Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Odds and Ends. Well, one odd and one end.

According to the Times:
Elementary and secondary schools plan to create a blacklist of "incompetent" native English speakers and to ask immigration not to reissue English-teaching or E-2 visas to them. 

It's hard to say what 'incompetent' means as the job descriptions for Native Speaker teachers is so, um, flexible.  BizarroBrian is all over it.  Kimchi Icecream describes how some NS teachers are trained, and it is hard to say how teachers can know how they will be evaluated after such training.

UPDATED DEC 31: The teachers strike back:

A group of native English teachers are organizing themselves to come up with a blacklist of schools that they say don't treat teachers fairly.

According to the Web site of the Independent Registry of Schools in Korea (IRSK), the organization was created by Charles Hill and some other foreign teachers working in public schools here to rate schools in Korea. 


With Korea's libel or slander laws (I'm too lazy to hunt up the difference - it's new Year's Eve), I don't know how either one is legal.
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The Chosun Ilbo has an article about speed limits on expressways.  My seven-year-old SUV is quite thirsty so I typically drive below the limit to conserve a little.
This statement seems unlikely, although I could not find any source directly supporting or refuting it:
There was a time in the 1930s that cars were traveling even at speeds of up to 300 km/h on the German Autobahn, but an increase in speeding cars and accidents has forced the German government to establish speed limits.

I suspect that few planes were traveling at 300 km/h until the end of the 1930's, much less any commercially available cars.  comments?

1 comment:

padaajoshi said...

Brian:

The reason Korea has so many problems with the teachers is

1) They have no standards, so they get a lot of riff raff from all over the English speaking world as well as Iran and other countries.

2) They can't seem to tell good teachers from bad ones.