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.
2011년 4월 22일 금요일
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
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.
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.
2011년 4월 15일 금요일
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
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/04/2011412102514350535.html
2011년 4월 11일 월요일
2011년 4월 9일 토요일
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
2011년 4월 8일 금요일
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
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
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 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.
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