Korean Job Discussion Forums

tomato · Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 6:17 pm Post subject: ChildU

Who has had experience with ChildU?
My director has recently decided that ChildU is the cat's pajamas.

You have probably seen their poster.
It is headed, "��ȣ! �� ̱� �б�� !"
("Yahoo! I go to an American school every day!"
It has a picture of a gleeful motorscooter-mounted child in front of a red-and-white striped USA.

They give Website addresses:

www.ChildU.co.kr
www.CompassLearning.co.kr

but I am more interested in the opinions of people who have actually used their material.

I am placing bets on how long the director will last before she hops on the next bandwagon.

The evil penguin · Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 8:14 pm Post subject:

Crap. Absolute crap.

Theres a ton of material. Lots of supplement materials and so on. But crap. Just not designed for ESL. Yep, its the "american curriculum" alright. As used by american kids in america. Great for reading comprehension and so. If you already speak english. As an ESL text its useless. Obscure turns of phrases that would be no problem for a native speaker. But for an ESL student, too difficult not to mention completely irrelevant.

Not impressed at all.

guangho · Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2005 6:26 pm Post subject:

It's okay if you don't mind dumbed down lessons, repetition and the fact that since the book is short you'll probably have to go through it and then go through it again.

tomato · Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2005 2:16 am Post subject:

Would you believe my director is paying 1.0 million per month for the franchise?

Demonicat · Joined: 18 Nov 2004 Location: Suwon

HAHA, mein gott, that's MY school. Anyway, its a pretty decent set-up, the children primarily learn from Lets Go, English Time, and Beeline- which have their plusses and minuses. The onlu drag is the official ChildU book. The childu book itself has to be the most poorly concieved text in Korea. In an attempt to simulate an American curriculum, math and science are taught as well. The comedic part is that in order to ensure that the Korean kids appear to be absolute wizzes at math and sscience, the level of said math and science courses are ridiculously low. Case in point, my middle school class (age 14 US), is on ChildU intermediate 1 (the previous poster was correct in that the books are short, but my franchise prefers to just to ChildU once a week to make it last). The math for 14 year olds is "greater than or less than". That's right, while they're at Korean school working on beginning algerbra, they are at childU working on whether 2 is more or less than 3. The science classes are similarly paced. The same 14 year old class is also learning science right now (15 minutes of BS math, 15 mins of BS science, then 15 mins of english). The science lesson on Friday was "liviong or nonliving"; "is a car alive?"
Frankly speaking I can only speak for my hagwon, and can't speak for any others in the chain, but it seems ok. Just make sure that you treat the childU book for what it really is- a chance for the kids to blow off steam and chill for 45 minutes, watching poorly animated flash cartoons and answering kindergarten questions.

tomato · Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2005 4:30 am Post subject:

Advertising executive David Ogilvy comments that many advertising clients choose advertising agencies the wrong way:

They go down the list in the Yellow Pages and treat themselves to a smorgasbord of presentations delivered by representatives. Then they choose the agency which delivers the most impressive presentation.

According to Ogilvy, that method has just one flaw: it tends to favor those agencies which assign the task of advertising themselves to their best employees and the task of advertising their clients to their other employees.

Back to the subject of Child U--it looks like Child U assigns its best employees to the task of bilking their customers out of one million weon per month, and then assigns its other employees to the task of designing their material.

Back to Ogilvy--Ogilvy suggests that the advertising customer look through periodicals for advertisements which they find impressive, and ask the advertising clients who does their advertising.

Back to Child U--a better test of ESL materials might be to look for good ESL students and ask them what materials they used to learn.

I wonder if Child U would pass such a test.