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Over my career as an instructor of English to Korean children, I've had to use many books. Some of them are better than others, but the overwhelming majority of them are terrible. There are a lot of gripes that I have with them, but this post will just focus on one.

If there's one thing that you should've learned by now from reading this blog, it's that the English academy system over here is more concerned with making money than actually teaching kids English. So, when it comes time for an academy franchise to produce their books, their curriculum, they want to pinch as many pennies as possible. As a result, they go heavy on the second-rate stock photography.

Often times, it's quite evident that the themes of units and lessons in the books were constructed around whatever pictures were in the public domain and they could get for free. Take, for instance, a recent lesson I had to teach to a class of middle schoolers, which was called, believe it or not, What Are You Wearing? As if that title isn't creepy enough, one of the lesson's "Warm-Up" questions - questions designed to facilitate discussion of the theme - was, "What do you wear when you are in your home?" I skipped that question, but still felt obliged to tell the class, "This question is weird and if someone ever asks you this don't answer and run away as fast as you can, okay?"

Anyway, this lesson is just littered with stock photos of people in various kinds of clothing. We get to this one part, where the kids are supposed to ask and answer questions which are structured a certain way. So, it will say something like "put on a tie" under a picture of a man putting on a tie. Hence, the student is supposed to say, "What is your father doing?" and the answer comes back, "He's putting on a tie." There are various pictures, one is "buckle a belt" (also borderline inappropriate), another is "put on a coat," and finally we get to this last one, and, well, just look at it.

First of all, how amazing is that picture above the words "your mom"? I mean, this picture of the picture doesn't fully capture how terrifying the woman looks. She's covered in tawdry jewelry, her eyes are looking in opposite directions, her face is asymmetrical, and her neck/face looks more suited for a lesson on botched plastic surgery or skin grafts than clothing. Then there's the whole "zip up her boots" thing. Whose mom is wearing those boots? Where is this woman going dressed like this? The whole thing is a catastrophe. It smacks of someone having a deadline to meet, but they woke up late one day, raced to work bleary-eyed and hungover and had to finish this patchwork assemblage of absurdity with whatever picture was readily available. It also caused the entire class period to grind to a halt, as the students and I laughed for about 10 minutes.