“From a correlational observation, we conclude that one variable is related to a second variable. But neither behavior could be directly causing the other even though there is a relationship. They found…”

Such read part of question 36 from the English section of this year’s mock Korean SAT (수능) for the first-year students.

Forty-five laborious questions with dense passages like this one, with 70 minutes to complete. Yet in the 45 minutes a week I have with my students, it’s a stream of “kimchi spicier more ice cream,” “Baseball funner than basketball,” and the daily “I want to toilet.”

To their credit, it’s not for lack of trying—many of the students are excited to learn, and one just interrupted me just now while I was writing this, asking me to explain how U.S. colleges are different than in Korea.

Here, teaching to a test is taken to the nth degree, producing graduates who know what “esoteric” means but can barely order food from an English menu. And this makes perfect sense when you basically have one shot at one test on one November day that determines your college—maybe even job—future. No one else has school, police cars shuttle late students to their test centers on time, and even airplanes avoid Korean airspace for part of the day; all this for the sake of one test.

The ramifications of teaching to a test can arise decades later. A lunch one of the other friendly English teachers in the teacher’s dining hall struck up a conversation. Since he’d studied English abroad for a few years, he was keen to talk:

“Speaking in English with you is very comfortable and natural. But when I speak English with other English teachers and the principal it feels…forced. It doesn’t come from here (gestures at gut), but I have to think about it. It’s not automatic.”

I replied that linguistically that may be because Koreans try to bring their Korean formal/polite/informal verb endings with them to English, which doesn’t have different levels of politeness built into the language structure.

For native speakers of English, the level of respect comes from the tone and word choice, rather than a formalized verb ending structure that incorporates social and age standing into the language. So when that formal structure is lost in an English conversation between two native Korean speakers, it becomes naturally unnatural.

But six years of class every day, even a whole SAT section devoted to English. Yet simple sentences allude them. Hypocritical then that I don’t remember 7 years of Latin. I guess both are unfortunate.

At least now I can add “Korean SAT Proctor” to my resume. Cheers to some poor Jeolla-buk region test grader who is confused by “CYL” signature scrawled on 10% of the test booklets I used to “validate” the test results. Hey I’m just doing what I’m told. #teachering

“Black man stronger than white man.”

— An actual student’s excited answer during a game. Once I stopped laughing, he got half credit.

Speaking of The Rock (who’s half Samoan, half Nova-Scotian), here’s why some say he should run for president. In the photo above, there’s The Rock with…a California governor. In our era, stranger things have happened. First Reagan, then Arnold, then Donald, next… Link

News

Rising inequality explained by two janitors. Having read about Eastman Kodak brownie cameras (thanks Harvard education for esoteric knowledge), this was all the more fascinating. Link

What if Isaac Asimov worked for Lowe’s…or the military? This company is how. Link

Unexpected Headline of the Week

Buzzfeed(!) trained one of its computers through machine learning to look for hidden spy planes. Here’s what it found. Link