While my roommates went to Osaka and the Manila respectively, I got laryngitis. I know, I know, I have the good life. And while I have been looking every bit as peaked as I felt pretty much all week, I actually went into teach on Saturday. I learned something through my work experience. When teaching a language, it helps if you can talk. *gasp* And when teaching small, affluent, gender-biased children, regularly verbally abused in their schooling system, it helps even more if you can yell (and use fascist principles), but we can save how I am
ruining children and creating culture-bound conformers producing productive contributors to Asian society another day. *
I'm sick is the point of this discussion.
And my Mac has been consistently overheating, so when I stop being sick, I am going to see if the authorized Mac store is indeed an authorized Mac store. (Ok, that wasn't the point at all, but it is a reason this post is ending)
* Do not read
this book and then teach in Asia. It will hold you accountable for all your wrong doings.
3 comments:
Sorry to hear that, Sis.
I think it is a peculiarly American idea that school is something that even should be enjoyable. It is probably something that only a country that has known affluence for as long as we have could believe.
Like the man says "contextualization" or context, to people who speak English rather than molest it, is everything.
Yeah, but I am American and privileged, and one of those people who also thinks that education shouldn't be painful, and that we can resolve the disparity between people who like learning and hate school.
I also think school should do more to foster critical thinking and creativity rather than create dutiful citizens that fear authority and know how to follow the rules rather than do what is right.
But as a teacher, the future dutiful citizens give me far less gray hair. And more often than not, the difficulties of reasoning in a second language are insurmountable.
These things are all true.
However, after a while I decided that our schooling really only does half of its job, and their schooling only does half of its job.
While we foster an independent attitude, they run circles around us in math in science. And I think that is partially because American students expect every part of school (and life) to be fun, and those parts are hard work, no matter how fun Mythbusters is.
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