geography

American kids get a lot of stick- and rightfully so- for being clueless about the geography of this massive ball of atoms we call Earth. A cursory search around the internet yields some statistics, and suffice to say they aren't pretty. Some may accuse me of being a geography snob because I know the name of every country in the world and its capital, but -- oh wait, you didn't know that? Yeah, I know every country and capital in the world. No big deal. And I can identify every country by its flag. Again, no big deal. But enough about how I'm a geography wizard.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that Korean kids aren't much better. They know their own country, but not much else. For instance, today in one class I gave each student an individual speaking test. The first question I asked each student was "Where is Canada?" Here are the answers I received:

-I don't know.
-South of France.
-In South Africa.
-Next to China.
-Asia.
-Italy.
-Behind America.

Behind America isn't an awful answer because the kid probably just got his prepositions mixed up, but for the other ones, I mean...look at that. You might want to jump to their defense and say that they could answer the question much better in their native tongue, but Canada is a Konglish word. Meaning that the Korean word for Canada is Canada. So they aren't getting tripped up by that.

Maybe I'm being too hard on them. God knows it's easy to look down on people when your knowledge of the subject matter is unparalleled. Maybe they're too busy at school learning applicable knowledge and skills. Who knows?