Gord has posted a review of Education Fever: Society, Politics, and The Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea by Michael J. Seth. The title alone makes me want to read it, but after reading Gord’s review this book is now on my must read list.

Gord’s review is well written as one would expect from the quality of his past writings. Read the excerpt below or go read the whole thing, it really is compelling.

This book should, in my opinion, be required reading for anyone who’s coming to work as a teacher of any kind in Korea. Why? I believe this for a number of reasons…

...As an individual teacher, the themes of the book were quite familiar to me, for I have faced all of them in my own classroom at one time or another: class size issues, the fast-and-loose approach to standards of admission and academic advancement that results in the graduation of effective incompetents, the (to a Westerner) rather extreme zeal with which Koreans regard education, the universally-agreed-upon insanity of the University Entrance Exam and its paradoxical continuation into the present day, the stunning impotence and occasional outright ineptitude of the Ministry of Education, and the puzzling insistence that university studies (and especially English-language studies) are the hope of the nation. All of these are things I have bumped into myself time and time again.

What the book does is snap these issues into perspective, showing how and why they got the way they did, as well as establishing that, no, you — the white foreign teacher who is encountering these things for the first time ever — are not the only person who perceives there is a problem, and that your simple solution probably would work, in Canada, but for some reason — cultural, societal, linguistic, pedagogical, or logistical — is seen by Koreans as inapplicable. Reading this book, you don’t just realize what the wisest of us have intuited or picked up in conversations — that Koreans see many of these problems too — but you also see that you’re far from the first Westerner to suggest the very same solution to these problems. Most of them walked away in frustration, muttering darkly, and though their predictions about Korea’s economic future turned out to be flat-out-wrong (they thought the society would be stuck in poverty forever) many would agree that socially and developmentally, Korea’s developing much more slowly than it could be, and the bottom line is its educational system.

---

Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Mar 12, 2008 at 07:49 PM
Teaching | Book_Gigilo | Book Reviews | |

A few weeks ago at the KOTESOL conference I attended a presentation by Scott Miles promoting a new book teaching Reading titled Essential Reading. I walked away from that presentation interested in the book and determined to trial it with my students. I used the material with two different first year classes.

Teachers in Japan attending next weeks JALT conference will want to watch Mr. Miles’ presentation.  I have spoken with Scott and confirmed that each attendee will recieve a free copy of the level three book.  The entire series is edited by Mr. Miles and the third book was written by him as well. If you do attend please say hi and let Scott know you heard about the book from my blog.

Below is what I wrote about Miles’ presentation:

The next presentation I attended was also done by a friend, Scott Miles. Scott is the author and series editor on a new series of books teaching reading skills. The series is titled Essential Reading and is designed in a unique way. It’s targetting specifically EFL students in an Asian context. The readings were chosen to be engaging and relevant to Asians at the university level, i.e. material that they would be interested in reading on their own. Each of the readings was also written in a way that it would provide information that students were unlikely to know previously despite being familiar wiht some of the topics. Furthermore the readings were selected to elicit an emotional response and as Scott put it, this means that sometimes “they are not entirely safe”. But if they students respond emotionally they are definitely engaged. Finally there is support for ER built in. There are excerpts from graded readers and each book also has 2-3 graded short stories at the back. All attendees came away with a free copy of book 3.

I have the level three book which according to Mr. Miles in his presentation would likely be good for freshmen students in Korea. I chose to do half of unit two (Punishment) and all of unit three (Extensive Reading).Additionally when teaching I did not have access to the teachers book nor did I do anything special to prepare the material. I ran through the material sequentially and alloted time for each section and did not supplement or change anything.

---

Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Nov 17, 2007 at 02:10 PM
Teaching | Book Reviews | Materials | |