New Boy lesson plan

The following lesson is one that I did with most of my classes this semester, and it worked quite well in all of them. After trying it out once, I shared it with 2 of my co-teachers, Dan Deacon and Joseph Doucette, to see if it would work for other teachers too, and both said it increased participation and interest in the class.  The lesson plan below is fairly detailed and the result of trial and error (especially in deciding where to pause the video for clarification discussions).  Changes made along the way will be explained in the discussion afterwards.

Goals

             The video has so much meaning and language that a variety of goals can be achieved by watching it with students. This paper is focused on the critical reading aspect, but I'll briefly mention other possible objectives, too.

1. Exposure to unfamiliar accents: The students are confronted with both an Irish and a African accent, neither of which is familiar to most Korean students. As the narrative is quite visual, it is fairly easy to understand for even beginner-level students, but understanding the language intensifies the impact and also the emotional involvement of the students.
2. Pragmatics: Since the video wasn't made with ESL learners in mind, dialogue is often imbedded with meanings that are obscure to someone from a different cultural background (see Christian Kelly, “Do they know it's Christmas?”) As the story progresses and themes are established, student schemata are created and the story gradually becomes more comprehensible, which increases the enjoyment.
3. Fun: Most classes (and I dare say most students!) were visibly engaged with the story, and as a result didn't view the explanations and discussion so much as a lesson, but a part of watching the movie.
4.  Introduction to critical reading: Discussing the different characters and guessing at their future actions are low risk ways to engage the students, but also to give them a chance to give their different opinions. Care should be taken to explore every possibly valid suggestion by a student, as the point here is not whether it fits in with the ultimate conclusion of the story, but making it clear that people view other people and their actions in different ways, and that it is okay to speculate and be wrong sometimes. Here it is also helpful if the teacher admits to having been fooled by the build-up, too.

Lesson Plan

The  lesson uses “New Boy” , a short movie by Steph Green based on a story by Roddy Doyle.

( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs )

Introduction:

     

 1. Write “New Boy” on the board and ask students to guess at the meaning.

  2. Students discuss how it feels to be new at school, and what problems new boys and girls have. Vocabulary is provided as necessary, but prompt students in the direction of “bully” and “clique” if they don't arrive there by themselves.

   3. Make it clear to the students that the accents will be difficult at first, and that understanding them will become easier as they get used to it.

Watching the movie:

To follow this lesson plan, it is best to be exact in pausing the movie, as some transitions happen very quickly and the element of surprise is quite easily lost.  

1. Watch 0.0 to 1:17: Why did the one boy suggest Joseph should sit next to Pamela?

                 Why did the teacher tell the students to put their hands in the air?

                 What did Seth Quinn do with the small boy’s book? What do you 

                                       think about Seth?

2. Watch 1:17 to 2:05: How is Joseph's old school different from the new school? How are the 

                   students' attitudes different?

                  What does Christian Kelly ask Joseph? What does it mean? (Students

                  commonly think it is a question about cultural differences, so a brief

                  explanation of the Ethiopian Famine and Band Aid will probably be

                  necessary, after which students can discuss the real meaning of

                  Christian's question.)

                  What did Hazel tell the teacher? (Explain “poking”)

3. Watch 2:05 to 4:20:  Who was Joseph's teacher in Africa really? (His father)

                   What did they talk about? (a soccer game, Joseph scored 3 goals in the 

                           last game, he's a star, etc.)

                    What does Christian say to Joseph about Hazel? (“Speccy fancies you. 

                            You're dead!”) How does Joseph react to this?

4. Watch 4:20 to 5:58: What did Christian say to Joseph? (“Are you hungry? Chew on                 this!”) How is this related to Christian's previous comment?

                   What happened next? What would you have done if you were 

                   Joseph?

                  What did Seth Quinn say to the other boys? (“I seen her knickers”: 

                  see discussion) What do you think about this kind of behavior?

5. Explain to students that everything up to this point will now be watched again to allow them to see the bigger picture. Watch 0:24 to 5:58, then let the students discuss the following questions.:

 1. What do you think about Joseph? How is his behavior different in the new school?

    2. What do you think about Hazel? ( Good chance to introduce new vocabulary such as “teacher's pet” and “telling on someone”, etc.)

3. What do you think about Christian Kelly?

4. What's going to happen next?

6. Explain to students that the rest of the movie will be watched without interruptions, but that the class will go back afterwards to look at individual utterances. Watch 5:58 to 9:40 (the end).

7. Discuss the following questions:

1. What had happened to Joseph's father? How did this affect Joseph's life?

2. Why did Hazel come out of the classroom to speak to the teacher?  How did the teacher respond?

3. What did Hazel say as she was walking back into the class that made the teacher angry?  What did Seth Quinn say to Joseph and Christian? What did Joseph say?

4. What do you think about the children now? What's going to happen after the story?

5. What do you think about the teacher?

Homework: Watch the movie again and write a letter to Joseph.

Reflection

The lesson worked quite well from the first time I tried it, but there were a few issues that had to be addressed at times. I'll briefly summarize them over the next few paragraphs.

                The movie navigates us through a day of the lives of several children, central of whom is Joseph, a Rwandan refugee in his first day in class in Ireland. He is confronted with racism, gets into a fight (sort of), and makes friends with his tormentors of earlier. At the same time, we are privy to Joseph's memories, which tell a back story that emphasizes the difficulty of the experience for him. Joseph eventually becomes a member of the class by holding on to certain unwritten rules: not telling on people, not backing down, and making fun of the teacher.

                The first problem that arose was the density of the dialogue in parts of the movie. Since the characters spoke at normal speeds in what constituted difficult accents for the students, often using using idiomatic language, a lot more time had to be spent replaying crucial parts to prepare the students for the 2^nd half of the movie. This was of course a blessing in disguise in terms of listening practice, but the extra energy spent on comprehension took its toll for the beginner level students, and in one class there was a clear drop in engagement after the first half of the movie.

                The language also included some crude expressions, which made it important for me to make it clear that I was not teaching this language for usage but for comprehension. Some of these were shocking for the students but easy to explain in context (Hazel calling the teacher  “a bitch” and Seth saying the teacher “thinks she's robbin' a fockin' bank”), but  the “seen her knickers” -scene was more problematic. At first I just didn't highlight it as the screen class's attitude towards the teacher / authority was by that time clear, but  there were a few fairly fluent speakers of English in 2 or 3 of the first classes, and a few of them mistook “knickers” for a racial epithet. The first time it happened, I just explained it to the individual student, but the second time I went back and verbally transcribed the whole scene for the class, tying it in to the contrast in class cultures between the Irish and Rwandan school. It certainly amplified the students' awareness of the cultural change that Joseph had to deal with, but it also took more time. I probably wouldn't cover it in future if I were to do beginner-level classes, but for mixed or higher levels doing it might be unavoidable.

                There was no significant resistance from the students, but  some of the beginner-level students seemed to suffer from information overload towards the end of it. In spite of that, the result was in line with the stated objective of providing a topic for discussion that didn't carry risk along with the necessary potential for disagreement.  Students responded with some very negative comments about the actions of some characters, but some others contradicted these without seeming concerned about public opinion in the class. Whether this was due to the lesson or not is debatable, but it established that the foundation for further critical lessons was in place.

                The stimulus towards critical reading happened in 2 places; at the end of the first period with Joseph on his way to the playground, and at the end of the movie with the situation resolved and the transition complete. After the events before break time, several students were able to predict a fight later on, but no one in my classes imagined Hazel standing up to the teacher the way she did, nor the ease with and the manner in which Christian and Seth accepted Joseph in the end. This situation in which many people were partially right but no one completely, created an atmosphere where speculation at the end was freer and opinions differed strongly, for example while discussing the teacher. 

                I didn't use the question about the future of the characters in class, but it was actually brought up in the homework by the students. After that, I used it as a question in the speaking exam (along with other questions discussing the story and the characters). Several students had opinions that were contrary to my intended reading, and a few came up with genuinely oppositional readings.  One student who had lived in Canada told his exam partner that he had experienced the same kind of situation on account of being Asian, and that the teacher's apparently unbiased approach to the 3 boys was in fact proof of racism, as she had taken the boy whose book Seth had thrown out the window at his word. Another said that Joseph had made a mistake in becoming friends with Christian and Seth, as they “were bad boys” who would “make problems”.

                In future, I would like to use this lesson as a springboard at the beginning of the semester, to launch the class into more difficult critical readings using short stories, newspaper articles or scenes from movies (Jack Bauer justifying torture on Fox springs to mind).  

                 

In conclusion, once the students realize that it's okay to say things that other people don't agree with, and once they start thinking from the points of view of the characters involved, students will naturally come up with oppositional readings.

Korean weddings and the way up

I went to a wedding in a small village south of Daejeon last weekend and was a bit disappointed that I'd missed the discussion on Wendell Berry's piece, but the wedding turned out to be a lesson in itself.

Over the last couple of years I've attended numerous weddings of co-workers and friends (not to mention my own) in wedding halls, and the jarring experience that the first one was, turned out to be a template for the rest of them: people talking throughout the ceremony, children running around, and from my perspective, a basic disregard for the couple who was getting married. Comments from fellow guests have generally included the word "rude", with varying amounts of salt and pepper for flavour.

Which is why I am so happy I finally went to a more traditional wedding, under a tree in a farming village, with chickens being thrown in the air and panseori singers urging the groom to (repeatedly) kiss the bride. Everyone still talked and laughed throughout the wedding, and the kids caused havoc (but at least they brought the chickens back). This time round, however, it was fun!

At some point under that tree, it dawned on me that the behaviour that so bothered my and my fellow-waegooks made perfect sense in its original context, a celebration of marriage and a good laugh for everyone there. The problem is that everyone wants to move up, and "up" in the world of weddings is defined by Charles and Diana and a complete collection of Hollywood wedding movies.

Completely out of context, but as Wendell Berry commented, "it does suggest that 'up' may be the wrong direction."

A Nigerian perspective on Ngugi and Phillipson

I wanted to post this link a while ago but kept forgetting -an interesting read!

Click on the link -you can download the pdf for free: http://www.google.com/search?client=gmail&rls=gm&q=ngugi%20joseph%20bisong

Lesson Plan

I've used this article in its full form for a few writing classes, and my students came up with very different opinions, so I thought I'd push things a little bit further. 

The basic idea is to use a topic where they wouldn't feel I or the other students care strongly about their opinions, and then to first let them do an oppositional reading in 1 group, and then form an opinion in another group with someone who had done the opposite oppositional reading.

Goals: 1. Introducing students to critical reading

2. Providing students with ideas and vocabulary to produce evaluative output.

Material: An article reporting on a controversy. The article has been simplified and then divided into two with one article (Part A) including some background and the for-arguments plus evidence, and the other (Part B) including some background and the against-arguments and evidence.

Class Plan:

1. Divide the class into groups of 4. Have a warm-up group discussion about bias in reporting, asking the students to come up with examples. Korean students are generally quite distrustful of the chaebol-owned newspapers, which could be useful in getting the lesson rolling.

2. Explain that they will be reading an article, and that they will be critically analyzing it. Do not explain that there are two different articles.

3. Hand out Part A to half the groups and Part B to the other half. Introduce some questions that can be used for a critical reading (“Who is speaking?”, etc.). The students read the articles and write down a short list of possible criticisms. In a low-motivation class it might be necessary to tell them that the group will receive a grade for the report. Grading will be in terms of reasoning and clarity of explanation.

4. After this task is completed, collect both the group reports and the articles.

5. Re-divide the class into pairs, with one student who had read and criticized Part A (the pros), and 1 student who had done the same with Part B (the cons). Do not tell them that they had read different articles; just that they have to come up with 3 opinions on the topic and reasons for their opinions. Once again, these reports can be graded if necessary.

Memorization vs. Critical thinking Part 2: Use the system don't fight it!

Looking at a couple of blogs I suddenly realized that I hadn't explicitly linked our topic to oppositional thinking, so here goes!

Considering how much memorization Korean students supposedly do, I have often been shocked at how little general knowledge they seem to have. The ethnocentric quality of my casual observation was highlighted by Curt's story of his wife's comments on Kant - we certainly didn't cover that in high school, but apparently Korean students do!

The implication is that the South African education system and one of their products, me, have a different definition of general world knowledge than the Korean system. This is important in terms of Bloom's cognitive levels (as mentioned  in the previous post), since basic knowledge is a prerequisite for higher cognitive thought. When I receive new information, I measure it against previous information, and when I ask my students to read things critically, I often expect them to evaluate the readings using my background knowledge, not theirs.

Awareness of such an error of perspective immediately brings to mind 2 possible remedies:
1> Introducing EFL teachers in Korea to the basic content of the Korean high school curriculum.
2> Supplying students with more background knowledge before expecting them to comprehend the context of the readings.

English as a dominant language in a multilingual country: South Africa

Just came across this article while supposedly studying for my midterm tomorrow -interesting perspective on English as an instrument of class division in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Yet it is also true that these people -- both black and white -- are the beneficiaries of a post-apartheid dispensation marked by increasing inequalities. Thus the elite has become distant from the masses, who have derived little, if any, benefit from the new era. The elite's embrace of English is both a sign of this distancing and a means by which it is being achieved.
http://mg.co.za/article/2011-04-21-the-future-will-be-spoken-in-all-tongues

Memorization vs. Critical Thinking

        Let me just first say that I loved the format of the final discussion in class last week; if I didn't have 30+ students in my too small classrooms I would do that on a regular basis myself!

        Our discussion topic was the effect of memorization in Korean education on the ability to think critically, and my 2 discussion partners (both Korean) had quite different views!

        Michelle said that the top universities had a nonsul, or essay, that you had to write to gain entrance and that it required critical thought. As I had no idea of this, we spent our entire time as a pair discussing this and never got to possible solutions! My next partner was Miran, and she had 2 very interesting things to say: firstly that there are hagwons (cram schools) that teach you to answer the nonsul questions, and secondly that she disagreed that memorization was all bad.

          Now on the hagwons, Miran's point was basically that you were taught how to beat the test, not think critically. This made me think of Yoshinori Shimuzu's short story, Japanese Entrance Exams for Earnest Young Men: the protagonist, Ichiro,  can't pass the Japanese proficiency test necessary to get into a good university and decides to take on a tutor, Tsukisaka, who specializes in helping students ace the exam. Allow me 2 quotes!

Tsukisaka after watching Ichiro struggle with a question on a reading passage:
This kind of problem is a game, Ichiro, and you want to score as many points as you can. It has nothing to do with the essay passage. All you have to do to choose the correct answers is know the rules.

After passing the test and getting into a good university, Ichiro writes a thank-you letter to his mentor, which the narrator describes thus:
His letter was eloquent testimony to the fact that expertise at answering questions on Japanese tests had no relation whatsoever to skill at using the language. If anything, it suggested that being able to answer those questions correctly led to a degeneration in his Japanese skills.

Hyperbole, to be sure, but food for thought!

         Miran's second point concerned the necessity for memory work in high school, and I had to agree. In current educational theory there seems to be a tendency to contrast memorization with thought; I consider this a false dichotomy. Thought built on knowledge is potentially much more rigorous, and merely browsing through some information doesn't provide most of us with a solid foundation for critical thought. We need to graze and digest ideas before we can make them work for us.

        My geography teacher in high school introduced Bloom's cognitive levels to us in grade 10. Here's a quick look at them:

He explained that in order to apply any of the higher levels, you needed the lower levels; in other words, you had to make sure you knew the material before you were in a position to analyze, synthesize and evaluate data using the theories in the book.  In my first semester writing his tests, my grade dropped by 30% and it was a long slog getting them up again, but his teaching principles still make sense to me today.

The counter-argument is of course that critical thinking should be taught concurrently with factual knowledge, but in my opinion that doesn't detract from the  necessity of learning the value of information as well as the ability to commit them to memory. Memorizing in itself does not limit thought, but the lack of critical thinking practice does.

           So, if our interpretation is correct and memorizing in itself is not the problem, where should we go and look? I believe that this brings us back to English education in Korea, testing, the unreasonable demands tests place on students, and consequently how much study-time is  wasted on memorizing vocabulary, expressions and grammar. The point is not to learn to use the language, but to pass the test. Whether or not the government and universities mean for this to happen, it is a direct cause of the proliferation of  hagwons and the unhealthy study habits often exhibited by our students. The resulting fatigue and boredom with learning arguably have a greater effect on students' ability to think critically than the physical act of memorization itself.

Xenophobia in Israel: a view on the evolution of moral entitlement born from historic victimhood

Asked if he considers the city's campaign against Africans to be racist, Ben David simply answered, "Jews cannot be racist."
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/04/2011412102514350535.html 

A different look at Aid: Dambisa Moyo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inClCwsVwjY&feature=related

Racism is bigger than its North American definition.

      In February comments about Coloured people by black socialite and column writer Kuli Roberts caused an uproar in South Africa and eventually led to her column being cancelled by her newspaper. Among her comments were the following:

 Coloured girls are the future for various reasons:
You will never run out of cigarettes.
You will always be assured of a large family as many of these girls breed as if Allan Boesak sent them on a mission to increase the coloured race.
They always know where to get hair curlers and wear them with pride, even in shopping malls.
You don’t have to listen to those clicks most African languages have. 

 Comments attributed to a friend:
They drink Black Label beer and smoke like chimneys.

They shout and throw plates.

They have no front teeth and eat fish like they are trying to deplete the ocean.

They love to fight in public and most are very violent.

They’re always referring to your mother’s this or your mother’s that.

They know exactly what tik is. (tik is a drug common in poor areas of Cape Town) 


You can read the full text on this website (the newspaper has retracted it):
http://www.wonted.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1334:tshiamo&catid=925:tune-news&Itemid=38

The following article discusses her column as well as other racist comments towards Coloured people.
http://mg.co.za/article/2011-02-28-weekly-kuli-roberts-column-to-be-discontinued
"In 2005 the spokesperson for City of Cape Town, the late Blackman Ngoro, was fired after referring to coloureds as 'beggars, homeless and drunk on cheap wine'."


"Roberts' column comes amidst a furore over remarks made about coloureds by government spokesperson Jimmy Manyi.
 Manyi, then the director-general of labour, said in a show broadcast on KykNet's Robinson Regstreeks in March 2010 that there was an "over supply" of coloureds in the Western Cape."



            Manyi's comments are viewed by some in the light of the ANC's inability to win elections in the Western Cape, which is partially the case because some coloured people (who predominantly live in the Western Cape) feel marginalized by the ANC. Trevor Manuel, a minister in government, responded with the following open letter:
http://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/trevor-manuel-s-open-letter-to-jimmy-manyi-1.1034606
"I have never waged any battle from the premise of an epithet that apartheid sought to attach to me but I will do battle against the harm you seek to inflict. When I do so, it is not as a coloured but as a non-racist determined to ensure that our great movement and our constitution are not diluted through the actions of racists like you."
"  I now know who Nelson Mandela was talking about when he said from the dock that he had fought against white domination and that he had fought against black domination.

Jimmy, he was talking about fighting against people like you." 

                Now at this point, unless you are South African, you're probably confused with the usage of coloured and black, so  I've added a few links as background knowledge (Wikipedia will do for a basic introduction, but feel free to do your own research!). In post-apartheid South Africa,  black  is legally used to refer to communities disadvantaged during Apartheid and thus also includes Coloured and Indian people. (In 2008, Chinese South Africans  campaigned for and won legal black status in order to benefit from black empowerment policies, but that's really too much information for this post!) In the articles above, though, black refers specifically to people of Bantu origin. 


Quick definitions:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_peoples:
Bantu also is used as a general label for 300-600 ethnic groups in Africa of speakers of Bantu languages, distributed from Cameroon east across Central Africa and Eastern Africa to Southern Africa.

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoisan :
Khoisan (also spelled Khoesaan, Khoesan or Khoe-San) is a unifying name for two ethnic groups of Southern Africa, who share physical and putative linguistic characteristics distinct from the Bantu majority of the region.
 The San include the original inhabitants of Southern Africa before the southward Bantu migrations from Central and East Africa reached their region, leading to Bantu farmers replacing the Khoi and San as the predominant population. 
 The Bantu people, with advanced agriculture and metalworking technology developed in West Africa from at least 2000 BC, outcompeted and intermarried with the Khoisan in the years after contact and became the dominant population of Southeastern Africa before the arrival of the Dutch in 1642.

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured
In the South African, Namibian, Zambian, Botswana and Zimbabwean context, the term Coloured (also known as Bruinmense, Kleurlinge or Bruin Afrikaners in Afrikaans) refers or referred to an ethnic group of mixed-race people who possess some sub-Saharan African ancestry but not enough to be considered Black under the law of South Africa. Genetic studies suggest the group has the highest levels of mixed ancestry in the world. However, the maternal (female) contribution to the Coloured population, measured by mitochondrial DNA studies, was found to come mostly from the Khoisan population.

                                                  Distribution of Coloured People in South Africa



Genetic studies:
 1. Strong Maternal Khoisan Contribution to the South African Coloured   
                                 Population: A Case of  Gender Biased Admixture
       The overall picture of gender-biased admixture depicted in this study indicates that the modern South African Coloured population results mainly from the early encounter of European and African males with autochthonous Khoisan females of the Cape of Good Hope around 350 years ago.                        

 (The American Journal of Human Genetics,  Volume 86, Issue 4, 611-620, 25 March 2010)                        http://www.cell.com/AJHG/abstract/S0002-9297%2810%2900096-0

2. Journey of Mankind: A great visualization of the spread of Homo sapiens over the planet based on mitochondrial  and Y-chromosome markers. It takes about 10 minutes if you read all the extra information.
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

             Important to this post is that proto-Khoisan people arrived in Southern Africa over a 100 000 years ago. The Bantu migration from Central Africa started approximately 1000 BC and reached Southern Africa around 300 AD, gradually displacing the Khoisan from the northern parts of South Africa with their more advanced agricultural production techniques and weapons made of iron as opposed to bone/stone. The significance of  the lack of paternal Khoisan-DNA in coloured people's genes in terms of their power relations with Europeans and the Bantu is fairly obvious. 

           So, what's the point? Surely this is ancient history and irrelevant today.
 But is it? Let's travel to Botswana...

"Jumanda Galekebone, of the advocacy group First People of the Kalahari, was raised traditionally - learning to hunt and live in symbiosis with nature on the world's second-largest reserve.
'I am very sad and desperate,' he said. 'The government is racist. To them, the Bushman is nothing."

"Galekebone's sentiments are fuelled by statements such as those of Botswana President Ian Khama, who said the Bushmen's hunting lifestyle was an 'archaic fantasy.'
Khama's predecessor Festus Mogae termed the people as 'Stone Age creatures who must change or otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish."
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/africa/features/article_1614852.php/Waiting-for-water-Bushmen-denied-wells-by-Botswana

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/04/0416_030416_san2.html

http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/bushmen




        The question then is whether this is a case of Freire's oppressed turning into the oppressor,  a continuation of precolonial Khoisan displacement by the Bantu,  just another example of post-Neolithic/ post-industrial society grabbing land from hunter-gatherers (see the Survival International link above for more), or whether it's an example of the callousness of the diamond industry. Quite possibly it is all of the above. What no !Kung would  question though, is that it is an attempt to dehumanize them, and that was also the reaction of Coloured people to the statements by Roberts and Manyi.

         Racism is virtually always seen through a  North American prism, and Hollywood determines which discussions are relevant;  usually they focus on issues simple enough not to confuse the general population. Commendable as it is to try and penetrate one's own problems, generalizing the black/white dichotomy internationally provides a convenient cloak for non-white oppressors  to hide the nature of their actions. The real issue at hand is power and the abuse thereof, and when power is used to dehumanize and discriminate against a specific population, I consider it racism.
          
      

        

  

Tertiary Education in Korea and the False Promise of Equal Opportunity

 Literacy and the Literacy Myth:          
    On page 36 the writer refers to how society distributes education to "lower" and "higher" classes of people.  I think in Korea there has been a deliberate move away from this, possibly because of the status associated with a university education, and because the government wanted to show that this kind of education was available to everyone. As a result, many students study at lower-tier universities which will offer them very little opportunity in the job market, as hires are generally made from the top-level universities. In a discussion class about discrimination in hiring practices in the Korean job market, a student told us about her summer job vetting applications for a big company; she basically had to throw out any applicants that hadn't graduated from one of the top universities. This to me implies a false kind of freedom; everyone can get higher education, but it's actually considered worthless by those with the ability to pay salaries.
I also found this quote in an OECD report:
Furthermore, there is a general consensus that university graduates have taken jobs that were designed for college graduates, sometimes as university graduates simply apply for these lower jobs when they are unable to get better jobs, but sometimes because universities have opened baccalaureate programmes that explicitly compete with college programmes. (For example, we heard of lower-quality universities offering four-year programmes in cosmetology, which are surely jobs that should be filled by college or secondary school graduates.)
The OECD Thematic Review of Tertiary Education - Country Note for Korea

14-Feb-2007

lhttp://www.oecd.org/infobycountry/0,3380,en_2649_39263238_1_70555_119663_1_1,00.html

          On the same site this could be contrasted with the Finnish model where there are only 20 universities, which means that many students can't go to university or have to wait for a long time to be accepted. Students who instead go to Polytechnics have no waiting lists and also find jobs relatively easy after completing their studies. It would appear that a bachelor's degree, any bachelor's degree, has lost at least some of its ability to lure students away from career-oriented studies, and a lot if it has to do with the raised status of Polytechnic qualifications in Finland. 

      In conclusion, in spite of the many examples where education has been used to prevent upward mobility of populations,  tertiary preparation for the labor market might not be the time and place to  try and wipe out these differences. A society that wants to open the doors of opportunity for  all should apply quality education much earlier.

A reflection on a week's classes

            This has been an interesting week of classes; and interesting doesn't mean good! Freire said in last week's reading that the oppressor is also harmed through the act of oppression, and I think this week provided an apt example of how this can happen in the classroom. Since I've started teaching Dankook, I've tried to steer clear from stamping down my authority in class, not out of a desire to be loved, but because I believe that it generally affects motivation negatively. This week presented me with a situation where it seemed I had no other way though.

             My Tuesday afternoon class is a 50/50 mix of business and dance students -the first half being motivated and fairly high-level, the second quite the opposite. Up till this week I had attempted through enthusiasm to get the dance students to become more involved, but on Tuesday it seemed as if the business students were actually joining the dance students in being disinterested and even disruptive, continuing to talk to each other even as I was trying to explain something. After a few failed attempts to get things going, I eventually had to resort to "violence" -I took down the names of 3 students for speaking Korean, and the next time somebody didn't answer a question, I did the same thing. I wrote down 5 or 6 names in the next 5 minutes, explaining to them that this would affect their participation scores. The mood in class changed drastically and people started participating, out of fear rather than real interest. At that point I told them that we could do the class like that for the rest of the semester, but that I personally would rather teach than be a policeman. Students nodded, I morphed back into cheerful entertaining mode and the class went fine from there. During group discussions  I went round and made sure that everyone was okay. Mission accomplished, you could say; I'm pretty sure that class is going to shape up very well from here and make some real progress in spite of their level. But this is Machiavelli, not Freire.

           Freire became true the next morning, when for a much smaller reason I gave another class a similar speech to the one above, and motivation immediately dropped. In between classes, speaking to my co-"oppressors", I found that they had been experiencing similar problems, which reinforced my belief that I needed to be stricter in class. The next day, I asked a girl to leave the class if she wasn't interested in participating, the first time I had ever done that in almost 6 years of teaching.

         I believe that  the first instance of "violence" changed me, especially since it had been effective. It influenced my behavior and the "violence" carried over to other classes. After the class where I had asked the girl to leave, I thought about it and realized that I had let myself be caught up in a downward cycle of motivation, and in my classes today I consciously pulled away from exercising authority, with much more positive results.

         I still believe my actions in the original class were appropriate; the only other option at that point would've been to throw my hands up in the air and give up on the class, which I was not prepared to do. The true danger of any "violence", however, lies in its powers of seduction once you have used it.

My pop culture post Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBpoAFRE5iw

The Klipdrift brandy ad is from the post-1994 democracy era. The emphasis here is on multicultural understanding (3 languages consistently spoken throughout), overcoming linguistic misunderstanding through good cheer and brandy, and the fact that things have changed. They make fun of the white guy who insists on helping people who don't need it, and the black guy is patient, polite, and ultimately grateful for the hospitality.
By this I don't mean that these intentions are absent in South Africa, but it is probably statistically not that prevalent -the brandy company, however, makes it clear that they associate with that kind of drinking.
(Cynics might mention that the ad is about a black family sightseeing on white land in Africa, unless they knew the areas involved and the regional demographics.)

My pop culture posts Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtmIHICLLYk
In terms of how pop culture reflects society and what it aspires to, I've decided on 2 ads for alcoholic products; the first 1, from the 1980's,   is for a beer popular  among white people at the time,  and the second, which was made after 2000, is for a brandy ( a drink that was considered a "working-class white" drink in the 80's).

The interesting thing about the Lion Lager ad for the contemporary South African viewer is not the conspicuous, how shall we put it, "lily-whiteness" of everyone in the ad, but the fact that they were rowing. SA is a dry country and rowing as a team sport is virtually non-existent there -the only times I ever saw it on TV as a kid was when the Henley boat race in upper-class England was broadcasted.

At the time it was very important for White South Africa to align itself with the First World, pragmatically as well as for reasons of morale. For the Afrikaans-speaking population, this meant the British against whom they had lost a war  at the beginning of the 20th century.

Ironically, Lion Lager eventually went off the market -older white people drifted towards Castle Lager, while younger people from the 90's onwards started to drink Black Label, a beer whose advertising targeted working-class black people. All of these beers belonged to the same brewing company -SAB (today SAB-Miller).

Teaching culture in an English class

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=some-40000-foreign-teachers-to-be-assigned-2011-03-27

Mahfuz Yalçınkaya, the press consultant for Eğitim Bir-Sen, another Turkish education union, said his group was not sure whether the foreign teachers would bring a secret agenda along with their language skills to the elementary schools and kindergartens of Turkey.
“There could be missionaries among the teachers, or they may have other goals like promoting their own culture,” he added. 


Even though it wouldn't be surprising if some teachers went to Turkey intending to spread the gospel, I'm not convinced that it in itself poses a threat to Turkish culture. Neither probably does teachers talking about their own or other cultures, but the fact is that a far larger percentage of teachers will probably do that, making the impact much bigger than that of religious proselytizing. Many of the native-speaker English teachers in Korea consider it part of their job to explain Western , and more specifically their own, culture to students, and it would probably be the same in Turkey.

The questions posed by the Turkish education union mentioned above are thus valid, if a bit hyperbolic. As teachers hired to help students improve their English, can it be considered an abuse of our position of power if we use it as an opportunity to explain our cultural viewpoints? Do we really broaden horizons, or are we expounding "broad horizons" according to our culture-specific definition?

A fairly recent article about Chechnya

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/europe/2011/01/26/arabising-chechens-maximum-effect

Putin and the "crusade" against Gadaffi

I found it interesting that Putin was trying to present the current military action against the Libyan government as a "crusade", a war between Christendom and Islam, especially considering (and possibly because of) his own governments' military actions in Chechnya and Georgia.

Note: The Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, distanced his government from the wording of the statement within hours.
http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE72K0DF20110321

a luta continua...

PC's flipping back and forth between English and Korean ... need a post to check what's going on.