Textbooks in Korea

Being white and blonde is highly coveted in Korea. This is reflected in our textbooks. There are conversations in every chapter of one book that we read as a class. But the pictures of the children talking are always bleach-blonde white kids. The best, though, was a description of the Tooth Fairy in a storybook. She had “shiny blonde hair”. Shiny? Does that imply that non-blonde hair is dull? I laughed out loud the first time I read that, and then had to explain to my kids why I thought it was funny.

School Daze

At my school, I "teach" half of each Korean teachers class. So for example, I'll teache 22 minutes of Erin's class, then 22 minutes of Kate's class. I pile my books up before classes start each day, in a vain attempt to stay organized. My boss often puts my books away on the bookshelf while I'm teaching, and I must remind her that I'm using them. The pile is quite substantial when you teach 12 classes in a day.

Incorrect info in Textbooks

I find it amazing that in a country where many parents spend 25% or more of their income of their children’s education (including English education), and where English education is a huge industry, that there are so many obvious mistakes in the textbooks. Basic things like prepositions and spelling of vocabulary words are sometimes wrong. These are not easily explained away as typos.

Even in the Sing Along book, full of English children’s songs like Row, Row, Row Your Boat, and such, there are mistakes. But in there the mistakes are musical rhythms that are written wrong. I know small children may not know the difference usually, but several of my kids get confused because the song they hear on the CD doesn’t match the one musically written on the page. Most of the songs they already know the tunes of, only with Korean words, so they may have seen the correct notes elsewhere. For me, it’s just annoying.

What’s worse is when one of the other teachers fills in the answers in her book, and then I have to correct it. I feel bad, and only say something when I must. She even looks in her grammar books and in the answer keys as she’s filling in the blanks, which makes me question whether those are correct or not.

Some schools (the bigger chains of hagwons) have their own line of books (as we do), and they employ native speaking editors to help write them and comb through them for mistakes (which we must not). What a novel idea.