nanoomi

For this contest, Rosetta Stone has agreed to give one lucky winner a Level 1 software package of their choice! That’s a $179US value! If you’re thinking about coming to Korea, you’re all set! Going to France? You’re set! Want to visit the bush in Africa? Rosetta Stone can teach you Swahili!

The New York Times published an article last week looking at the reaction to the film “Dogani” (“The Crucible”):

At an appeals court in the southwestern city of Gwangju in 2006, a school official was convicted of raping a 13-year-old deaf girl and sentenced to one year in prison. When the verdict came, an outraged middle-aged man, also deaf, let out an incomprehensible cry from the galley, signaling frantically with sign language.

“It was clear that the man was shouting, ‘This is wrong! This is wrong!”’ Lee Ji-won, a newspaper intern, wrote in her blog later that day under the subject line, “I saw the foul underside of our society.”

The man was forcibly removed for disrupting the courtroom. And that might have been the end of it. Except that the intern’s blog inspired a best-selling author, Gong Ji-young, to write a novel based on the sexual assaults at the Inhwa School for the hearing impaired, the school’s attempts to conceal the abuses and the victims’ struggle for justice.

Now, a film based on that novel — “Dogani,” or “The Crucible” — has roiled South Korea.

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As noted at the Marmot’s Hole Monday, another Korean-American wanted for (attempted) murder has been found to have worked as an English teacher in Korea, and in this case even ran an SAT hagwon. Here’s what the Joongang Daily had to say about it:

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On March 23, OhmyNews published a lengthy article about the new 6th grade elementary school English curriculum, of which a portion is below. One wonders if the reporter was ordered to bash the Lee Myung-bak government and got lost along the way.

Memorize 520 words without teaching how to read?
[Curriculum full of holes, Part 2] How to evaluate, when public English education involves only memorizing words?

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I was looking through the Korea Herald from January 1972 (the National Assembly Library has the original papers bound in large books) and came across the tale of that year’s high school entrance exam, as told in photos. I’m not exactly sure when the high school entrance exam was abolished; the middle school exam ended in 1968, as this photo published on January 12 also hints:

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Earlier I posted a translation of a February 5, 2010 Dong-A Ilbo interview with Anti-English Spectrum’s Lee Eun-ung. A response to the claims made in the article follows. Here are links to the original foreign media articles (National Post, Vancouver Sun, LA Times (Feb. 2009, Jan. 2010)) referred to in the Dong-A Ilbo article.

At the beginning of the article, it asks “Why are foreign media ‘attacking the citizen’s group?’” and “attacking” is in quotes; not so a few sentences later: “Why are you receiving such attacks?” The reporter decided to turn the debate into “us vs. them” – “malicious foreign press reports are distorting things Korean.” This is amusing when you realize that in reality, one of the most critical statements made about Anti-English Spectrum came from an ROK diplomat, Younggoog Park, Minister-Counsellor of Public Affairs at the Korea Embassy in Ottawa:

“Their reactionary views and opinions do not represent the sentiment of Koreans toward Canadians or other foreign teachers,” Park told the CBC’s The Current.

Lee then takes the chance to once again reiterate the reason for forming AES – the English Spectrum incident: “During this incident, postings like ‘Picking up Korean women is easy… I had sex with a middle school girl’ enraged Koreans.” He fails to mention, as always, that the “How to mollest[sic] your students” post on Korean ESL (from which the “I had sex with a middle school girl” quote came) also enraged the foreign English teachers who read it when it was first posted a year and a half before it was discovered by Koreans. For once, due only to the criticism brought up in foreign media reports, Lee does actually admit something he never has before: “[A]mong the people who first joined our group, some concentrated only on attacking and degrading women who date foreigners.”

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In early February the Dong-A Ilbo published two articles (by the same reporter, Kim Hyeon-jin) about Anti-English Spectrum. A short piece, titled “‘Stalkers’ vs ‘Protection of Korean Students,’” was translated by Korea Beat at the time. The longer interview with Lee Eun-ung, which was never translated, is below. (Many thanks to Coola for help with the translation.) I’ll follow this with a deconstruction of the claims made in the interview tomorrow.

Is the “Movement to Expel Bad English Teachers” stalking?

Stalking? Racial discrimination? The manager of the group to “Expel Bad Native Speaking Teachers,” Lee Eun-ung.

The 'LA Times' January 31 interview with the manager of “Citizens for Upright English Education,” Lee Eun-ung. Last February the newspaper published an article about this group in which foreign teachers living in Korea argued that (certain) Koreans who strongly believe that they are of a single bloodline (danil minjok) were conducting a campaign to spread xenophobia. Capture from site.

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According to the JoongAng Ilbo, corporal punishment is to be phased out in Gyeonggi-do schools.

In Gyeonggi, students who were to receive corporal punishment will instead receive “knowledge and virtue-based punishments,” such as writing book reports, completing community service projects or doing extra assignments.

They’re also to be phased out in Seoul schools as well, but no concrete steps have been taken in this direction. This is interesting:

Examination of students’ belongings without prior notice, regulation of hair length, verbal abuse and school violence will be prohibited. The teacher’s duty to monitor students’ dress code and conduct of behavior at school gates will be removed. Measures will be taken to raise awareness of student rights and student councils will be given greater autonomy.

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On the 23rd, the New Daily posted a long article by reporter Jeon Gyeong-ung purporting to tell the truth about Itaewon. Robert already posted about it at the Marmot’s Hole today, but as I translated the first third or so of it, I thought I’d post it here.

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“The Republic of Korea’s hidden center, Yongsan’s Itaewon”

Itaewon – ‘a loser’s paradise’ where Korean women are ruined?
A pack of black people looking only for sex
Fantastic clubs? Frequent crimes of drugs, fraud, perverted marriage
Government, media glorify ‘multiculturalism’ ahead of purification

Until now, only Itaewon’s spectacular side and its unexposed great power have been closely examined. However tall mountains always have deep valleys. That the national media and government ignore this for reasons such as policy is a serious problem.

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