I was walking to work along "Broadway" this afternoon, and happened past this temporary store selling Xmas decorations, and blasting from some loudspeakers was that latter-day American Xmas-music standy, "Feliz Navidad," sung earnestly in a charming Korean accent. This was culturally disorienting. The sun was a lovely blurry gold in a hazy winter sky.
Earlier, I had enjoyed watching an episode of Spongebob Squarepants on my television, dubbed into Korean. The fact that I didn't understand anything he said really didn't interfere with my ability to understand the plot, although there's some pretty clever word-play in those cartoons that I obviously missed out on. As I watched, I had some sweet instant coffee, and ate a pre-made sandwich of indeterminate content bought from the "Orange" (e.g. 7-11 type) store downstairs. The sandwich was made with an eerie green-tinted bread. It tasted pretty good, in a wonder-bread sort of way.
When I got to work, I was correcting some writing books, and ran across the following passage, written by Julia, age 13. Note the oddly-phrased demonstration of her strong awareness of Korea's rapidly evolving gender-roles: "I think test is garbage. Test has no existence, cause if I know who make test, I curse him (or her, but I think him, because long time ago, men were best)."
I played a game with the T2 class today, and for the first time in over two months, every single student participated and even showed glimmers of enthusiasm. Of course, we didn't touch the curriculum. Ah well.
I also had recently given a "꼬치 challenge" to my 수능 and T1 cohorts. The challenge involved the following: if they could get a class average of above 75% on a context-based vocabulary quiz for the current chapter in the text, I would buy them all 꼬치 (skewered barbecue chicken, see entry of a week or so ago). Well, it never rains but it pours – both groups made the grade today, and I paid out 21,000 won to treat them all to 꼬치 from the corner stand. But it was worth it to see them work hard at it… bribery gets you everywhere, as they say. And the stomach is the key to these youngsters' minds.