Getting out of trouble in the EFL classroom
“Anton is… a tall and sturdy Iranian who came to Kongju to lay low from the Seoul Police for a while… He speaks Turkish, Japanese, Persian and Korean fluently. He doesn’t speak English. This makes classes very difficult for him…
One day he was teaching the textbook ‘Side by Side’ and one of the exercises included a reference to Little Red Riding Hood. One of the students asked him what ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ meant. He did a rough calculation in his head and tried to translate the English to Korean literally. Then he realized that it was a cultural reference and that he didn’t have chance in hell of figuring it out. He got angry and stood up. He pointed at each of the students and screamed ‘Do you can?! Do you can?! Do you can?!’ They didn’t quite understand what he was saying, but they realized that they weren’t really concerned with disrupting the placid nature of their education by asking such questions”
Korea Bug by J. Scott Burgeson (2005) pg lxx. A reasonably interesting book if you are interested in Korea
