Gender, jobs, and job interviews

Hello everyone! How are you doing? Can you believe that the end of this 10 week course is coming very soon??? I cannot. Time is really flying.

We started out Monday’s class with a little riddle/story. I told you that a father and his son were driving in the country side. The father was driving and he was driving a little too quickly. They had a car accident and the father was killed. The son was badly injured. An ambulance came and rushed the son to the hospital. When the son arrived at the emergency room, the doctor said, “I cannot operate on him, he is my son!”

If you don’t know who the doctor is, you will have to think about it, or ask someone.

We spent the first hour on Monday talking about gender and jobs. Some questions that we considered where, “What do you think about stay-at home dads? and, “What do you think about women in the military?” 

Remember: How do you think about ….. ? >>> How do you feel about….? 

These questions started quite a lot of interesting discussion.

In the second hour, we changed the topic from women and jobs to just jobs. The first question for discussion was, “When you were a kid, what was your dream job?”
I was very interested to hear everyone’s different answers.

The next question was, “Have you ever had a job interview?” I think it was a good chance for people who have had interviews to give some advice to those who had not. People automatically shared their experiences and advice. I was happy about this.

My next question was,  “What are the most common job interview questions?” People shared their ideas. I was waiting for Miyoung to ask how we can fit an elephant in the refrigerator, but she never did. After lots of discussion about job interviews and dreams. I handed out copies of 20 of the most common interview questions in America. We used these for some discussion as well. Here is a link for some common behavioral questions that might be asked in an interview. Want more interview questions? Click here. Would you like a sample answer? Well, then, click here.  I do not know very much about getting a job in Korea, but this link might provide some useful advice for answering hard questions.

We continued the job theme on Thursday. We started out the class with a 10-opinions that each person either agreed with or disagreed with. I was very impressed with how well everyone worked together to explain what a yes or a no answer would mean in each case. Because I am a very strict teacher, people that came late had to survive without the paper. I thought this actually worked very well, because those with the paper had to speak very clearly for the late people to understand. Again, very good job with this. I found the conversations fascinating. Many people gave answers that were the opposite of what I would have expected.  Also, these questions caused people to get into serious discussions that were a few steps away from the questions on the sheet. This was, of course, fine. I am always happy to see such discussions in English.

When we came back from the break I asked everyone to pretend that this was a job interview. I think people got a bit confused because I did not want you to make an interview again… but to imagine that your partner had given these answers in a job interview. My question was, “What would your answers tell an employer about you?” 

After about 10 minutes with one partner on the above question we changed back into bigger groups (with a more balanced male/female ratio) and the next question to consider was, “What would the ‘right answers’ be?” This was very interesting for me to listen to because many people had different opinions and different opinions from me as well. I think that Eric said it best. He said that your answer is not so important, it is more important that you speak well. I tend to agree. Roger asked me how to say a Korean proverb, I roughly translated it as, “It is not what you say, but how you say it.” I think that this sentence applies very well to job interviews as well as to life.

As I said at the end of class on Thursday, my next question was going to be, “How would you change your answers if you were applying to become a member of a religious organization?”  I felt as though the class (much like the 10 weeks) really flew by. Good job.

Some words that have come up in the past few classes:

babysitter     Let’s go out tonight! I’ll call the babysitter to watch the kids.

nanny     It is quite expensive to hire a full-time nanny. Let’s think of another option.

housekeeper    They must be rich. They have a housekeeper to clean the house.

housewife     His mom doesn’t work. She is a housewife.

stay-at-home mom/dad    Mike’s dream is to be a stay-at-home dad.

ambidextrous    She can use both hands equally. I guess she is ambidextrous.

cartoonist    She is very good at drawing. I think she wants to be a cartoonist.
successful     His mom always tells him that it is important to be successful.

successfully    I finished the term successfully.

success     I wish you great success in all your future endeavors.

succeed    If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

atheist     He said he is not an atheist because he believes in God.

testosterone   She complained there was too much testosterone–she wanted more girls.

devil’s advocate    Don’t think this is my opinion. I am just playing devil’s advocate.

kiss up/kiss _ _ _  He said the best way to get someone to like them is to kiss up.

on the surface   On the surface it might seem easy, but it is actually quite hard.

Of course there were some errors as well. A few people said sentences like:

Love is important than money.
Success is important than love. 
I believe love than sex.

I think we forgot the comparison words to make these sentences work. So:

Love is more important than money.
Success is more important than love.
I believe in love more than I believe in sex.

A common topic on Thursday night was blood type. I guess this was the case because we were talking about personality types. A very usual sentence about blood types that I heard was, “You look like ‘O’.” I don’t really think that people can really guess someone’s blood type by their personality. I certainly don’t think that we can tell someone’s blood type by their looks. I think a better sentence would be, “You seem like you are ‘O’.” 

One word that I hear a lot in class is, “charge.” As in,  “My charge is ….” This sounds quite strange to me. I think that I would choose another word, like duty or responsibility.

OK. That is all for now. I hope everyone has a great day/night/weekend. See you next week!

Making commercials

So, after about half of the students (even less ) had seen the commercials that I gave for homework we spent some time explaining them to each other. Again, if you have not seen them yet, they are still below on the blog here. After explaining the commercials that were homework we spent some time talking about commercials. The question that I asked was, “What makes a good commercial?” (What makes a commercial good?)

Many people had similar ideas about this. It was interesting to hear people explaining and describing commercials to each other. I asked each group to describe a commercial to me, because I do not have a TV. I expected that everyone would feel sorry for me, but no one did. It is OK. I will be OK, I am sure. Anyway, each group did a good job to explain their commercials to me and to the other groups. Actually, I had not seen any of the commercials in my life so it was very interesting.

The main part of the second hour of class was spent making commercials. No, we didn’t actually film them, but made the story for each of them. The themes were, “Don’t use the air conditioner too much,” “Don’t throw away pets” and “Don’t smoke.” I was very impressed with the visual imagery that each group came up with. As I write this, I am thinking about the water overflowing onto the office worker who used the AC too much.

I thought it was a very good class because I liked how the groups worked together and came up with very different ideas.

Some words that came up during this class:

spokesperson     Jun Ji-hyeon is the spokesperson for many, many products.

memorable     That commercial is so memorable, I am sure I will never forget it.

CM jingle (song)     He thinks that the most important thing is a memorable jingle. (please don’t forget that CF is also Konglish)

impressive     His speaking style was very impressive.

impressed     I was very impressed with his speaking style.

catchphrase/slogan     “Impossible Is Nothing” is a memorable slogan.

catchy     A catchy slogan is one that we can remember easily.

consumer    A consumer is someone who buys goods or services.

copyright That song is copyrighted, you cannot use it.

Everyone did a great job. Nice!

Friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, lovers…etc.

This class was certainly an interesting one. People seemed a bit shy at first and kind of gave me looks telling me that they were not interested in talking about this topic. Well, once we got into pairs it was another story as the questions were shooting around the room like fireworks. It was very interesting for me to watch.

There were quite a few words that came up during the lesson. Some of them are:

bronchial tubes The bronchial tubes connect the trachea to the lungs.
bronchitis I have had bronchitis before, it really hurts.
bangs Charly had a new hairstyle today–she had bangs.
background Many people said that they did not care about family background.
picky If someone is picky, they are not often satisfied with choices.
convert Many people convert so as to the same religion as their spouse.
success rate A good success rate for a hitter in baseball is .300.
break up They decided that they were not happy so they broke up.
couple They are both so energetic and fun–they make a great couple.
single Some people want to stay single forever.
advice You shouldn’t give advise unless someone asks for it.
advise As your lawyer, I advise you to tell the truth.
confess He felt much better after he confessed his sins.
propose She is getting sick of waiting for him to propose.

Please do notice that the last two words are English words, but are often misused in Korea. Confess is rarely used to tell someone that you love them, and propose is almost never used to simply ask someone out. Mi-young made a good point, it is used to bring up an idea, in a meeting or something like that.

One question that was asked lot in this class was, “Do you have boyfriend/girlfriend.” We need to be careful not to forget the article here, so, “Do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend?” is more correct.

Also be careful of questions like, “How many boyfriends do you have?” because while grammatically correct, this question could make someone angry. I suppose that the question that was intended was, “How many boyfriends have you ever had?”

A few people talked about the importance of letting someone “know your mind.” I think I would usually say that “you need to tell him/her your feelings” or “let him/her know how you feel.”

Because today’s topic was very personal and private, occasionly we needed to escape from a question. Some useful ways of doing that are:

Sorry, that’s private.

That’s personal.

I’d rather not say.

I’d prefer not to say.

As I wrote above, I thought that everyone did a great job in the class. Some examples of conversations questions about dating that you could have asked are here. Conversation questions about friends can be found here.

Good job!

Talking about the internet

On Monday, May 7th we talked about using the internet. The question that we started with was, “How often do you use the internet?” Starting with this question, students talked with a partner for about 10 minutes. In this time, many people thought of more and more questions about the internet. Some include:

How many hours a day/week/month do you use the internet?

What kind of websites do you visit?

What sites do you visit?

What information do you search for?

Do you use cyworld/____/_____?

Do you have a blog?

After chatting for a while it was time to start the survey. I asked everyone to think of 1-2 questions about the internet to ask their classmates. I thought that everyone did a good job to think of good questions. I was surprised when there were not many differences between the kind of answers that came up. There were lots of interesting questions, and I think that many answers were interesting too. Someone (JH) was disappointed in his classmates’ honesty. I wonder how honest everyone was. After finishing the survey, everyone presented their results. I thought we did a great job with this, each presentation was special and unique. Nice job!

During this class, everyone did a great job to communicate their ideas and thoughts. There were some errors that might make this more difficult. Some phrases that I heard include:

I buy my clothes by internet. >>> I buy my clothes online./I buy clothes on the internet.
I do internet everyday. >>> I use the internet every day./I surf the internet every day.
I like to shop in internet. >>> I like to shop on the internet./I like to shop online.
I surf internet for hours everyday. >>> I surf the internet for hours every day.
I turn on my computer all day. >>> I leave my computer on all day.
(turning the computer on all day would be strange–we just need to turn it on once.)

We still had some problems talking about the number of people.

5 peoples answered yes. >>> 5 people answered yes.

1 people did not agree. >>> 1 person didn’t agree.

A sentence that I heard was, “I didn’t decide mind.” I think this person wanted to say, “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

One person’s survey question was, “Can you believe someone that you meet via online chatting?” While this question is not completely wrong, I think that I should have asked this person to change the question to, “Can you trust someone that you meet online.” I would use believe to be just one time. Like, “I believe you” when I hear a story. Trust sounds more like forever. This is not a huge problem, but trust would be much more natural in this situation. Please believe me and trust me!

Thursday’s class

Wow. I think this class was fantastic. I was really impressed with how much and well everyone spoke. I was also impressed with the strong arguments that were made. It seemed that everyone was speaking a lot and enjoying the time.

We started off the class by saying hello to the person next to us. Maybe some people were meeting for the first time, but mostly people just said hello and “nice to see you again.” After about 10 minutes of small talk, each student thought of 5 topics for discussion in class. Next, they shared their topics with a partner and explained why they thought it would be a good topic. The next stage is where the arguing began. Each pair (with one team of three) had to make a list of 10 topics that they thought would be interesting. They also had to put the topics in order from 1-10, with 1 being the most interesting. Lots of good discussion came out of this. The next step was to get into even bigger groups and to do the same thing–make a list of 10 topics. This took much longer than I expected because some teams had a hard time to agree on topics. I thought it was very interesting to hear different opinions about what would be a good topic. After each group made its list of 10 topics we shared the answers with the class and suddenly it was time to go home.

The 10 topics from the first group were:

1. Girlfriends/Boyfriends, are they necessary?
2. How to make friends
3. Plastic surgery
4. What makes you happy?
5. Trips–recommending places to travel
6. Explaining places in Korean to foreigners
7. Movies
8. Travel experiences
9. Blood type
10. The best news you have ever heard

the middle group came up with these topics:

1. The shooting at Virginia Tech.
2. Movies
3. Club activities
4. Cherry blossoms
5. Eating/Food (Mike’s favorite)
6. Hillary Clinton
7. Photography
8. Sports and exercise
9. Green Tea
10. Is it better to live alone or with your family?

The topics that the third group had were:

1. Diets to be healthy
2. Good places for dating
3. Mike (???)
4. Spring
5. The upcoming election
6. How to cook
7. Baseball
8. Superstitions
9. The massacre in America
10. Classmates’ lives

I think that these lists are enough for 40 weeks of class, not just 10 weeks. Great job.

Since the discussion took much longer than expected (this is a good thing) there was no time to talk about mistakes and errors.

I will do that now.

One common problem is people confusing scary and scared. Scared is the feeling, as in I feel scared when I watch a horror movie. If something is scary it makes us scared. So, the horror movie was scary.

I was scared when the scary man shouted at me.

Another common problem is to use the word younger when we should say young.
You look very younger. >>> You look very young. or You look younger than ____.

A question I often hear in class is, “Have you been to abroad?” we do not need to “to” with abroad.

Another common problem is misusing the word die. Die is a verb, “to die”. So we could say, “He died last week.” Students often say something like, “he was dead last week,” this means to me that he was dead, but now he is alive–not very likely. Also, suicide is a noun and the most usual verb used with this noun is commit. Sorry for such sad and morbid grammar points! The next point will be more cheerful.

One word that causes a lot of confusion is graduate. This is because it can be a noun or a verb and has different pronunciation. I think the meaning most people know is the verb graduate (grad-jyou-ate) . This word can also be a noun, a person who has graduated is a graduate (grad-jew-it) Finally, the school that people who have already attended 4 years of university attend is a graduate school (same pronunciation as the noun). I hope you are less confused than before.

That is all for today. Thank you very much for your hard work. Have a fantastic weekend!