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Warning! *Possibly Inflammatory Remarks*

Not too long ago there were a series of posts concerning Tiger Moms and Paper Tigers about Asian American students and studies. There was also one article titled What happens to all the Asian American Overachievers When the Test Taking Ends? I won’t address the main point of the article but it does mention this near the beginning:

And so there is an additional concern accompanying the rise of the Tiger Children, one focused more on the narrowness of the educational experience a non-Asian child might receive in the company of fanatically preprofessional Asian students. Jenny Tsai, a student who was elected president of her class at the equally competitive New York public school Hunter College High School, remembers frequently hearing that “the school was becoming too Asian, that they would be the downfall of our school.” A couple of years ago, she revisited this issue in her senior thesis at Harvard, where she interviewed graduates of elite public schools and found that the white students regarded the Asians students with wariness. (She quotes a music teacher at Stuyvesant describing the dominance of Asians: “They were mediocre kids, but they got in because they were coached.”) In 2005, The Wall Street Journal reported on “white flight” from a high school in Cupertino, California, that began soon after the children of Asian software engineers had made the place so brutally competitive that a B average could place you in the bottom third of the class.

Colleges have a way of correcting for this imbalance: The Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade has calculated that an Asian applicant must, in practice, score 140 points higher on the SAT than a comparable white applicant to have the same chance of admission. This is obviously unfair to the many qualified Asian individuals who are punished for the success of others with similar faces. Upper-middle-class white kids, after all, have their own elite private schools, and their own private tutors, far more expensive than the cram schools, to help them game the education system.

Paper Tigers:What happens to all the test taking overachievers when the tests end?

I came across this very interesting article (however positive or negative people may interpret it such as Ask A Korean), it basically talks about  what is referred to as the “bamboo ceiling.” By now it is really no secret that Asian students excel at scholastic but this article wants to look at life after all the tests are over. So what happens after school? You’ve spent your whole life studying and taking tests, now what?  Perhaps it is because I am not Asian that I feel as though I am not qualified enough to talk about this, after all my upbringing was totally different. But it does point out something rather interesting regarding “Leadership and Following.”

I just got an email today informing me that my interview with EPIK has been scheduled! I know it is only the first interview out of 2 but nevertheless it is quite exciting.

Which prompted me to talk a little about the interview itself. It will be over the phone and some of the information one needs to know is first and foremost, what is EPIK?

Perhaps one of the things I haven’t really written so much about is really on being an English teacher.   Particularly being an American English teacher. There is quite a bit of information out there regarding teaching, of course in this case relating to Korea and Japan – but when I read most of the information out there I can’t help but think of the situation here in America.

This is actually something I come across quite often when reading blogs from foreigners teaching abroad. As the world knows it, English as a global language is something in high demand.  Public schools have it, but so do people who own companies and want to make some money off this booming industry.

One of the things on my mind is foreigners and nick names.

Now, I know it makes it easier for most teachers for their students to have Western names but I gotta admit it gets kind of weird. Sometimes I have met foreigners who seem to not like their real names, and just want to be called their western choices.  I really get happy when  I meet someone who wants to keep their original name.  And quite honestly, I think Americans are more intrigued with meeting a person with a name like Sehee than if she called herself Megan or something.  It just makes you more cool in my opinion.

The world of  online communication and that of real life or academic is  quite different in terms of writing and speaking.  I have been using skype for quite a few years now, almost as early as it was introduced. In my time using it, I have met many people who are learning English and I had the pleasure of chatting with.  There were some people who I met but for some reason, I did not like them so much, I was not so sure why, they seemed like nice people, but they had a kind of “attitude” that I wasn’t so fond of.