Archive for March, 2007

Even in Jeongseon, an English Experience Center


For a month this winter, I was working at the brand-new, ₩400,000,000 (~US$400,000) Jeongseon English Experience Center (JEEC).

The concept of vacation, to many Koreans, ends up often just meaning a time when you can force your children to study something that’s just not their regular classes. Many kids barely get a day of vacation until University. One popular ‘vacation’ activity is English camp, and since many school districts have foreign teachers who are getting paid salaries whether school is in session or not, the labor for said camps is often very available.

Most people, when assigned to teach a winter “camp”, are given a classroom and told to prepare a week or so’s worth of three hours a day lessons and activities. A few of us here in Jeongseon County, however, had the privilege of teaching our camp in our very own brand-new English village. There’s a number of said English villages here in Korea, on very different scales, but all with a similar set-up. Most, if not all, are actually designed and built by the same company. Each is essentially a building (or several buildings for the larger ones) with a series of themed booths constructed to resemble places one might go as a traveler in North America. JEEC has eight booths:


Flight Airport,



the East Bank,



the North Post Office,



the Empire Hotel,



the French Fresh Food Restaurant,



the E-cent Shopping Center,

cute-name-lacking library,


and the Main Street / Virtual Reality Station.

The “Virtual Reality Station” is an excellent example of what’s not quite right about JEEC (and, indeed, many other things in Korea). It’s called the “Virtual Reality Station” because there is a giant, rear-projection screen and a little stage area with seats around it. Intended to be projected onto this screen is a virtual city with extra areas not included in the actual center, such as an office building and a subway station. One can use a wireless Playstation style controller to walk around the virtual North American city (in first person perspective but unfortunately with no gun), theoretically going up to the digital white folk milling about and talking to them. To talk to them, however, requires real people to pretend to be their voices. Needless to say, this is stupid and we haven’t used it once. What we did use everyday, however, was the computer on which that program was intended to run. On it we showed PowerPoints with dialogs, vocabulary, and photographs in order to prepare the students for role playing in the various booths. Now that’s all well and good, and in fact the rear-projection screen allowed us to use dry-erase markers directly on the display, so it made for a nice setup. Annoyingly, the crappy software for the wireless game controller wasn’t smart enough to control PowerPoint, and despite the heaps and heaps of money and attention spent on building the place, once we were actually running it our requests for a wireless mouse and keyboard went unheeded for weeks. (We’re still waiting.) The computer in question, you see, is in a little room behind the screen. Without wireless control, to show a PowerPoint presentation means having one teacher sitting in the room using his expertise and teacher training for the difficult task of pressing the space bar whenever we called “next!” from the other room. (This job we affectionately called “backstage monkey.”) To make things even better, when I was messing with the projector one morning, trying to get it aligned perfectly (I didn’t care for the PowerPoints but when it came to hooking up my laptop and watching the Daily Show on the big screen, I didn’t want it at a funny angle!!), I noticed that with just a male-to-male PS/2 cable one could connect the schmancy projector to the computer and use its remote control as a mouse! So, did they keep the box the projector came in? Of course not. Did the grounds keeper actually have any idea what I was talking about when I asked him? No.

Many other things followed a very similar pattern: there are real cash registers. Nobody could figure out how to set them up (we didn’t even have instructions in Korean). But, not having any special paper for them, that hardly mattered. We have (probably very expensive) plastic food in the restaurant, but only a few dishes that don’t particularly correspond to the pretend menu anyway. I will spare you the rest of the list and explain my take on the general phenomenon. The Korean public school system spends heaps of time and money on easy, showy solutions to teaching the kids English, but then proceeds to lack the institutional organization and will to fully implement them. The whole program of hiring foreign English teachers is, itself, just another, broader example of this phenomenon. Nevertheless, at least most of my peers here take their jobs seriously, and we try to make the best of it. At JEEC, some of the ways we did this were by using the “Virtual Reality Center” as a high-tech classroom, by printing pictures of food and laminating them, and, gasp, writing bills by hand (which anyway gave us the ability to try and overcharge the students for their “meals” and see if they were paying attention).

While most of our activities at JEEC could be done with a little creativity and imagination – and a lot less money – in a normal classroom, I think that it was a great experience for the students. Many of you, being from California and the like, might think it strange to build a specialized “English village.” We don’t need to build “Spanish villages” in California. But, remember how different things are for kids from small towns in a small, homogeneous country. At the very least, JEEC gives the kids a chance to have a low-risk exposure to something different. For example, while most middle-class American children have already flown in an airplane at a tender age, with the exception of Jeju island, no one in Korea needs to get on an airplane to visit gramma. If any of these students visit any foreign country they will doubtless be using English at the airport and I’m quite confident many of them will draw on their experiences at JEEC.

The local media certainly love JEEC.



We’ve had TV news crews three times already. Here is a clip of one news show’s coverage*:



This is from the week before I was there, the news coverage in which I starred I couldn’t find online. While searching for it though, I came across an article (Google wanna-translation) in the national news section of chosun.com, the title of which translates as “Even in Jeongseon They’re Opening an English Village.” Jeongseon County, you see, is in the serious boonies, and this title is very amusing.

As a final anecdote, our fake money and the fake passports we give the students all say “JELC” on them rather than “JEEC.” The original name of the center was the “Jeongseon English Learning Center,” until, apparently, it surfaced that “JELC” sounds like an archaic Korean word for fellatio that no one had ever heard of. Of course they still had to change the name of the place after they’d already printed all the materials.

*I’ll give 50 bucks to the first person (who doesn’t already know!) who can find the other appearance of the host in the news clip on my websites.