Random Quote
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
---- Terry Pratchett
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
---- Mitch Hedberg
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
---- George Orwell
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
---- H. G. Wells
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
---- Robert Frost
Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
---- Isaac Newton
"It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'"
---- Sam Levenson
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
---- Malcom Forbes
The least of learning is done in the classrooms
---- Thomas Merton
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
---- Franklin D. Roosevelt
Technology will not replace teachers...teachers who use technology will
probably replace teachers who do not.
---- Ray Clifford
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?"
---- Kelvin Throop III
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
---- John Ciardi
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
---- Edward R. Murrow
Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation.
---- Kin Hubbard
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
---- Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1519)
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
---- Charlemagne
The voodoo priest and all his powders were as nothing compared to espresso, cappuccino, and mocha, which are stronger than all the religions of the world combined, and perhaps stronger than the human soul itself.
---- Mark Helprin, Memoir from Antproof Case, 1995
As soon as I buy the moose head, I have to go pick up some KY jelly.
---- Mary Roninette Kowal
Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
---- Terry Pratchett
it's probably not a good idea to underestimate my ability to make an ass out of myself—just when I seem to have it under control, I'll turn around and surprise you.
---- Tenser said the Tensor
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
---- Gail Godwin
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent.
---- Robert Copeland
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.
---- Edward Abbey
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
---- Pablo Picasso
Education Fever
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 06:49 PM
Teaching | Book_Gigilo | Book Reviews |
gordsellar wrote 32 words on Friday Mar 14, 2008 at 11:01 AM
Thanks for your kind words! The book’s a bit steep, but if you cannot find it in your local lilbrary, let me know. I could loan it to you for a while.