And the ones that never grow up join the GNP.

More tolerant as they get older. When kids are in the Lord of the Flies stage, they are all beastly, anywhere you go.

Yeah, then they grow up and join the Roh administration.

I guess is sounds all good and nice to talk about “quality experienced teachers” and the poor Koreans getting their money’s worth and all the other crap that has been floating around this topic for years.

The system is a sewer from top to bottom —- and the students or the partents of the younger students help make it that way.

I never wanted to teach kids in Korea (or the US), but I was pleasantly suprised when I did, because you could actual do some teaching with them.

But eventually, the constant phone calls from parents every single day and the nature of the cut throat competition between hakwons, the management was constantly telling you how to do your job —- and as someone noted, these people aren’t educators to begin with —- and all the instructors would get a steady dose of things like “Do X because Mrs. Kim said her son liked X.” Then a week later, “Why are you doing X! Mrs. Lee said she doesn’t think X is the right way to learn English and she is taking her little girl to another school!!”

With private “lessons” it is even worse. (I mean with ESL, not content instruction like math or science the Korean illegal tutors do).

But this is just more burger flipper whinning….

I didn’t care much for the people who could come to another nation and knowingly break the law in such a manner as illegal langauge instruction.

But as I keep saying —– it seemed to me they were some of the few expats who had figured out how to work the system the way the Koreans have designed it.

Do Korean parents/schools teach that bullying is wrong? I know it might sound like an obvious point… but to me, it is also obvious to teach kids they should not play in the road, and that is not taught in Korea. Anyhow, I am seriously curious about the point. I can see that, in general, Korean parents are pretty lax with the discipline, at least before their children are around 8 or so.

Yes, the bullying is always related to being “different”. Adult Koreans are almost always really nice, having grown out of it or perhaps being more circumspect about their contempt (I prefer to think the former), but the primary school-age kids are starting to get consistently mean. I shudder to think what the high school kids are like.

Odd, people are always saying that the succeeding generations are becoming more tolerant.

The latest antagonist, having studied Engrishee, has found that she can pull Debbie’s chain by declaring that Debbie can’t speak English, that the bully’s English is better than Debbie’s, and one hilarious variation has been that Debbie’s daddy can’t speak English. Debbie’s fully and fluently bilingual (actually, she speaks some Japanese now too), knows hundreds of Chinese characters and has won a prize for calligraphy — so her Korean is better than those little fools’ as well. But she doesn’t deal with it well. What an absurd claim, and so easily beaten (”Your English is good? Great! Show me, turd”), but Debbie is still pretty young and not as good at argumentation.

As for me, I always like to beat down the little bullies. The little neighborhood kids crowd around and ask me the same questions all the time (in Korean) and I always give ‘em a good answer, but sometimes I like to say things like “I’m not here to talk about that. I came to find out why Kyongmee’s ass is so fat.” Bullies are not good at taking it.

Anyway, I expect that when Debbie’s a little older she will come to appreciate taking away good money from their families for nonsense study sessions.

Even with a BA in English, what does that prove? I’ve seen terrible foreign teachers with Masters degrees in English, and really good teachers with no degree working illegally.

The requirement of a university degree means nothing.