Let's Make a Robot

I hear it every day.  My classroom sits between the two Korean co-English teacher's classrooms.  To the right, children are belting out...

             Bah bah black sheep, have you any wool?

             Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.

             One for the master, one for the dame,

             And one for the little boy who lives down the lane.

To the left…

             Let’s make a robot

             Let’s make a robot

             Ok, ok, ooooookkkkk.

             Let’s make a robot

             Let’s make a robot

             Ok, ok, oooookkkkkk

I must seem like a painfully boring teacher to my students.  I teach them things like…

             Excuse me, where is the bus station?

             It is two blocks away.  First, walk straight to the end of the block.

             Turn right at the corner.  Walk two more blocks.

             The bus station will be in front of you.

                          …or

             Yesterday was Wednesday, July 6, 2011.

             Today is Thursday,July 7, 2011.

             Tomorrow will be Friday, July 8, 2011.

                         …or

             I need one ticket to Seoul.  What time does the train leave?

My favorite travel writer, Bill Bryson, while sitting in a cafe in Belgium, put it this way...

...but hardly anyone in Wallonia (southern, French-speaking Belgium) speaks

English.  I began to regret that I didn't understand French well enough to

eavesdrop.  I took three years of French in school, but learned next to nothing.

The trouble was that the textbooks were so amazingly useless.  They were always

written by somebody clearly out of touch with the Francophile world -- Professor

Marvis Frisbee of the Highway 68 State Teachers College at Windsock, North

Dakota, or something -- and at no point did they intersect with the real world.  They

never told you any of the things you would need to know in France -- how to engage

a bidet, deal with a toilet matron, or kneecap a line-jumper.  They were always

tediously preoccupied with classroom activities: hanging up coats in the cloakroom,

cleaning the blackboard, opening the window, shutting the window, setting

out the day's lessons.  Even in the seventh grade I could see that this sort of

thing would be of limited utility in the years ahead.  How often on a visit to France

do you need to tell someone you want to clean the blackboard?  How frequently

do you wish to say: "It is winter.  Soon it will be spring."  In my experience,

people know this already.

from Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe

Maybe I'm just a little too critical.  The children are, of course, learning useful things.  Pronunciation.  Tone.  Vocabulary.  Show tunes.  I used to wonder why taxi drivers would sing the theme songs to the Lion King and Alladin as they carted us off across town to do our shopping.  I thought he was trying to impress me, and be rewarded with a gracious tip.

...or maybe Disney is implementing a new marketing scheme in rural Korea.  Sneaky.