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Don Miller wrote:Thanks for the urls and hints.. I went to an interview with NOVA today actually, despite all of the bad things I've heard.. and it seems WAY too business oriented for me...
To cite one good example of how great a disservice this is to students, once while on a homestay program with a group of students in California a perplexed student came to me and said, "I went to a carnival with my host family yesterday, and when I tried to order a hotdog at a food stand the man couldn't understand me."
"What did you say?" I asked.
"'A hohtto dohggu pleazu,' and even though I repeated it 3 or 4 times he couldn't understand."
"Well," I explained, "It's simple. All you have to do is say 'a hotdog, please,' and forget all that 'katakana English' they taught you in junior high."
...
As is usual, one of my students quit my class after graduating from elementary school so he could start attending a "high school prep" class run by an older Japanese woman who I had heard of (and vice versa, so it seems). In her class he would learn about math tests and social studies tests and, of course, English tests; what kind of problems there would be and how to pass them. I thought this amusing since this woman could not speak English. Nevertheless, what really knocked me over was what she said to my former student on his first day there, as reported by the boy's mother to my wife: "Now, I want you to forget all that 'correct pronunciation' nonsense that Mr. Matheson taught you. I'm going to teach you the English you need to succeed in Japan." (!!!)
It was this event that really hit me like a mallet, causing me to see that the attitude towards English taught in the schools here was seriously twisted. With this kind of help it's no wonder that we have students unable to order a hotdog in spite of 6 years of English. And I believe that it's this problem of not taking English education seriously enough which allows thousands of household items to be smothered with all kinds of nonsensical English words.
GomiGirl wrote:With a real-live teaching degree you can definitely do better than Nova..
Best of luck!!
My rant this week is directed towards all the foreigners out there who look down on teaching English for a living. In a recent issue, Tokyo Classified featured a story about sex workers in Japan. The American woman was quoted as saying "...it seemed like the only thing [job] I could get quick was English teaching. I was too proud to do that."
Unregistered Haiku Poet wrote:Pride is relative
Pussy is universal
I am a rich whore
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