Final
Essay (11 July 2014)
2012310552 Jiwon Lee
Global Business Administration
SKKU Suwon Current Events
Introduction It
is natural that people pay more attention onto the things which are more
stimulating and provocative than others. Considering my recent interest, it
seems that this simple logic applies to my everyday life; for example, I often
enjoy googling some of the celebrities of issue, whose stories often come up on
the homepage than daily economics news, and read articles which catch my eyes
with amazing and mysterious news than calm,
plain stories. Those big and small happenings make me quite concentrated
on the given information. That would surely explain why I chose these three
topics of my interest that I will discuss below. The three themes to analyze
are as follows: 1) a teacher killed in front of her students by mom in France,
2) choco pies banned in North Korea and 3) corruption issue of Vice President
in Argentina.
Body The first article from Hongwoo Lee’s
blog project 3, his blog literally named ‘Welcome to Hongwoo Lee’s blog!’,
deals with a teacher’s death by a parent in France; it relates to my mother who
is also a middle-school teacher majoring in computer science. As reported by
Hongwoo, one of the parents in a class of 6-year-old children got misunderstood
as her daughter had been mistreated by her teacher. As the woman had been
placed in the psychiatric institution before, this time again she was put into
the hospital. Regarding this shocking news, Hongwoo argued that teachers should
be treated important because they are very influential when motivating their
students with his personal experience. I want to touch this problem with another
perspective while agreeing with his opinion. In Korean society, it was too
prevalent to educate children in famous private institutes and thus very often
public school teachers are neglected and disregarded as incompetent motivator.
My mom has been continuously telling me the wrongdoings of her students and
parents; student’s father in one of her classes abruptly came into the
classroom while drunk without any interruption, and said bad words to my mom
and so forth. I even worried about what if it was legal for him to hold guns
for private use; it might be far worse than one could imagine. I do not understand
why teachers including my mom should be neglected and considered unimportant by
those and why it should be stuck as social phenomenon.
Second
article was from Jaehyeok Heo’s blog project 3 of his website named ‘2014summer
class hyeok’, which covered the North Korea’s illegalization of ‘choco pies’,
one of the most famous cookies in South Korea; recently North Korean issues are
of my interest because it repeatedly showed a succession of provocative
behaviors to the global society and I saw it as its need to communicate with my
country. According to Jaehyeok’s short summary, ‘choco pie’ plant was at first
built in the North Korea to boost the peninsular cooperation between the two
countries; it became very popular, but recently North Korean government took
that as threat of westernized culture. Jaehyeok
mentioned it as ‘funny and sad story at the same time’ in regards to this
article because it proves that North Korea itself is too weak to keep its conservative
stance only by taking control of people via media and ruthless authorities. I
heard that the North Koreans are now facing enormous cultural shocks with
considerable impact of South-Korean dramas due to the active media import from
its neighboring country, China. As it says in the article that choco pies are
yet so popular that it is still supplied through secret distribution channels, I
hope South Korean products like these could inform poor North Korean citizens
of unbearable and inhumane lives of themselves, just as much as the North Korea
is now concerned about.
The
last article of the corrupt Vice President in Argentina comes from ‘Dawon’s
blog’, which is managed by Dawon Seo, and the reason why I chose this article
was that the corruption has been the prime interest of mine as a Korean,
especially since examining the adequacy of governmental officer nominees; no
one is safe from the critics’ thorough criticism and doubts so far. As reported
by Dawon, Argentina’s Vice President, Amado Boudou, was suspected to be
involved in bribery regarding the tax break given to a printing company. As he
was the Economy Minister before his term as VP, people are being more critical
to his wrongdoings. For this, Dawon argued that it is very difficult for
influential leaders to avoid corruption issues, and the politically stronger
they becomes, the more possibility they have in order to be exempt from those
suspicions because they make laws themselves. Her opinions made me think of
Korea’s situation, now facing the important nominee examination for the
Minister of Education. Hearing the news that the nominee insisted that ‘his
faults’ that people criticizes on was part of the scholarly culture in Korea
that time, I was struck dumb with amazement that this could be his excuse. I
thought the nominee should have apologized for his wrongdoings and proven that
he would try his best to recover his notorious fame and work for his people.
Just like Dawon mentioned, Argentina government should be very careful when
selecting its leaders and try not to be very generous with the leaders’ immorality.
Conclusion So far, I have
shown my interest in three of my classmates’ news articles and analyzed
according to my thoughts upon those. Some might be surprised that all these
articles are the news in the last one month; the three whole different
countries, France, North Korea and Argentina were all having quite a big topics
that were worth talking about. Furthermore, it was also noticeable that the
opinions from the three classmates shared quite similar ideas with mine; I
suppose that was why they and I both chose those topics. There is a famous old
saying, ‘there are no futures for the people who forget their past.’ With this
in mind, I hope we should think ourselves as global citizens and progress
further by overcoming our disputable events in the past.
<Sources>
1a_Blog. Lee, Hongwoo. “Article # 3 (France): Calls for tighter school security after French teacher killed by pupil's mother.” Welcome to HongwooLee’s Blog. 06 July 2014. Web. 09 July 2014.
1b_Original
Article. Chazan,
David. "Calls for Tighter School Security after French Teacher Killed by
Pupil's Mother." The
Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 05 July 2014. Web. 09 July 2014.
2a_Blog. Heo,
Jaehyeok. “Blog Project 3. North Korea. 2.North Korea has reportedly banned
Choco Pies”. 2014summer class hyeok.
03 July 2014. Web. 09 July 2014.
2b_Original
Article. McCoy, Terrence. "North Korea has
reportedly banned Choco Pies" The
washingtonpost. 01 July 2014. Web. 09 July 2014.
3a_Blog.
Seo, Dawon. “Blog Project 2: Argentina. Argentina Vice President Amado Boudou:
Charged With Corruption and Bribery”. Dawon’s
Blog. 29 June 2014. Web. 09 July 2014
3b_Original
Article. Guion, Payton. "Argentina Vice
President Amado Boudou: Charged With Corruption and Bribery" Latin
post. 29 June 2014. Web. 09 July 2014
Link http://www.latinpost.com/articles/15967/20140629/argentina-vice-president-amado-boudou-charged-with-corruption-and-bribery.htm
Link http://www.latinpost.com/articles/15967/20140629/argentina-vice-president-amado-boudou-charged-with-corruption-and-bribery.htm
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