismay, yesterday, Curt seemed to essentially disagree when I said something to this effect. I had said that we should focus on improving our teachers, rather than on improving our curriculum. And his reaction was that he didn't see teachers as being the problem. It wasn't a direct rejection of the earlier philosophy, but it certainly felt like an about face to me.
The context in which I suggested focusing on teachers instead of curriculum was actually a sort of brainstorm I had, during our conversation, about curriculum. Curt is looking at alternatives to the fairly fossilized "Reading-Listening-Speaking-Writing-Grammar-Vocab" subdivision of material that prevails in hagwon. I first went with my prefered notion, what he called "Immersion" but that I think of as "subject-driven" – teaching "subjects" in English, integrating the various functional components.
When Curt rejected that, for the same reason he always does – the dearth of native-speaking teacher to serve as a focus for that style of teaching (a rejection that strikes me as utterly rational if not completely necessary), I decided to suggest another alternative arrangement that I've been mulling over lately, mostly out of frustration with the seemingly excessive complexity of our modest hagwon's schedule.
This alternative would essentially say we only have 3 types of classes, which is really my observation that we have three basic types of teachers in our hagwon:
1) integrated class – this is the native speakers (like myself or Razel or Grace), who focus on "subjects" or "topics" in the immersion style mentioned above
2) analytic class – this is the grammar-translation style that is most traditional in Korean English education, rejected by pedagogy but a reality "on the ground" and we have teachers who teach this way and we might as well support them – some are quite good in many respects
3) foundations class – this is the "daily word test", the memorization words and also the naesin (school term tests) style memorization of speeches, essays and other fragments; this also includes the attendance-keeping and counseling aspects of the "homeroom" teacher job. I hate this memorizaiton stuff, not because I don't think it's helpful – I actually strongly believe that it is helpful – but when overly emphasized, it makes English painful, and that discourages students, and destroys motivation.
Anyway, I laid these ideas out to Curt. He basically said, "that sounds like it's teacher centered." I said, well, but that's OK. If we focus on our teachers' strengths, and develop them, that will benefit the students, in the long run, as our consistency and quality will increase." He asked about how we would decide the curriculum for these new divisions of labor, and I said what he'd once said to me, that it didn't really matter – the focus was improved teaching and good teachers would inevitably choose or develop appropriately good curriculum. He was somewhat scandalized by this notion.
Hence my feeling that the tables had been turned.
I haven't developed a specific thought about this at this point, mostly just recording here for future reference.
