Thank you to everyone who made it out to my housewarming party last night. And a very special thank you to the poor cab drivers who had to wander into the middle of nowhere with a bunch of foreigners.
Apparently the consensus is that I do NOT live in the city. Whatever. I’m ten minutes by motorcycle bus from city hall.
My last week at Yale all the teachers had to attend a mandatory seminar about ESL/EFL hosted by the Seoil English Educational System, a company which sells textbooks and curriculums to hogwons.
These guys are serious. They have teaching English to Koreans down to a science. The Seoil books are intended to cover their entire English education from elementary to high school. They’re the ones who published the books with all those silly songs like:
Robots
Robots
I like Robots. I like Robots. How about you?
or
Excuse me, excuse me, where’s the bathroom?
Down the hall. Down the hall. It’s down the hall.
The lecture started off well. Seoil’s talking head-was his name Brad? I don’t remember. I think he was from Oregon, but I could be making that up too-began by talking about the problems Korean students face when learning English and how their speaking often lags behind their other skills. So far, so good.
So Seoil designed this speaking-based curriculum which is designed to get the students to speak better English. I can see why Yale is so into these guys, and it’s funny because my bosses were always very concerned-in a vague, unhelpful way-about if the foreign teachers were giving the students speaking practice and if their speaking was improving.
There’s nothing wrong with focusing on speaking, although Koreans are far less likely to have to use conversational English, and certainly not frequently.
In practice, however, the Seoil system is pretty mindless. In fact, judging from the video that we had to watch during the seminar, the whole curriculum is designed to be boring and monotonous for both the students and the teachers.
Brad explained it as follows (this is paraphrasing): “In a typical lesson, the kids go into the listening labs and learn how to say and respond to certain key phrases. Then the foreign teacher reinforces the lesson the next day with our Seoil flash cards. If the students do not speak well enough, then the next day they have to go back into the listening lab.”
Back to the lab! Ahhhhhhhhhh. These poor kids. It’s like Silence of the Lambs:
“It asks me if I like yogurt or it gets hose again.”
Listening labs are brutally useless, from my experience. The are robotic and train kids to be robots. Not only is their pronunciation still inaccurate, but they have no idea what they’re saying.
Learning phrases in a foreign language without knowing the meaning CAN be useful. When I was studying to become bar mitzvah, I had to learn my torah portion and the tropes so that I could sing it. I spent months learning how to chant pages of text that I wouldn’t understand until I saw the translation in English.
But my bar mitzvah wasn’t ABOUT learning Hebrew. It was about becoming a man, and bringing all my friends and family together and throwing a party and getting lots of money and stuff.
So in a way, Korean students in those listening labs are doing something similar. They’re not really learning English either. Except instead of learning how to be part of the Jewish community, they are learning how to be miserable robots. Mazel Tov!
Back to the model video: the English teacher they have as an example of a “good Seoil teacher” is super creepy. He spoke with this weird exaggerated and affected style (note: NOT his real voice) and was smiling weirdly the whole time.
In retrospect think my old boss got all his ideas about education from this video. The teacher is doing everything I was supposed to be doing. The teacher in the video never sits down; the whole time he is standing and hunched over the kids, popping their personal bubble space. And he’s smiling. The whole time. Have you ever been around somebody who is just smiling blandly no matter what is going on? It’s really unnerving.
I was told that I needed to stare at the kids and smile. I’m glad I didn’t do this.
Anyway, the best part of the video is when they play a game. Here was Mr. Model teacher’s game:
“If you get a question wrong, I take a step closer and then I get to touch you. If you get a question right…well, you’re gonna get one wrong at SOME point.”
I think the kids in the video are too young to realize they should be terrified.
I’m sure the Seoil method is based on thousands of hours of research and expertise and the system was designed by brilliant educators blah blah blah.
Robots. Robots. Robots. I like Robots. I like blocks too. Blocks. Blocks. Blocks. Blocks. Robots. Blocks. Robots. Roblocks. Blobots. I like Robots robots robots robots robots……..
Culture Time 