Niels Footman of the JoongAng Ilbo (and a contributing writer to SEOUL magazine, I should add) has started a weekly column on the English-language Korea blog scene. You’ll definitely want to add it to your weekly reading list, especially if you’re interested in what’s being said in the Korea blogosphere.
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61 Comments
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Let me know which hour is yours.
give baduk credit. He was right !
dogbertt wrote:
Let me know which hour is yours.
Oh, I’m a tightly-wound, very fast-running Seiko; I’m right many times a day.
wjk wrote:
give baduk credit. He was right!
That’s what I wonder about. Is this a case of Baduk being incredibly insightful, or is the case of a ranting lunatic coincidentally being right about something?
The one thing that gives me pause about giving Baduk credit is that, so far at least (there’s my nod to Baduk), Dolly the sheep has not been disproven as a fraud, as Baduk has insisted as part of that whole anti-Hwang package.
Dogbertt, what do you think about Putin and his boys trying to help out Saddam and his boys in the opening days of Gulf War II?
Shelton Teacha sad.
Why wasn’t Migukin mentioned?
It’s official: Shelton Teacha Not Cool.
Maybe if I buy Niels a beer at Watts on Tap, I can get a gratuitous mention. Then I can be the true King Of All Media that I aspire to be.*
Oh, anyone interested in having a k-blogosphere meeting at Watts on Tap one night? Please, leave daggers and other sharp instruments of death at home. Just askin.
*Everything before (*) is an attempt a humor. Humor, as you may know, is the process through which someone says (or writes) something they don’t mean in an effort to produce a chuckle. This concludes our official moment of buying you a clue.
Shelton, stop calling yourself “Shelton Teacha.”
That is sad.
(I bring this up only because you call yourself that even when there are no asterisks around.)
Laying out your twisted plans for media domination, though… that could get you a spot as the villain who gets killed first in a mediocre Bond flick.
If you want to meet up with other K-bloggers, you’ll have to find them first. And finding them will be a part of the educational rungs of the ladder that you felt free to skip.
Kushibo,
http://koreanamerican431.blogspot.com/
About Hwang, I was about 90% sure when he announced that he followed Dr.Wilmut’s method and created the first human “clone” stem cell. I followed the experimental progress after Dolly. There was none. Dr. Wilmut’s method is not made public (only description) and few labs were able to duplicate the feat, if it ever was a truth. Knowing Korean scientists and business people, I judged him to be lying and I was right.
However, when he lied again and claimed that he made eleven more, even I was shaken. I guess lying big has its merits. Yet, he continued to exhibit typical behavior patterns for a lying scientist. He did not stay in the lab(Like Schulz of the Hogan’s heroes, he did not want to know about what went on in the lab). He made exaggerated claims about the future of cloning. He played media. The conclusion: He is not a scientist looking for truth. He is a f***.
Now Wilmut behaves like a f***. I still think Dolly is a lie.
Well, the history of talking about myself in the third person is thus:
In class, students will often say things like, “Shelton Teacha tired?”
You find youself saying, “Yes, Shelton Teacha tired.”
Given my personality, I find this funny enough that now — for ironic comic effect — I will often refer to myself in the third-person.
But maybe that’s just me being my usual cloyingly annoying self.
Wink.
Like Schulz of the Hogan’s heroes, he did not want to know about what went on in the lab
At the end of the war, Allied investigators found Sgt. Hans Georg Schultz utterly useless when it came to finding out about the Nazi eugenics programs. He didn’t seem to know much about mistreatment of prisoners of war, either.
Colonel Wilhelm Klink did not fare so well. A Russian patrol caught him driving a stolen American jeep and dressed as a Polish peasant. He was convicted of crimes against the peace and crimes against the Soviet Union, hanged in Leningrad, and buried in an unmarked grave. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Col. Hogan, Cpl. LeBeau, Sgt. Kinchloe, Sgt. Carter, Sgt. Baker, and Cpl. Newkirk managed to find where their beloved friend was buried, had him disinterred, and then given a proper funeral in his native village in the Bavarian mountains.
Helga and Hilda also ran afoul of the occupying authorities. Both spent about nine months in prison before their assistance to the POWs became known.
Everything I learned in school I could have picked up watching Hogan’s Heroes. Sorry, Mom and Dad.
You find youself saying, “Yes, Shelton Teacha tired.”
No. When I’m teaching, I find myself correcting my students. Isn’t that what you’re being paid to do. It seems your role should not be to reinforce Konglishy forms of communication.
If you ever caught yourself referring to “Shelton Teach’s hand phone,” then you should quit now.
Granted, I don’t teach English and I certainly don’t teach kids, but how hard would it be to get them to call you Mr. Bumgarner, or at least Mr. Bum?
Back when I was their age, all my teachers were Ms., Mr., or Mrs. [surname OR truncation of surname].
There’s a homeless guy downtown that once a week reads off a complete list of U.S. Senators and Representatives, and after each name he reads a crime that the congressman is supposed to have committed. Rape, murder, arson, extortion, child abuse, kidnapping, genocide…it runs the gamut. I’m guessing that sometime in the last few years, he probably randomly matched Tom Delay’s name with conspiracy. It doesn’t mean he knows squat about DeLay or that he’s knowledgeable about anything in general. All it means is that if you scattershot bullshit long enough, you’re bound to hit something.
Baduk has rattled off so many raving lunatic conspiracy theories in the comments section of this and several other blogs about so many different topics, that the amazing coincidence would be if he did NOT nail something eventually.
Calling him “prescient” on Hwang is ridiculous. He’s opposed to cloning on religious and moral grounds, and has proclaimed all cloning technology from all sources to be fraud, including those that have withstood scientific verification. He simply does not want to believe in the technology because it violates “God’s Law,” and the easiest way for him to deny its existence and potential impact on society is to proclaim the entire industry a fraud.
You can bet that when (and its only a matter of time) the technology reaches the stage where human cloning is a reality, baduk will be spewing the same crap he is now, and no amount of proof will convince him otherwise. He could witness the whole process, do the DNA testing himself, and if it came out a positive match, he’d start raving about the yakuza and the CIA fixing the results.
I’ve seen monkeys and dogs pick better stocks and football winners in contests against human experts. That doesn’t mean I’m dumb enough to call the monkeys and dogs “prescient,” or would give them any credit for having any kind of ability.
Apparently though, at least one journalist at the Joongang Ilbo would.
To paraphrase Eddie Murphy:
“His momma done name him ‘Bum’, I’m'a gonna call him ‘Bum’.”
And that’s just Ted Kennedy.
kushibo, I’m afraid I’m going to have to call you on this one.
In that strange land known as hagwons, Korean kids almost 99 percent of the time use the traditional Korean idea* of puting your honorific after your first name instead of before your last name. Thus, I’m Shelton Teacher not Mr. Bumgarner.
I’ve been in Korea long enough that the idea of my students calling me “Mr. Bumgarner” is a hoot or put another way, “STRANGIE, TEACHA, STRANGIE!”
*That’s a guess on my part. I know there is some Korean to English going on, but the exact nature is fuzzy in my mind.
Shelton, I’m afraid I’m going to have to call you on this one.
You made this odd comment, “Korean kids almost 99 percent of the time use the traditional Korean idea* of puting your honorific after your first name instead of before your last name.”
Where to start…. First, disabuse yourself of the notion that “teacher” is an honorific. It is nothing of the sort. In an educational setting, it is a job description. Nothing more. Nothing less.
In Korean, if you don’t know someone’s job title or social position, you politely refer to them as “Seonsaeng-nim” (”teacher”). This is the colloquial equivalent of referring to someone “Mr.” or “Ms”.
However, in a teacher’s case, calling you “teacher” is simply refering to your job title. So. calling you “teacher” or “Seonsaeng” is NOT honoring you. It is simply stating a fact.
If you want to analyze the “honor” part of it. there are a comple of things to note.
1. If you want to bestow an honorific on somone, you add “nim” to their title or description. Thus, in the word “Seonsaeng-nim”, it it the “nim” that is the honorific, not the “seonsaeng” part. One of the subleties of Korean is that failing to add “nim” to someone’s title is not simply treating them neutrally. IIt is, in effect, a sign of lack of respect or disrespect. Thus, if you are called simply “teacher” or “seonsang” it is not a compliment and you are not being honored. On the contrary, you are specifically NOT being honored.
2. A social, professional, or academic subordinate will very rarely (almost NEVER) use both a superior’s family and given names, and they will NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER use ONLY a superior’s first name. To do so would be unquestionably and probably unforgivably, disrespectfully rude, insulting, and offensive.
It is not a “traditional Korean idea” to put an honorific after a given name. The only reason it seems that way is that family names come before given names in Korea. If a teacher’s name is Hong Gil Dong, you will NEVER…not in a MILLION YEARS…. hear a korean student refer to the teacher as “Gil Dong seonsaeng” or even “Gil Dong Seonsaeng-nim” it will ALWAYS be “Hong Seonsaeng-nim” or just “Seonsaeng-nim”.
Thus, to allow your students to call you Shelton Teacher is far from being an honorific in any remotely conceiveable sense. In fact it is doubly disrespectful in that you are not given the “nim” honorific (which could be equated with “Mr.” when afixed to a job description)and your socially inferior students are calling you by only your first name.
You can either insist on being treated with respect, or you can continue to allow Koreans to think that it is ok to refrain from giving foreign English teachers the same basic courtesy and respect that is given to Korean teachers and any other member of society.
Koreans aren’t retarded. Like all people, they have an ability to learn and want to have opportunities to learn — not to be patronized. Speak proper English, and give your students a good grounding, Mr. Bum. That’s what they (their parents) are paying for. If you speakee Konglishee to them, you’re a thief.
iheartblueballs,
“Baduk has rattled off so many raving lunatic conspiracy theories in the comments section of this and several other blogs about so many different topics” - uh, do you care to elaborate? Character assassination without quoting even one example is a sign of a weak mind.
“He’s opposed to cloning on religious and moral grounds, and has proclaimed all cloning technology from all sources to be fraud, including those that have withstood scientific verification” - Do you know of any somatic cloning articles that withstood verification? Do you have any idea about how much “verification” is done when some cloning articles are published in scientific journal, even ones respected as the best of the field such as Nature and Science? Hwang was almost named the best scientist by the Time magazine. Two years ago, when I said Hwang is lying, every one considered me a mad man. They all said so many people work in Hwang’s lab and they cannot be all lying. Well, they were! I am a scientist by training (M.S in Chemistry) and have worked in biology research labs and you have not. End of discussion.
Jeff, be fair. You might hear Korean a kid using the teacher’s first name, sotto voce. But if you did, the teacher might hear it too — and it would be followed by the sounds of the kid getting a first-class thrashing. “What?! Am I your buddy?!!! We’ll see what kind of buddy I am, you little shit!” Using the teacher’s first name would be a transgression of the highest order.
As I alluded to, I wasn’t sure about its exact nature. I used the term “honorific” because to me that seemed to be what it was — they were using “Teacher” instead of “Mr.”
I regret that I misinformed anyone. I’m sure your minds will recover soon enough. Anyone wishing to do issue a class-action suit against me for my horrible crime against humanity. I just know from my personal experience that I am called “Shelton Teacher” all the time. I was trying to explain my personal experience using what knowledge I had.
mae-long
Are you sure the students are not saying “Shelton 미쳐”?
I regret that I misinformed anyone. I’m sure your minds will recover soon enough. Anyone wishing to do issue a class-action suit against me for my horrible crime against humanity may contact me.
that’s what I meant to say. sorry. I’m flustered and at work.
Wilmut now says he is not the one who made Dolly. According to his recent testimony in the court, he say the Dolly’s inventor is Prof Keith Campbell. WTF! He gave lectures all around the world, received all the credit and even wined and dined with Dr. Hwang. Now, he says he was just a figure head. The true inventor is Dr. Campbell, who mysterious quit the lab right after Dolly was made. A pang of conscience, maybe? A true scientist cannot look in the mirror in the morning when he knows he is a fake.
Dr. Wilmut and Dr. Hwang can live with that. But, true scientists cannot.
Maybe Wilmut was afraid when Hwang got caught. Other scientific evidences, including Telomere evidence, are mounting against somatic cloning method alleged used in making Dolly. Wilmut is preparing for that eventuality and putting Campbell’s name to the public. Maybe, Campbell threatened Wilmut that he would expose the lie. Wilmut maybe getting back at Campbell. Scientific world is sometimes very similar to Godfather world.
When Hwang got found out about his lies, he said
1) I don’t much about human cell lines. I am a vetenarian by training.
2) I trusted my subordinate, Mr. Kim Sunjong, who switched the cell lines.
3) I am innocent. Actually, my career is ruined and I am the victim.
Dr. Wilmut is preparing to use the same defense.
1) I did not actually do the lab work. Dr. Campbell did. (How come he never have said this for last ten years?)
2) I did not know scientists can lie like that. I trusted Dr. Campbell and had no reason to question his integrity.
3) I am innocent. Actually, I am the victim.
Dr. Wilmut is pulling Hwang. Englishmen and the Japanese can lie just like Koreans, including scientists.
When questioned about Telomere lengths in Dolly, Wilmut said that he “personally” observed Dolly’s DNA and found them to be shorter.
Dr. Jerry Yang, another f***, who claimed to have cloned a cow by Wilmut’s method, says, for his cows, the telomere length was the same as newborn cow!!! WTF!
So, according to these two f***s, for a lamb telomere gets shorter but for a cow telomere grows back. This is such stupid contradiction and at least one of the two is lying. Or, if I am correct, there was no somatic cloning to begin with in the first place.
Hwang’s group used thousands and thousands of human eggs. If Wilmut’s method works, how come Korean team has never been successful, even with the “glorified” Chopstick technique?
SNUPPY is a proof of a somatic cloning? Who supplied the blood samples to Korean university investigation team? Dr. Lee Byungchun, the same guy who was under investigation. WTF!
The method does not work. And, these f***s are fooling the entire earth population (except moi and a few biologists who are silent on the topic in fear of losing job). A naked emperor!
Actually, any trained EFL professional would know to respond to a student of such ability with something like ‘Yes, I am. I am tired.’ That’s what real teachers do, Skeleton.
Hee-hee.
You’re a hoot.
I am not a trained EFL professional. I fear 99 percent of the people teaching EFL in Korea, aren’t either. That’s kinda the whole point/problem. I’m just a dude who has a BA and was born in the United States. Shrug.
I think any “trained EFL professional” who was a human being and not a trained robot would eventually find themselves saying something like, “Yes, Shelton Teacha tired.”
MAE-LONG
MAE-LONG
MAE-LONG
MAE-LONG
Shelton 미쳐,
Nothing personal, but the odds are very low that you will ever get a job as a full-time writer, so I’d suggest that you start taking your current job a little more seriously. You are the one receiving a salary, not the children. You are there for them. They are not there for you.
I would like to know if there is an RSS feed for this weekly digest of English lanaguage blogs on Korea. I looked around the joongang but couldn’t find one. That would be very useful instead of trying to remember to check in each week.
My own delightful daughters, being born in Korea in a bi-cultural household (they’re mongrels, in other words), are in the course of acquiring — hopefully, at a very high level — English-Korean bilingualism through living with their Daddy and through attendance at a very expensive foreigners’ school. Whenever either of them makes some grammatical error I always make a point to show them the correct usage, and make ‘em repeat after me a couple of times with a couple of variants, exactly as the trained EFL professional would. Otherwise, how on Earth would they ever acquire it? (Well, there’s always Lizzie McGuire on DVD.)
Now for some bragging: My oldest girl Debbie (age
has recently passed the Korean national Chinese-characters examination for “pre-Level 4″, which, I understand, is for middle-schoolers. Beats the heck out of the 50-odd characters I can scrawl. And, she’s a junior black belt in Taekwon-do. If she came back from the expensive foreigners’ school saying “Teacha tired” I would have great concern about my money being wasted.
“Teacha” Mr. Bum is really not doing his job diligently. He’s a thief. Couple that with poor judgment (buying booze for middle-schoolers) and the extreme needy neuroses he displays here, and my suggestion is Blogger’s Night at Watts on Tap or wherever ought to be released on a Need to Know Basis.
That is indeed what you seem to think. Not that you’d know of course, because - as you’ve already mentioned - you aren’t one. Instead, you’re simply a guy who takes money from language-learners while reinforcing their mistakes.
Eh. This is one issue on which I am sympathetic to Shelton. Most hagwons are so much snake oil… If one’s boss is a thief and one’s clients are loonies, I don’t see why a random, much-abused, bottom-of-the-totem-pole employee ought to be the one person in the whole dysfunctional food chain who takes the job seriously.
Free markets at their finest — when the customers start demanding competence and the owners start caring, then teachers will be held to a higher standard. Treat teachers like crap, and (surprise, surprise) you get crappy teachers.
(On the other hand, there really is no excuse for enjoying Watt’s on Tap or Norihaneun Saramdeul… dreadful bars)
He don’t know me very well, do he?
As for the other usual personal attacks:
People who mean well:
Mae-long
People who don’t:
It’s “B-U-M-G-A-R-N-E-R,” suckahs
Shelton,
You remind me of the American Idol rejects who wail on about the judges not recognizing talent when they see it. Meanwhile, they are being led out the door and the audience is laughing at them, not with them.
By the way, I was being kind when I said the odds of you finding a full-time job as a writer were very low.
About the hagwon thing. I have heard and experienced (first and only hagwan job back in 2k) that some managers specifically tell the workers not to bother “teaching”. Basically, teaching is not the reason why they are there in many cases.
“Whenever either of them makes some grammatical error I always make a point to show them the correct usage, and make ‘em repeat after me a couple of times with a couple of variants, exactly as the trained EFL professional would.”
PPP (presentation, practice, production) is not really current. It only sticks around due to ‘professionalizing’ the presenter (teacher) and that it has a seemingly tangible goal. There is no evidence that it actually has any benefit at all. On the flipside, it certainly does not hurt.
It would appear that most grammatical morphemes (off topic a bit but related) are acquired in a relatively set pattern - regardless of input.
Give Shelton a break here. How many terminally unfunny people do you know who have the courtesy to identify when and where they are TRYING to be humorous?
This has got to be one of the most fricken sick threads I have seen in the Hole.
Is their some kind of twisted interpersonal dynamic between Shelton and the rest of the peanut gallery here that I have missed?
*Everything before (*) is an attempt a humor. Humor, as you may know, is the process through which someone says (or writes) something they don’t mean in an effort to produce a chuckle. This concludes our official moment of buying you a clue.
Arrogance and genius, though irritating, is tolerable.
Arrogance and ignorance is not.
Shelton Teacha sad.
Why wasn’t Migukin mentioned?
It’s official: Shelton Teacha Not Cool.
In a nutshell, Shelton attracts vitriol because he can’t write anything without ultimately turning the focus of the piece onto himself. The lack of sincerity in his writing is mind-blowing.
In case he decides to reply (again) stating that we just don’t get it, I’ll rebut in advance by referring you to my previous post comparing him to American Idol rejects.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I can’t speak for others.
EFL Geek said
“I would like to know if there is an RSS feed for this weekly digest of English lanaguage blogs on Korea. I looked around the joongang but couldn’t find one. That would be very useful instead of trying to remember to check in each week.”
I’m not sure about the list of blogs in the JaD article but the top of this page has an aggregator for pretty much all the decent blogs in this area… might be the type of thing you’re after.
peace
Buddhist monk walks up to a hot dog stand and says, “Make me one with everything.”
Now _that’s_ funny.
Shelton, take note.
Bum, Dogbertt teacha cool
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear:
The ongoing soap opera of Shelton-vs.-everyone else once again rears its ugly head. How can I resist but to put in my two cents’ worth?
Shelton, honestly, you are doing both yourself and your students a grave disservice by not correcting them. It would be so trivially easy to ask them to address you in another manner and be firm about it. And typing out here on this blog their Konglish pronunciation is just tacky, to me. They’re not calling you “Teacha,” they’re calling you “Teacher.”
That said, Jeff in Korea’s rant was uncalled for, was it not? Yes, it was right of J in K to disabuse Shelton of his mangled terminology—and thinking that the way he is addressed is somehow properly “Korean,” but on the first matter, I think Shelton simply meant “title” and not “honorific.” On the second matter, I have more to say below.
Before I get going, I defer to Jeff in Korea’s many years of experience (according to a passing comment on his blog), and I’ll add that I have never taught English in Korea, so I do not have firsthand experience of the wonders of Hagwon dynamics.
Anyhow, are his students deliberatly setting out to maliciously “doubly” disrespect him by not calling him “Shelton Teacher” and not Bumgarner Seonsaengnim!? Did they have a secret conference and agree among themselves, “Let’s show this foreign teacher the ultimate disrespect by calling him by his first name (shock, horror!), then drop the honorific -nim prefix from his job title”!? Come on now, really!
Shelton probably introduces himself on day one with each new class as “Shelton.” Yes, he should be treated with the same respect as Koreans his age, which means that were he to be addressed in Korean, he should be called Seonsaengnim or perhaps, were the distinction necessary, Bumgarner Seongsaengnim. But if he introduced himself as Shelton and he’s not a Korean anyway, they probably didn’t have anything better to go on than to address him by what he said or implied he’d prefer to be addressed by.
His students added the “Teacher” as a translation of Seonsaeng(nim). For all we know, the honorific -nim suffix is implicitly there, but since both Seonsaeng and Seonsaengnim would translate into English as “Teacher” (unless you want to say in some faux, Lafcadio-Hearne-(?)-slash-70s-B-dubbed-martial-arts-movie style of English, “honorable teacher” for the latter), it comes out the same. One certainly wouldn’t expect them to say “Teacher-nim,” would one?
In the end, through implicit consensus, his students settled on what seemed most comfortable: a strange combination of his personal preference (his first name) and a translation of the term of address they would use for a Korean teacher. Since he neglectfully not corrected them of this practice, they continue to address him in that way. I do think Shelton should do something about this, but I do not by any means think that they are laughing behind his back at their cunningly getting away with not-so-subtle displays of linguistic trickery!
Or am I just naive in all of this? Since most of my encounters are with strangers (who don’t know my name) or family members (who address me by kinship terms or name, as the case may be), I haven’t actually been in a situation in which I should have been addressed by my surname but was addressed by my given name instead, so I can’t really speak from first-hand experience on this. But more generally, I cannot recall any incident in recent memory where someone younger than I or in my generation (or even ten to twenty years) older spoke inappropriately to me, nor even any incident in recent memory where a stranger significantly older than I spoke impolitely to me. (In Korean, that is: English is another matter, as of course I have had to put up with the usual bemused “Hello!”s (in English) from school-age kids on the street, which seem to be more for entertainment value on their part than for anything else.)
That said, Shelton, you really should insist on their addressing you as Mr. Bumgarner. That’s how they should address you, as that is how most English-speaking students (at least at the pre-university level) are expected to address their teachers. And their parents are paying you (minus your boss’s undoubtedly hefty cut, admittedly) to teach them how native English speakers speak. (Leaving all possible comments on the Hagwon system (e.g., Haisan’s above) aside.) Never mind that they find it “strange”: so is the fact, from their point of view, that we put a verb before its direct object, no doubt, or our inscrutable use of “a(n)” versus “the.”
End of rant. Given the recent very heated trend of discussions and comments on the Marmot’s Hole and elsewhere, this post was about the safest place to let off some steam!
Well, apart from all the other small typos here and their, I do need to correct this one logical error in my post above:
Anyhow, are his students deliberately setting out to maliciously “doubly” disrespect him by not calling him “Shelton Teacher” and not Bumgarner Seonsaengnim!?
Dagnabit, there was supposed to be strikethrough in that there last paragraph!
Anyhow, are his students deliberately setting out to maliciously “doubly” disrespect him by calling him “Shelton Teacher” and not Bumgarner Seonsaengnim!?
Sorry, what I was getting in at in that long, rambling rant was that I don’t think there is any default system at work whereby Shelton is being deliberately disrespected in the way that he is being addressed. That said, I do agree that he should do something about it, and not let it slide.
shelton, shelton, shelton…
Perhaps they were actually calling him ‘charlatan teacher’. If I were one of those students, Lord knows I’d be tempted, especially after having paid all that money.
Maybe his students are all drunk and slurring their words.
It seems silly to point out that “Bumgarner” is rather unwieldy from the standpoint of speakers of a language where surnames are completely monosyllabic. On top of that, ‘arner’ is nearly impossible for the majority of Koreans to pronounce. It would be more of a disservice to spend the majority of class time repeating the correct pronunciation of ‘Bumgarner’ ad nauseum rather than teaching things more cogent to English language and comprehension. For example, a friend of mine has a multisyllabic last name which is nearly impossible for a Korean to pronounce if only for the absence of the ‘f’ sound in the Korean language; her first name is a single syllable. Do you think she spends the majority of the class trying to teach her students how to pronounce her name or do you think she simply goes by her first name to facilitate things. This makes sense to me. There is no patent disrespect shown to Shelton by his students, however, the majority of you who are childishly butchering his last name and the like.
As a side note. Calling someone sunsaeng-nim or teacher in general is an upgrade from calling someone ajushi.
Good point. I was thinking about that (his three-syllable last name), but then forgout about it. 범가너 might work, although it’s deliberately dropping the ㄹ’s to speed up pronunciation (although of course in many widely spoken varieties of English, those r’s are dropped anyhow—or the preceding vowels or rhotized (is that the correct term?)).
So to simplify things, more efficient terms of address that are also idiomatic English might simply be “Shelton” (as some university profs in the English-speaking world prefer to be addressed) or “Teacher” (as some students address some teachers).
“Shelton Teacher” doesn’t seem disrespectful to me (for reasons given above and elaborated by Random Guy), but to a native English speaker who wasn’t familiar with Korean at all, it would just sound highly unnatural, so I really don’t think it should be encouraged.
Yep — exactly. And as an illustration, here we are, talking about him instead of the topic at hand.
Can’t pronounce the r’s? Oh, boo hoo. So they end up sounding like New or Old Englanders.
For kids, calling him Mr. Bum would be, as I stated in the beginning, would be acceptable while still retaining an air of authentic English communication. Same with calling him Mr. B.
I had a Mrs. Kahoutek whom the elementary school kids — native English speakers, most of them — called Mrs. K. As a child I had a dentist with a long and unwieldy last name whom everyone called Dr. Ernie, after his first name.
If “미스터 범가너” is too hard for his students to muster, I fear for these child when it is time to learn their own home address.
Has anyone looked into the propriety of Bumgarner teaching minors?
In an effort to keep my number of posts down, here’s one single mega-post:
Shelton Teacha wrote:
kushibo, I’m afraid I’m going to have to call you on this one.
Thank goodness for caller-ID.
In that strange land known as hagwons, Korean kids almost 99 percent of the time use the traditional Korean idea* of puting your honorific after your first name instead of before your last name. Thus, I’m Shelton Teacher not Mr. Bumgarner.
And it’s your job to cure them of this habit. You are there to teach them English, not reinforce Konglish. You’ve heard the term “Monkey see, monkey do,” right? Well, the little monkeys are going to follow the big monkey, if not immediately then eventually, on matters such as this. If 셸턴선생님 let’s us call him Shelton Teacha without saying anything, then it must be okay.
Jeff in Korea wrote:
Where to start…. First, disabuse yourself of the notion that “teacher” is an honorific. It is nothing of the sort. In an educational setting, it is a job description. Nothing more. Nothing less.
I have to agree with Curious Sewing here and say that “teacher/teacha” is a substitute for 선생님, thus whatever respect the students impart with 선생님 is imparted with “teacher/teacha.” Shelton gets enough jeers from this audience without us making him think his students have no more respect for him than they would a shaved ape.
Iceberg wrote:
Are you sure the students are not saying “Shelton 미쳐”?
Iceberg, that’s cold. Funny, but cold.
Nothing personal, but the odds are very low that you will ever get a job as a full-time writer, so I’d suggest that you start taking your current job a little more seriously. You are the one receiving a salary, not the children. You are there for them. They are not there for you.
Amen. Shelton, you are in some sort of situation where doing a half-assed hack job seems acceptable. If you want to become a valuable member of society in the future, run from your situation now. Run! Run! And also listen to the constructive criticism of others. Keep running!
Shelton wrote:
I am not a trained EFL professional. I fear 99 percent of the people teaching EFL in Korea, aren’t either. That’s kinda the whole point/problem. I’m just a dude who has a BA and was born in the United States. Shrug.
Your defense has never been ignorance, but laziness. Now it’s laziness and being seriously disqualified. That, sir, is no defense.
I think any “trained EFL professional” who was a human being and not a trained robot would eventually find themselves saying something like, “Yes, Shelton Teacha tired.”
My ex is a trained EFL professional, and she would slap you upside the head for saying that, Shelton. Then she would steal your exercise equipment, because that’s what she does.
[For] people who don’t [mean well]:
It’s “B-U-M-G-A-R-N-E-R,” suckahs
You had to read that off your palm, didn’t you?
Haisan wrote:
Eh. This is one issue on which I am sympathetic to Shelton. Most hagwons are so much snake oil… If one’s boss is a thief and one’s clients are loonies, I don’t see why a random, much-abused, bottom-of-the-totem-pole employee ought to be the one person in the whole dysfunctional food chain who takes the job seriously.
And we established that Shelton’s hagwon and boss were like this…when? I am not sympathetic to anyone who thinks they have a right to do a half-assed job because OTHER people were treated badly at some other place.
If Shelton’s place of employment were really that bad, then get thee to some other nursery right away. It would be better for all involved.
Andy Jackson wrote:
Is their some kind of twisted interpersonal dynamic between Shelton and the rest of the peanut gallery here that I have missed?
The dynamic is a confluence of self-aggrandizement, arrogance, ignorance, and stubbornness. The rest of us are just throwing tomatoes at the stage.
tlqtoRl wrote:
kushibo, way to many comments.
Yeah, I felt the same about your one.
But yeah, I have been violating my own standard of only one comment per thread, but I have decided to make exceptions to this well-intentioned rule when I am personally involved. It’s the Korean in me.
kushibo,
But yeah, I have been violating my own standard of only one comment per thread, but I have decided to make exceptions to this well-intentioned rule when I am personally involved. It’s the Korean in me.
hehe. It’s actually nice to see you write more than one post
…Oh, and with respect to Haisan, can we really blame the parents who send their kids to hagwons? The pressure is so intense to get one’s kids into the best elementary school, then the best high school, then the best university—all so that they can have the right university’s name on their resume and get a half-decent job at the end of it all. The parents are working their butts off trying to ensure a successful outcome for their kids. If they can’t afford to send their children abroad for a few months or years to study English (as seems to be the preferred option), hagwons are the best they can do or afford. There are a few parents who may really go the extra mile and actively seek out the optimal means for their children to really learn English, but I would imagine for most that hagwons—being so plentiful and so close by in the neighbourhood where their kids’ schools are—are the most efficient option. Yes, maybe the hagwon system is dysfunctional (I don’t know from firsthand experience, but that seems to be the general tenor on this forum and elsewhere), but then the entire yuchiwon (preschool)-to-myeongmun daehak (famous university)-to-Samsung/LG/Hyundai system fosters the appearance of hagwons so that the kids can get all the extra training they need just so that they can pass all the English (and math, and science, and history, and Korean, and hanmun) questions on the various entrance examinations they have to endure. I wouldn’t blame the parents in any of this: they’re just trying to do what they think is the best for their kids in an utterly unmerciful system.
my main man shelton,
instead of making a dick of yourself in public, why don’t you drop the writing bit, become a private dick and find out who’s paying all this money for hines wards’ travel expenses and accomodations. i’ll expect a full report within 24 hours.
I, for one, am simply tired of the whole “bemused nebbish in Korea” shtick.
It’s been done to death, jumped the shark, played out.
but it does do wonders for one’s schadenfreude, don’t it?
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