FTAs and Open Class

My older elementary class had their Open Class today -not what I expected.

I've already done one Open Class with my younger elementary class, and that went great. This class has lost a couple of students since I started with them. Now we have four.

The day of, I find out that two of them are not coming, because their families can't make it. For the two that showed up their levels are polar opposites. I think the director sensed this and opted to go for "teams". Our students would be on a team with their families.

But, there was a serious imbalance. One of the students has a father who is an English teacher, thus. Wow. It was hard to watch.

I felt a low of sympathy for the other student.

Later that day I had debate with the highschooler and they were debating, my favourite subject: Free Trade Agreements. We've been talking about them for about two weeks now, and I think a lot of my ideals must've spilled into theirs.

I started with a class of economic nationalists saying that they would only buy Korean products and they're not interested in FTAs. Now we went into the debate with a heavy defense for the value of FTAs. I must've pushed them too hard to my side, haha.

I had to Oppose, along with the student who lost rock-paper-scissors, and talk about how bad FTAs are. I tried, but my heart wasn't in it.

Most importantly, I was impressed by their questions and answers.

One unique question looked at how pork was cheaper than beef and if consumers want affordabe pork we need to end tariffs from beef-exporting countries. This is because, of course, we always talk about food in this class. But then we started talking about poor meat standards in other countries, and the time Korea imported American beef during the whole mad cow thing. Yeah, the debate got intense. It was the first time I had to moderate the speaking order, there was a line up of three students all wanting to talk at once (which is REALLY saying something because they are only three students in the class).

It eventually got down to my favourite argument: Strengthened trade relations and economic dependence is a tool for maintaining peace.

Thanks, IR degree.