Teaching Sexism

I found this horrifying gem a couple of days ago while perusing EFL websites.  Jokes!  What a great teaching tool!  I mean, nothing teaches us more about culture than its humor, right?  So let’s read some North American jokes about love and marriage to teach us about the culture of relationships in the US and Canada:

*A man inserted an ad in the classifieds: “Wife wanted.”
The next day he received a hundred letters. They all said the same thing: “You can have mine.”

Oh, I get it.  It’s because having a wife is such a burden!  I mean, if the bitch didn’t cook and clean, we wouldn’t even put up with her, amiright?

*Q: Why are men with pierced ears better suited for marriage?
A: Because they have suffered and bought jewelry.

Those gold-digging wives!  All they care about is getting their greedy little hands on some bling and making their poor husbands suffer, presumably by working long and hard hours in order to buy wife said jewelry. 

Who thought this was an appropriate lesson for anyone, let alone ESL students?

The Curve

I teach conversation classes to third and fourth year English majors.  They easily have the highest-level English skills of all of the students at my school; they’re engaged, funny, and really dedicated to being the best students they can be and advocating for their own education.  They actually come to my office hours just to chat!  This is why it is so heartbreaking that I’m giving a C+ to students who earned a 90% in my class and a B+ to students who earned a 96%.  The difference between an A and a B student in one of my classes was that one of them came to class late once.   

Most university classes in South Korea are graded on a curve; at my university, only 30% of the students can receive an A — no matter how successful they are or how hard they’ve worked.  They could all bust their asses, come to every class, practice presentations until they’re blue in the face, and still only nine of thirty-two can get an A.  Another 30% must receive a C or lower — for some reason, the computer grading system has decided that although the percentage is the same, nine students can get an A, but ten students must receive a C.

This won’t stop after university.  Most jobs in South Korea have mandatory professional development and evaluations in place that rank employees; raises are partially based on these rankings.  This system of hyper-competition has real life consequences.  If a student has less than a B average at my university, he or she is unable to participate in special programs, like our English intensive course or study abroad.  This means that students are effectively being punished for actually earning As that we’re taking back from them. 

There are those who praise the education system in South Korea for forcing students into high achievement tunnel vision simply because it affects student test scores; however, this model of education is deflating and destructive.  It lowers student and teacher morale. 

The school computers won’t allow grades to be submitted if there is a higher percentage of A grades or B grades than is supposed to be there, and the way we enter grades is by typing in number scores from student work.  What this means is that we have to purposefully enter egregious numbers to lower our students’ scores.  This is not just a practice at my university, but at most private universities in the country.

I’m at a loss for how this is supposed to a good thing in any way for anyone.

UPDATE!  I teach one class that was promoted throughout the department as not having a curve, which is part of the reason students sign up for it; it’s a multi-course program that all of the foreign instructors are part of.  We graded fairly and told the students their grades last week.  Today we got an email telling us that actually, the academic affairs office has decided that only 40% of the students in that class can receive an A… which means that students who think they’re getting an A+ will really be receiving a B.  Way to go, Terrible U! 

New Restrictions on Social Media Postings for Teachers

Pretty thrilled not to be living in Kansas right now…

From the linked NPR article:
“Under the policy, examples of improper use of social media include speech that could incite or produce violence, discloses confidential information or ‘is contrary to the best interests of the employer.'”

That is wide open.  I’m wondering what constitutes “confidential information”.  Pretty sure that under this policy I would already be suspended / fired / tarred and feathered… whatever it is that they do to teachers in Kansas.  

A sampling of hilarious and delightful things my former elementary students wrote:

1.  She (a teacher) is leave because we toke all the time.
2.  My mom is my hoes wife.
3.  When we finished shop, we went to the calculator.
4.  If I will be president I will kill all the people that eat alcholes.
5.  If you don’t brush your teeth you will get plague.
6.  I would travel by Car, becaus If I ride airplane, boat… I’ll throw-up and dizzy.
    I would travel by whale, because it is free of charge, and good at earth.
    I would travel by future traffic. (because it is better than now traffic).

I really miss those kids.

Outsiders

I have this student who always sits apart from the rest of the class… off to the side, next to the wall.  This particular class is a cohort of students who take all of their classes together and basically spend all of their time together.  They’re tight… except this guy.  He always wears a leather jacket; he’s a little pudgy, and he’s got a little bit of a unibrow going on.  When I talk to him, he always smiles, and he’s smart — he doesn’t always do his homework, but when he does, it’s really good.  He gets jokes that the other students don’t get.  His answers are more creative. 

We were doing partner discussion a couple of days ago, and one student was missing, so I took the opportunity to be his partner.  Usually, when I do this, my students freak out a little; they’re scared to speak in English to the instructor for the duration of class (which I understand — speaking in a second language for that long can be exhausting if you’re at a beginner or intermediate level).  But he looked happy. 

We were asking and answering questions that contained idioms related to the body: Do you know someone with a heart of gold?  Did you ever put your foot in your mouth?  What do people do that gets on your nerves?  In the middle of these questions came: Do you know someone who always keeps people at arm’s length?  “Yes,” he said.  “Who?”  I asked.  “Tell me about this person.”  “It’s me!” he replied, and laughed.  Suddenly, I was curious. “Why?” I asked.  “Why?” he repeated.  “Yes.”  “I have a disease,” he said, confidently.           

“Oh,” I said, matter-of-factly.  “Like Asperger’s?”  He didn’t know what that was, so I wrote it down for him.  He looked at it and said, “No.  I have schizophrenia.  Do you know schizophrenia?”  “Yes,” I said.  “I do.”  My heart breaking a little, my face trying to remain neutral. 

In South Korea, there is a serious social stigma against mental illness and physical disability.  I have seen parents not get the proper care or medication for their child because they won’t admit that (s)he needs help.  Families who have differently-abled children often hide them away from society (watch the movie “Oasis” for a dramatic example of this), so it was really surprising that this student so readily admitted this to me, smile on his face. 

I asked if he was seeing a therapist.  Yes, he said — twice a week.  Was he on meds?  Yes.  Then he said, “Don’t worry — it’s not bad.  I just think that my face is changing.”  I made a questioning sound, so he repeated: “I just think my face is changing all the time.  This is my only problem.”  Oh, okay. 

My coworkers think that this kid is an outcast, or maybe a 왕 타 (victim of bullying).  They crack jokes about how he’s the kind of kid who you’d see on the news for school shooting if guns were legal in Korea.  I always just thought he was an introvert.  I would never in a million years tell them about his schizophrenia (he didn’t say to keep it confidential, but it’s the right thing to do), but I will certainly make a quicker and stronger defense of him if he comes up again in conversation. 

After the body idioms discussion and a short film, we moved on to questions involving relationship idioms and largely agreed on our answers.  Neither of us believes in soul mates, we both think that open and honest communication is the best way to patch up a relationship, and neither of us is interested in settling down.  Maybe I feel a kinship to him because I’ve always felt like an outsider too, even from the inside. 

My favorite moment in our whole conversation was this one, though:
Me: Do you believe in love at first sight? 
Him: Yes! 
Me: Why?
Him: Because I fall in love with every girl I see!    

Paying to Pass

A couple of weeks ago, I was unexpectedly called into the English department head’s office; I automatically felt as though I’d done something wrong.  Despite the fact that I’ve been working at this university for two months, this was my first time meeting him.  Here’s how our very first conversation went:

Dr. K: Oh, hello — nice to meet you.
Me: Nice to meet you, too!
Dr. K: I asked you to meet with me because there are three students in your conversation class who have not been coming.  Here are their names.
Me: Yes, I recognize them from the attendance sheet.
Dr. K: These students have jobs, so they cannot attend your class.  I need you to understand their situation and manage their attendance.
Me: Umm… manage?  Can you explain that more clearly?
Dr. K: Yes, well, these students have a job so they cannot come to class.  But they cannot… erm… You shouldn’t… erm…
Me: You’re telling me not to fail them.
Dr. K: You should understand their situation.
Me: So, I should give them D grades?
Dr. K: Well, um, you need to understand that they cannot –
Me: They haven’t stepped foot in my class once.
Dr. K: Yes, but our university helps to prepare students to find a job.  It is not easy.  These students have jobs, so please understand them and maybe a C is okay.
Me, with an are-you-fucking-kidding-me? look on my face: Sigh.  Different culture.
Dr. K: No, it is not the culture.  The enrollment at universities is very competitive these days. We cannot lose students. 
Me, teeth gritted: Oh, I understand. 
Dr. K: Thank you for your understanding. 

I went to the head teacher to discuss this with him; pretty standard, he said.  He’s a businessman, so from his point of view, this is the right thing to do; finding a job is most important thing for our students.  I’m an educator, so I’m struggling with this idea.  To me, education and learning are intrinsically valuable; furthermore, telling students that they don’t actually have to earn their grades not only devalues what we do as teachers, but also what every other student at the university is doing and the university itself. 

After talking to teachers at other universities, I found out that this is standard practice across the board!  University students in Korea: paying to pass.  And I mean, I get it.  Being a university student isn’t going to pay the bills.  But still.   

I told Dr. K later on that I strongly disagree with this practice, but I’ll do as he asks (if I don’t, he would just go into the system and change the grades himself).  Just like my students, I’d really like to keep my job.