Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Yu_Bum_suk]

Today I was doing a review quiz and decided to throw in some general trivia questions just for fun. One was 'How long is the Han River'? Students - academic HS students - were guessing anywhere from 25-250km. 25KM!?? That wouldn't take you across Daegu! Another was 'How many people live in America?'. Answers ranged from 70,000,000 to 1,000,000,000. Only a couple were close. Then came 'How high is Mt Everest'? One third of the students knew that it's 8,848 metres.

How can a third of them know exactly how high Mt Everest is but none of them have any conception of how long the most important river in their country is? I wonderi if it's because learning by memorising makes it so hard for them to make logical guesses?

[spliff]

So, where's the "astounding" part?

[Justin Kimberlake]

[Privateer]

Two factors:

1. No common sense. They are incapable of the rational deduction required to make an educated guess/approximation so rely on either memorisation, so their answer is totally precise, or on completely random guesses that are not even in the right ballpark.

2. Confusion over how to translate numbers in English. Mathematical computation is a mechanical, unthinking process to them, so the absence of the unit 'man', i.e. 10,000, in English completely throws them off. They need to create a whole new internal abacus in order for numbers to come out right in English.

It's the education system that does it to them. They learn patches of knowledge in great and unnecessary detail, but there is no coherence to the whole.

[Fishead soup]

You're better off giving them the answers and have them come up the questions.

[spliff]

[Fishead soup]

[spliff]

Actually, I do mine as Jeopardy...a "very popular" US game show.

[Fishead soup]

[mrsquirrel]

[lowpo]

[spliff]

No sweat!
http://www.jmu.edu/madison/teacher/jeopardy/jeopardy.htm

[branchsnapper]

Large numbers of western people, especially school kids, are rotten at that kind of question. Knowing a load of generally useless stats is quite useful for answering a question like that too.

The Chinese are full these days of how westerners can't place Tibet on a map and yet have a strong opinion about it, and they have a point. Huge numbers of people in our own societies can't find their own country on the world map.

English teachers who post on Dave's ESL cafe are, on the other hand, relatively speaking, very informed and intelligent people. It may be a little scary, but it's true.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

[Snowkr]

Hey spliff, thanks for the jeopardy link. That site is really cool. How did you come across it, just out of curiosity? Did you go to JMU?

I disagree slightly with some of the assertions here that Koreans are incapable of making an "educated guess" because of all the rote and memorization that goes into learning here. I've actually found kids to be way smarter in that area here than they are back home.

Perhaps I've just gotten lucky...
I've also been pleasantly surprised at the level of creativity that some of the public school teachers I've encountered recently have shown.