Last night, I gave a presentation to the parents of the kids who will be moving up from elementary (6th grade) to middle school (7th grade) at the new school year – which starts in March in Korea. The curriculum undergoes major changes, both in public school and in hagwon. So the hagwon does a lot of orientation for parents of kids that move up. This is part of that. Curt spoke for over 2 hours. My bit was about 15 minutes. I'm speaking in a style that hopefully is understandable to at least a plurality of parents – slow, clearly enunciated – but there are no doubt parents that aren't understanding my English.
In the presentation, I'm talking about my debate program – I'm trying to sell it, essentially. There is so much focus on exam-prep at the middle-school level, that a lot of the parents don't see the benefit of a debate program or even of building speaking skills in general – there's no speaking component to the national English exam, after all.
The video of the 3 kids' before-and-after debating skills that I'm presenting is here, if you're interested to look at it.
"The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation." – Michelle Obama.
A while back, a friend pointed me to a website called "Six Sentences," where people write six-sentence-long stories. This appeals to me. It appeals to me a lot, actually. I may even try writing an entry for the website, sometime. Certainly, brevity has more than once been not just an accidental but a genuinely intentional feature of This Here Blog Thingy™. So at some point, don't be shocked if all my entries turn into six-sentence-long essays – kind of like that mania I got for a while one time when I posted single-word facebook statuses every day for a few months.
