...the dog ate my homework and other excuses

So today I’m missing the first class and I’m going to use various excuses, but there is one reason in particular. Every so often we spend the first lesson of the day practising rote-learned dialogues from the textbook.

I am going to stay as culturally neutral as possible, but this is a total waste of time. I waste more than 30 minutes memorising it of my free time, I waste 2 minutes in class reciting it, and then I waste the next 48 minutes of class listening to other people saying the same thing over and over again. This is a totally outmoded and anachronistic learning method.

Lets go back 2000 years to the time of the great Roman poets, when there were no computers, there were no books and there was very little paper. In these times, the only way to remember large quantities of new vocabulary was to put them into your head, by literally learning books off by heart. Instead of referring to a page in your notebook, you could go into your memory and find the right lines etc, or even more likely, be reminded of the word when you hear it.

When you were a child do you remember misunderstanding songs, and only realising what the words meant later in life, but you could sing the song perfectly anyway? Learning things off by heart does not help you to use and understand new vocabulary. It helps you to recite the things that you have learned off by heart. Anyone can learn any group of sounds together, you don’t need to know what they mean in order to do this.

This teaching method is totally irrelevant to modern day life, is highly inefficient and ultimately pretty much useless. It restricts you to only the learned conversations, it makes you unable to put your own sentences together and it destroys your confidence in the language. By learning like this you will never understand anyone because people don’t speak the exact same dialogues as in the textbook.

그래서 선생님, 내가 결석 했다geureseo, seonsengnim, naega gyeolseok haedda / check google translate to see what that means