Yonhap News learned from parents and teachers of middle school D in Jangan-gu, Suwon, where a native-speaker teacher from the United Kingdom came to school drunk and caused a disturbance.
The drunken teacher began teaching sex education to the students in words they could not understand, saying “the reason I’m not married is I don’t want to have kids like you,” and “Dokdo is Japanese.”
An English teacher named Choi who works at a high school in Jeollanam-do said, “they don’t know the basic purpose of education. During lesson song times they just sing songs over and over, 10 or 20 times. I totally fail to see how you can learn English through pop songs.”
English teachers who have to conduct lessons with native-speaker teachers say the biggest problem with them is lack of attention to lesson planning.
One teacher who was worked with a native-speaker teacher for 18 months said, “because elementary school students must be made interested in English, lesson preparation is the most important thing. But native-speaker teachers will prepare just two lessons in a year. Even that is for demonstration lessons.”
One elementary school teacher in Seoul said, “last year a native-speaker teacher who was at school for the first time was gone for a month claiming illness. Then for two weeks the teacher worked, then quit saying it was hard. Finally we went a semester with no native-speaker teacher.”
The Ministry says such native-speaker teachers are a minority, but statistics say otherwise.
Ministry statistics show that from January to April of last year 54 native-speaker teachers quit without notice or resigned for reasons including inability to fit in, work, and illness. That was the number for four months, and is equivalent to 160 in a year. Last year there were over 5,000 native-speaker teachers, a number that indicates a serious problem.
There are also not a few native-speaker teachers who have been caught with insufficient or forged credentials.
And here's a lengthy excerpt from Lim today:
The article gleefully cites the most outrageous cases of teacher misconduct to highlight the gross incompetence, negligence and outright lies involving native-speaker teachers. As an example, it tells of a middle school teacher from Great Britain who came in drunk and began to verbally abuse the students using words they didn't understand. One teacher supposedly told the class, ``The reason I'm not married is I don't want to have kids like you,'' and ``Dokdo is Japanese," while teaching sex education.
Gasp. This is indeed outrageous. Well, at least he didn't say Takeshima. That would have been unbearable and could have caused lasting psychological scars on these defenseless junior high school students. I did have one question, though: If the children didn't understand what the teacher was saying, how did they tell the adults what was actually said?
The article also lists other cases that are sufficiently shocking and disgraceful enough to deserve prime real estate in any British tabloid worth its name. But enough. Granted, the cases are probably not made up, but that's not the point; there is a bigger issue here than just bad and sensationalist journalism. The bigger issue is racism.
This article is not a search for the truth but a list of disparate episodes that have been connected in such a way as to create a narrative that is unjustified, inaccurate and dishonest. It's alarmist. Worse, it's outright racist because it attributes certain failings ― in this case, nothing less than a failure of character ― to a whole group of people based on the actions of a few individuals because they bear superficial physical resemblance, come from comparable cultural backgrounds, or share a similar language skill set.
This is unfortunate because such an attitude goes directly against the Korea Inc. stated attempt to transition itself into a diverse, multicultural and engaged workforce, ready to excel in a global environment.
I criticized Lim a few times in my blog's younger and more vulnerable years for what I considered bad writing on foreign English teachers, though he has delivered several quality pieces since then. I wrote a rebuttal to his piece "Why Not Korean Americans?," and it found its way into the Korea Times back in November, 2007. Go ahead and read "'Why Not Korean Americans' Way Off-base" if you've nothing else to do.
9 comments:
I did have one question, though: If the children didn't understand what the teacher was saying, how did they tell the adults what was actually said?
This was my comment on Brian's post weeks ago. I guess great minds think alike
I can hear the Korean response now: But he's KOREAN! How could he say such things!
Good for Mr. Lim for holding up the mirror, but I hope he is not expecting anything resembling a positive response from his countrymen/women.
One of the things I have noticed over the years is that, with the total absence of education regarding "What is racism" most people do not even realize that they ARE racist. Not their fault, really, since they have no idea what racism is.
He probably means not to paint Korean-Americans with the same brush as the whities under the umbrella of native speaker instructors. Yes, I am reading into his piece a little.
Lim writes some extremely insightful articles. I hope other newspapers pick this up. Ideally the Korean press.
South Korea is an insular, provincial backwater. The sooner everyone accepts this basic fact, the happier everyone will be.
I agree with Jason on this one as Korean-Ams on the whole are a lot more understanding and respectful of Korean culture compared to the "one year in Korea, party hardy, make some money" crowd of typically younger foreign males here...Brian is the one off-base here for just rebutting anything that is against the foreigner crowd.
AK hangs out with different KAs than me, obviously. I've seen them come and go over the years, and they are no less partiers or mercenary than their non-Korean counterparts. In fact, in my experience they are more so; they can bank a LOT more legal coin while here and usually do, bragging all the way to the bank. We won't get into their drinking exploits or "hunting" stories, of which there are many, so please save the "we are better than you" angle.
Oh, you meant that KAs, ON THE WHOLE, are more understanding and respectful? Well allow me to counter that, ON THE WHOLE, foreigners in Korea do not fall into the "one year in Korea, party hardy, make some money" category and, ON THE WHOLE, do not even venture into Hongdae, Itaewon, or other such reported dens of iniquity.
AK, I think if you read more of the posts here you'll see that I don't defend everything NSETs do. I'm pretty critical of the fratboy, tri-delt way of life embraced by some teachers, and am increasingly critical of the "teachers" who don't give a damn.
But I don't think we can make such broad generalizations about the Korean-Americans who come here to teach for a year or two after college. (And I know that columnists are paid---or in my case aren't---to be a little controversial, and I know that it's tough to come up with material each week, so I'm not going to join Lim and that 2007 article at the hip). I know the people I ran into in Bundang when I lived there weren't any different than the other foreign teachers. If anything they were *more* rowdy, percentage-wise, since there were comparatively few of them. And you can't really talk about arrogant foreigners here without acknowledging the Gangnam gyopo crowd. If I can put "teacher" in quotation marks when dealing with some of the Westerners that come here, I can certainly put "discover their Korean roots" in quotation marks when talking about these Korean-Americans. Or should that be "Korean"-Americans?
Is that "Korean"-Americans or, judging by some of their attitudes, Korean-"Americans"?
Post a Comment