That somebody is Yellow Ostrich. Plus, I like his music marketing strategy: pay what you think it’s worth. Embedded, a video of one of the tracks of his Morgan Freeman EP (“Inspired by Morgan Freeman’s wikipedia page.”). Brilliant. And here’s a review. A commenter muses, “this is post-irony, I thnk.” Uh-huh-yeh. Thanks to Chris Bodenner, guest-blogging for Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic, for pointing to this.
Yellow Ostrich – Morgan Freeman’s Early Life from Panaframe on Vimeo.
I hiked up to the top of 월출산 (wol-chul-san = Moon Rise Mountain) with my friend Mr Kim. It took 7 hours – about 3 hours longer than we had anticipated – we went very slowly, like ants (우리는 개미처럼 천천히 가고 있었습니다) . We spent a lot of time pausing and trying to communicate with one another, me teaching English, him teaching Korean.
I became frustrated with “faucalized consonants” (or sometimes called “tense” consonants, and mistakenly understood by many as geminates because they are written as “doubles” of the regular series: ㅅ[s] / ㅆ [s͈]… ㄱ[k] / ㄲ[k͈] … ㅂ[p] / ㅃ[p͈] … ㅈ[t͡ɕ] /ㅉ[t͡ɕ͈] … ㄷ[t] /ㄸ[t͈]). Not even the linguists seem really to understand these sounds. To my English-trained ear, I am simply incapable of hearing how they’re different, but there are many minimal pairs where understanding the distinction is important. I can’t produce the sound consistently either, although I can sometimes make myself understood by pronouncing a geminate or by using the “ejective” series that I worked so hard to master during my phonology classes as a linguistics major: p’, t’, k’, q’, s’ (these ejectives are common in many African Bantu-family languages, like Xhosa, I think).
Memorably, I was trying to say the word “dream”: 꿈 [k͈um] (standard romanization <kkum>), but Mr Kim was simply incapable of figuring out what I was talking about, because he was only hearing me say 굼[kum], which, standing alone, is a nonsense syllable. I was almost in tears when I realized I simply couldn’t express the sound correctly. Will I ever be able to do it? I wish I could meet a Korean-speaker who was also a trained linguist (or, a trained linguist who was also a Korean-speaker would do, too), who could teach me what to do with my vocal tract to make these sounds reliably. Most Koreans, when faced with the idea that the difference is hard to hear for non-native-speakers, will simply pronounce the faucalized versions louder, because that is part of how they’re perceived psychologically, I think.
Anyway… here are some pictures.
Approaching the mountain in the car from Yeongam Town.
A small temple under construction. I like the detailed woodwork on the eaves.
A small purple flower.
I’m not sure what “shemanism” is (sounds vaguely West Hollywood), but it’s definitely not allowed.
The Cloud Bridge (구름다리)
A dragonfly.
“Hiking while drunk prohibitted.”
Looking east.
At the summit.
A man surfing the internet on his cellphone at the summit (because we’re in South Korea, of course).
On the way back down: Six Brothers Rocks.
Me, trying to look very tired (because I was very tired).
A waterfall.
I don’t really know the name of the street. It’s one of basically two streets that make up Hongnong town. There’s a “High Street” and a “Low Street” – I mean these literally, because one street is farther up the hill than the other, and they run parallel to each other, with little alleyways between, for about 10 blocks in length. The bus terminal is on the southwest end of “High Street” and the elementary school where I work is on about two-thirds along the same street, toward the northeast end. Beyond the elementary school is the middle school and the fire station.
Here’s the little video I made – all shakey and walky but whatever… it sorta captures the town. Although that morning I didn’t run into any of my students, like I normally do. The music is “Fractured” by Zeromancer. Awesome track.
(Sorry the resolution is so poor – I’ve been having nightmares with uploading large files from home, so I cut the video output filesize way back, to make it tolerable on upload – it still took 25 minutes to put it on youtube.)
Mr Kim, from last weekend, invited me to go hiking today. I was thrilled to hear myself attempting to give him directions to my apartment in Korean, yesterday evening, on the phone. Well, not thrilled. But it gives me some optimism, when I use the language at all in a successful way, that I may someday "get there" – wherever "there" is: some kind of communicative efficacy, anyway.
"Where is your house?" he asked. I answered in English, and realized he wasn't understanding. I tried to explain in Korean, then. I wasn't even using full sentences. But he said he understood. Now, we have a real-life test of that understanding, as I wait for him to show up to pick me up.
I've always wondered what it would be like to to run a school that was genuinely, completely optional for children. Partly, it's a sort of what-if, child-empowerment question that has lingered with me since my own hippyish origins. Partly, it's some curiosity as to what might be the challenges of such an operation, from the standpoint of things like curriculum.
The Hongnong summer school seems to be my chance to see how such a thing might work. Any given kid shows up one day, and not the next. A colleague teacher comes by my classroom at 10 AM, and deposits a pair of visiting nieces with me, because the teacher's got something "important" to do. "This is my nephew [sic]. Can she stay here for a while?" "Sure," I grin, and a preschooler in a soaking wet purple shirt charges happily in amongst my third graders and begins headbutting her older peers, like an ecstatic goat. I give her a paper cut-out alligator and some crayons.
The consequence is that there's very little chance to build up any kind of class-to-class "progress" – each class session becomes a stand-alone daycare operation, where even the nominal breakdown by age or ability no longer holds.
Not even the physical environment holds steady. The school is under constant, heavy construction. Yesterday morning, I entered my classroom to find two workmen hanging out the window, doing something arcane with a power drill. And then during the JET test prep class, the power went out. Whoops… I guess we need a new lesson plan that doesn't require the computer (which I was using to play the CD with listening sections on it).
And you know what? I don't mind. I'm not bad at rigidity and structure, tempermentally. But I've always harbored philosphical reservations about it. So here we are. What shall we do today?
tweegret. N. the feeling that one gets that one might be missing out, by not participating in what seems to be a largely vacuous fad called Twitter.
I felt a twinge of tweegret, this morning, for the first time, when I learned that Kim Jeong-il is tweeting. For those who are interested, he's at @uriminzok. It's apparently in Korean.
It's not what you think. Just another day in the classroom. I got a present from a student: the end result of a science class where they vivisected a frog.
I was reading an essay by Oliver Wang, who has been guest-writing for Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog at The Atlantic magazine website (and, incidentally, Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the highest-quality blog that I've run across, both in terms of quality of writing and depth of topics). Wang is talking about a social issues class he teaches (apparently he's a university professor of some sort). He talks about a lot of issues, but he touches on one of the ones that most interests me.
Surprisingly, illegal immigration has not been a big topic but what is surprising is that the majority of my students who write about illegal immigration as a social problem are Asian American and presumably, either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants. Moreover, there's invariably at least one or two papers that use familiar boilerplate such as "illegal immigration is bankrupting the state" even though when I actually covered immigration, earlier in the semester, I specifically try to defuse overheated talking points such as these.
In any case, these papers by Asian American students have been a curious phenom; I've seen it happen now at least three semester in a row but I don't have a great explanation for it besides some half-hearted theory about it being some internalized model minority mentality. This is one of those, "this topic requires more research" moments.
My thoughts, regarding this: I don't think that it's Asian-Americans' role as "model minority" that creates these reactionary politics vis-a-vis immigration issues, but rather the fact of their having come from Asia in the first place – because in much of Asia (most notably in Korea and Japan, in my experience, but hardly limited to those countries, I expect), ideologies of racial purity and narratives about the overwhelming "cost" of all types of immigration (i.e. not just the financial burden but also the social costs within relatively homogeneous societies) are quite dominant.
These ideologies, I suspect, are not easily discarded by just a few generations' removal to a new and very different society / ideological setting. The contrast might be that, in comparison to East Asia, other large immigrant groups in the U.S. these days mostly hail from societies that are to one degree or another multicultural themselves, perhaps not always on the "melting pot" model of the U.S., but nevertheless… consider the mestizismo narratives of the Mexican "Raza" concept, or the castes and hierarchies (often leading to heterogeneous social subgroupings) found in many south Asian or African cultures.
After more than a week of practicing, 35 minutes a day (minus weekend, of course), I've decided to try to benchmark the progress (or lack thereof) of my third graders' effort to make a little musical play.
I'm feeling the pain of my own lack of experience in teaching / directing a dramatic production, definitely. Especially with a bunch of only marginally focused, limited-English-speaking, hyperactive 8 year olds (Western age counting – Koreans call them 10 year olds).
We're doing a little 7 minute-long musical production I found on one of the kindergarten curriculum DVDs, where I've added some characters and dialogue to accommodate the larger group, but kept the songs, which are simple and the kids seem to like them.
Here's some video I made of where things stand. Pretty rough.
I watched a movie I’d read about, finally, yesterday. The name it was released under in English is “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” but the movie is Swedish, and the Swedish title is “Män som hatar kvinnor” which translates as “Men who hate women.” This latter is a much more appropriate title – the fact is, it’s a very dark, brutal film, on themes like rape and misogyny, and therefore I should 
make clear at the outset, I don’t recommend this as a “lite” cinema experience: not a family a film.
But the acting and cinematography were pretty good, and the good guys (and girls) win, in the end, so it’s not that depressing.
My main thought as I was watching the movie, though, was actually linguistic. I’ve never studied Swedish. I did, in fact, study Danish for a short period back when I was “surfing languages” at the University of Minnesota in 87~89 (I had a tendency to attend a few weeks or months of various beginning language classes without even actually enrolling – or enrolling and then dropping before the full refund deadline – as a kind of linguistic sampler, and during that two year period I hit perhaps half a dozen languages that way). Swedish and Danish are closely related. And they’re both close relatives of English.
The consequence of this relatedness (combined with the general insights offered by my having studied linguistics, and those weeks of beginning Danish) is that I found myself depressedly realizing I could understand about the same proportion of the Swedish dialogue as I am able to understand of Korean dialogue in a Korean movie – after having been trying to learn Korean for several years! Not all foreign languages are created equal, in terms of foreignness, I suppose. But it was kind of a strange and frustrating realization.
Yesterday I took a day trip. It followed the pattern of many day trips I’ve taken with Koreans – a little bit random, with an initial plan but a lot of ad hoc changes, too. A bit like many things. Unlike in work situations, however, this kind of thing doesn’t bother me in the least. It’s a good way to do things.
I have a coworker, Haewon, who is Gyopo. “Gyopo” is what Koreans call fellow Koreans who are born or have lived abroad and pertain at least as much to that foreign culture as to Korean culture. Haewon grew up in Houston, Texas, and she is not a full-time teacher – she’s kind of bottom-of-the-totem pole, because she’s young – university age – and I don’t think she holds a Korean teaching certification. She’s kind of just a teaching assistant or part-timer. Anyway, being the only truly bilingual person in the school (and possibly the only truly bilingual person in the entire town of Hongnong), she often gets stuck with “translator duty,” which I think must be very hard on her.
At first, I didn’t feel that comfortable around her – she seemed too serious, and kind of gloomy. But I’ve come to think highly of her. She’s quite intelligent, although she hides it for the most part, and she’s got a sort of understated, wry sense of humor that shows up at odd moments. Friday, she told me she had been invited by one of her adult students (she teaches a night class at the nuclear power plant) to go drive down and look at Boseong, which is where the famous green tea plantations are, at the other end of Jeollanam Province. She conveyed her student’s invitation that I could come along too.
The adult student was Mr Kim, who is a nuclear engineer who works at the power plant as a senior reactor operator. Interesting stuff. He’s my age. He’s trying desperately to improve his English (because his next promotion depends on a certain minimum level of proficiency – it’s tied to recent contract the Korean Nuclear Power company has finagled to build reactors for the United Arab Emirates), hence the fact of his taking the night class, with Haewon, and also his invitation through her to any “foreigners” she might know to spend a Saturday hanging out and touring around. He’s a nice guy, and generous.
We didn’t follow the plan of going straight to Boseong. We ended up going the opposite direction, at first, because he wanted to go see this giant causeway (it’s a bit like the giant polders the Dutch have built to increase the size of their country, in engineering terms). First, though, we stopped at a ancient Buddhist temple called Seonsun, which is one of the oldest in Korea, having been established in 577.
The causeway, which stretches south of Kunsan in a great arc jutting into the Yellow Sea, is called Saemangeum, and basically, as I hinted, the Koreans appear to be taking a cue from the Dutch and are attempting to build more, brand new South Korea, from scratch. One dumps dirt and rocks and cement into the ocean, fills things in and drains water, adds roads, trees, buildings, harbors, and viola, more Korea!
The project is still in early stages, but the plan is humongous, vast – and although it’s not terribly photogenic, especially in the sticky summer fog, I tried to take some pictures. Then we drove to Boseong, after stopping at a fish market in Kunsan and eating some dried, smoked octopus tentacle, and then nearly drowning in a rainstorm while tailing a dumptruck.
Here are some pictures. I really liked the dumptruck bas-relief attached to the monument at Saemangeum – it would maybe make a good logo for my blog.
Here is a flower I saw at the side of the road, while walking to meet Haewon and Mr Kim at 7 in the morning.
Peering into one of the temple buildings, at Seonsunsa.
Me and the dumptruck.
Me and Mr Kim.
The giant, super-humongous tidal flood gates, near the midpoint of the 50 km. long dike that we drove along.
A stream in the woods near the tea fields.
Peering at tea from under cedars, misty day.
Tea fields.
More tea.
Me, candidly, eating naengmyeon.
Such as it is. The music: “Shower Scene” by Saint Etienne.
Here are some pictures for the last week’s evolution of the town (“Washington, SK”) that my sixth graders are making. The changes are more subtle than during the first week. But it’s definitely continuing to get more complex.
Friday:
Monday:
Tuesday:
Wednesday:
Thursday:
Here is a new logo for this bog, posted the day when this was taken. [Added 2011-06-13].
South Korea is unique, and complicated.
Pentecostal: 30% evangelical Christian, with a strong pentecostal character to the evangelical churches.
Buddhist: 30~40% Buddhist, with at least 1000 years’ tradition of resistance to authority.
Confucian: that was the state “religion” for over 500 years, to the suppression/repression of all others.
Fascist: which of the Asian “tiger” economies isn’t at core, a remarkable – and somewhat depressing – realization of the fascist fantasy: state capitalism with majority-consensus-driven (and minority-oppressing) politics?
Republic: yes, the democracy seems to sort of work, here, although I’m personally convinced it’s a lot more fragile than many analysts seem to believe.
I was reading in the 13.7 blog on NPR's website that the Big Bang theory, as a theory of beginning (and not in its role of describing the universe's conditions billions of years ago), is becoming more and more precarious, scientifically.
I've always wondered a bit about this, but my take on it is more related to the problem time itself presents: it's just a dimension, which happens to have a sort of built-in directionality or "slope" (forward), that our perceptions roll down. And to talk of beginnings or endings in the broad sense of the whole universe neglects the very real possibility that time is a local condition, rather than a universal one. Which is to say, there's no meaning to concepts of begenning or ending without any time. Beyond time.
I suppose you could say that I'm trying to apply the so-called anthropic principle to time, and suggest that time is just an accident of our (local) universe that seems special but isn't. It seems special because it's part of what gives our consciousness its unique, weird, consciousness-like characteristics. But in the bigger picture, it's a minor, even irrelevant characteristic, or a sort of emergent property of other, deeper things, in the same way that there is a specific value for pi that emerges from the mathematical relations between points in a plane, or that we experience something we call temperature, which is really just the fact of a large bunch of particles wiggling at a certain average energy level.
Last night I stopped in the stationery store to buy some more colored paper for my sixth grade town project, and had an actual conversation with the woman in the store, in Korean. I was buying some stickers and toys too (thinking of using them as prizes at some point).
It was pretty cool: Where do you work? At Hongnong elementary. The kids like these things. Yes, they do. Your Korean is pretty good. No, I only know a little. How long have you been here? I lived in Seoul for 2 years and started living here recently. Etc.
At the end, the woman complimented my Korean again, but I felt ashamed. "계속 연습 하고 해요," I said (continuing practice [I should] do). But it felt like a lie.
Why? Because I have kind of dropped the ball on actively studying Korean. My first few months here in Yeonggwang, I'd kept really well to my routine of working on Korean at least an hour a day. But since the start of summer vacation, I haven't studied at all. My vocabulary list on my cell phone has reached maximum size of 200 words, so I'm not even saving the words I look up anymore. I'm not reviewing vocabulary. I'm not carrying around my "grammar bible" lately.
I thought about this. I think I was much more deeply wounded than I've been willing to admit, by the alcohol-imbued insults and mockery of my Korean-speaking efforts, that were directed at me during our "staff field trip" three weeks ago. I took it all very personally. And I took it as a call to give up on learning Korean. Certainly, it really wrecked my motivation.
Keep this in mind, the next time you want to laugh at someone's English that isn't so perfect. There are many English-speakers in Korea who have such an atrocious level of attainment that you want to laugh. They can sound like buffoons. But don't laugh. Be positive. I've been guilty of it, too – I know.
Learning a language is hard. This is one of the reasons why I think it should be required for foreigners teaching English here to study Korean. I think it would increase sensitivity to the emotional/motivational issues involved in language acquisition – they're not trivial.
I saw a Korean popular science game show type progrom where they were dropping ants from toy helicopters and then looking for the ants to see if they survived the fall. The ants survived, of course. I think ants are of such low mass relative to surface area that falling through air is like falling through water for something larger… the air resistance means their terminal velocity is quite low or something like that. They ride the air down like a feather, floating and wafting about.
Today I had a lunch of delicious kong-guk-su (handmade noodles in an iced soy soup, with cucumber) – I went out with Cheor-ho.
I thought my first grade class went well today - I'm not sure why I think that, since the kids were running around like crazy monkeys. Maybe I just felt more peaceful about that fact? For a while I had them sitting in a circle on the floor with me, while we read a story. I would stop and ask them simple questions, based on the model of the story: "Do you want some milk?" "Yes." Miming, going around in the circle. Before that, the kids had gotten hyper throwing paper airplanes we made, too.
I'm trying to get my sixth graders to start buying and selling land from each other in the town we've built. But they're too respectful of each other's prerogatives… or too shy to aggressively buy and sell, even though they have no problem hurling insults at one another. It's interesting observing these cultural differences, and to reflect on what implications they may have (if any) for how Korean capitalism actually works.
I’ve been having a lot of computer problems, lately. But I think I should lay off ranting about it here.
I’ve been having a lot of vivid, weird dreams, lately, too. But I hesitate to write about those, sometimes. Nobody wants to read all the time about someone else’s dreams.
I’ve been having a rather vague, inconclusive experience with my teaching efforts, lately. I’m not sure what I could say about it. The first grade feels out-of-control-but-situation-normal. The third grade may be improving with my new, changed direction; and sixth grade remains excellent, although I’m groping for ways to keep it interesting. The “JET” test-prep class is boring. But I expected that. Boring subject can easily lead to boring class.
I haven’t been communicating much with friends or family, lately. Sorry about that. I’ve been in one of my periodic eremitic states.
Lately, I’ve been feeling a little blue. (Picture is my own artwork, done in 1992.)
I couldn't think of what I wanted to write in this blog. Sometimes I just don't have anything I feel like sharing. I went surfing through my more private journal of notes and observations, looking for something to write here. I found the following unattributed quote, from a while back. Did I make it up? Did I hear it somewhere?
What is sleep? Just practicing being dead. Everything requires practice.
It’s said that when you dream in a language, you’ve “learned” it. So, what does it mean when you dream in a language, wake up and immediately type the phrase into Google Translate, just to make sure you understood correctly? That’s sort of what happened this morning.
I dreamed I was talking to a child on a bus. This is rooted in reality, because when I went to Gwangju on Friday, I’d met two of my Hongnong students: two sisters in 6th and 4th grade – the younger is the girl I call “Miss Sardonica” (in my mind) because of her strange, sardonic-looking grin. But they’re good kids. I let them play games on my cell phone during the trip, because they looked bored. It’s a notable, interesting difference between Korea and the US, that it’s utterly common to run into elementary-age children traveling alone on intercity buses here, for example.
Anyway, the dream: the child in the dream wasn’t one of these two girls, but some random child – well, not completely random, he looked like one of the first-graders: a certain extremely mischievous, bright-eyed boy named Ji-hun. And he seemed a little bit lost. There was a woman giving the child a hard time, but I didn’t understand what she was saying. Asking him questions to which he evidently couldn’t offer satisfactory answers. Not his mom – she was like a bus-company employee, the kind that get on the bus to check your ticket sometimes. But then the child turned to me and asked, “돈 있죠?” (don it-jyo), and then I woke up. It wasn’t a very complicated dream. Just a dream fragment, really. But it felt significant, because it had ended with a seemingly contextless question, spoken in Korean, that I felt I’d understood. It felt like a triumphant moment.
I had fallen asleep with the air conditioner on, which normally I avoid because it gives me a sore throat (not to mention it seems an unnatural and expensive way to sleep), so my little apartment was chilly. I looked out the window, and the sun was bright. Sky was blue.
I looked at my cell phone, to see what time it was, but it was turned off. Maybe some spam-text-message had inspired me to turn it off, the night before. Sometimes, I wake up and have no idea what time it is, I will try to guess. I looked out the window, noted the angle of sun’s shadows down on the gas station in front of my apartment building, noted the shade of blue of the sky, and said to myself, “hmm, 7:00… no, 6:50.” A little game I play with myself, right? I turned on my computer, and the clock read 6:53. I felt impressed with myself, at that moment.
But suddenly I felt very insecure about whether I’d understood the Korean from the end of the dream. So I opened up google translate and typed in the phrase, “돈 있죠?”
“Got money?” the google-monster muttered back at me, textually.
Yes, I’d understood. But now it struck me: what the hell did it mean? I mean, in the dream-interpretation sense… Why was this kid asking me if I had money?
I made some instant coffee and had toast for breakfast. Good morning.
Unlike most of my "caveat"'s, these are "real" and not just a convention of this blog. Which is to say, I am developing some disgruntlement with respect to Google's Chrome browser. And I've got one last chapter to provide to the long saga of my disgruntlement with Sony Vaio.
I have been a major user of Google Docs – it's where I do most of my writing, these days. I like that my writing is out there in the cloud, because it feels safer than having my writing confined to a local harddrive. You see, I lost well over 300 pages of writing, including two novels-in-progress that I was actually rather happy with, in 1998, to a harddrive crisis. Since then, I have been meticulous about back-ups, but I also like to put my active works out in the cloud, since that way I can work on them and get to them whenever I have internet access, and regardless of from what computer I happen to be on (for e.g. when that laptops dies – see a few paragraphs below).
And as time has gone by, I've been using Chrome more and more, on the assumption that it would be the easiest and best environment to work with Google Docs – same company making both, and all that. This was a bad assumption. For the third time in less than a month, this morning, I had Google Docs "hang" and lose written material for me. I've NEVER had this happen in either Firefox or Internet Explorer. So I guess Google Chrome can't handle Google Docs. Which is downright weird. But… whatever. Fortunately there are lots of choices in the browser market, these days.
In other, related, Jared-rants-about-tech news, my old laptop died last night. It had been a long, slow, dying. That's why I had bought a new laptop (netbook, actually) before coming back to Korea in January – I knew the thing was sickly, with random crashes, and occasional boot failures.
It's been suffering from a decaying harddrive problem of some kind – corrupt and inaccessible sectors on the C: drive. I can still get it to boot into the Windows Server 2003 that I hacked onto it, and although that will be useful if I find there's any data I need to recover, it won't be very practical, as I never was able to find a Win Server 2003 driver set for the video card on that laptop, which means I get a very crappy, lo-res screen when I'm using Win Server, on that box. I only ever booted to the server if I was doing programming, which I basically don't do anymore. And the Ubuntu Linux OS I'd installed seems unbootable, too, although I may be able to rescue that by re-installing.
As an end-of-life review, I only have this to say: I will never buy another Sony Vaio. It was a universe of problems and issues during its entire life, from the memorable August day 3 years ago when I bought it. That one laptop destroyed almost a decade of built-up brand loyalty I'd had toward Sony. So… good riddance.
Still… I'll miss the high-speed video card (even though it sometimes would crash the box by overheating) – this netbook can't come close to competing, with its slow video card and small screen. I suppose I was playing too many games on that box, anyway.
When I first got to Gwangju, in April, I was inclined to describe it as the "Des Moines" of South Korea. But having lived in glorious, hillbilliac Yeonggwang for the last 4 months, and returning there to spend the afternoon today, I thought, "jeez, it's like coming to Paris."
I hung out in a cafe (Yeonggwang doesn't really have cafes). I had a scone. I bought some real "imported from US" cheese (for about a dollar an ounce), took it home, and now I'm watching NCIS and eating cheese and crackers. Call it a break from Korea.
After one week of teaching summer classes, here are my thoughts on the curriculum I developed and rolled out for myself.
For first grade: medium-to-OK; about what I expected; it could be more organized, but those first graders are hard to manage, especially on my own, so I figure it could be worse; the best material is when I have them moving around playing (role-playing, vaguely), acting out story-lines from stories we've been reading.
For third grade: not going well; they were really into the role-play last month, but I think I got too serious about it, and showing them videos (i.e. Spongebob) to give them ideas actually distracts them and they lose their focus; I'm going to have to rethink, and change something.
For sixth grade: I've never had a more successful self-developed curriculum! They love it; they come in early and demand that we start immediately, and they refuse to leave the class after the time is up; mwahahaha – I win ^_^. They've named our simulation bulletin-board town: Washington, SK (cf. Washington, DC, I guess, but in South Korea).
I'm certain they told me that I was teaching a special gifted student English class at the county education office on Thursdays, starting the first week in August. Of course, that was back at the beginning of July. I said "OK," marked it on my calendar, and nothing more was said about it. Nothing. Nobody told me what time, where, what students, what materials were expected. I figured, well, that's just the Korean communication taboo, kicking in.
Being the somewhat responsible person that I try to be, I researched the when and where by asking a coworker who had been doing these classes before, and showed up at the education office building in Yeonggwang yesterday at 4:45, expecting to teach some kids at 5 pm. But they didn't know who I was. Finally, with my broken Korean, I managed to understand that "oh, that gifted program is on vacation at the moment." They told me to come back the last week in August.
Maybe I misunderstood the original request to do this – but I really don't think so. It's just another example of how information most definitely does not work its way down hierarchies, here.
I don't really feel that upset about it. But it's interesting, to me. So I thought I'd document the experience.
As I was walking back to my apartment afterward, I had a sort of insight: information doesn't move down hierarchies reliably because it's always the responsibility of those farther down to find stuff out – the higher-ups are never wrong, by definition, so, in my case for example, I now owe an apology to my higher-ups for having misunderstood (or for having failed to confirm) the original request. I remember my first hagwon boss's line: "but you never asked." As an employee in Korea, it is always one's responsibility to ask.
Google recently revamped the way that their news website is organized. As an admitted news junkie, this is something I've had to deal with, as I go there several times a day to see "what's happening." And let me be very clear.
I hate the new google news format. What's funny is that I found I'm not alone in this feeling, because I went to google and typed into the search engine "i hate the new…" and the little suggestions popped up, and right at the top was "i hate the new google news." So other people went and did the same thing I did.
Actually, some things about the new design are good ideas. One thing that I really like is the way it grabs my IP address and offers a section with "local" news – finding interesting news about southwest Korea in English is challenging, and that really helps.
But overall, the new design is a problem, and it boils down to one issue: real estate. By this, I don't mean anything about buying and selling land; I'm referring to how it uses screen space. At home, I mostly use my little netbook computer to surf online, and the screen is small. As a consequence, because the center column of entries is now "fleshed out" with more info about each story, only 1 and 1/2 story fits "above the fold" on my screen – I have to scroll to see more stories. And the convenient little index thing on the left now is two or even three screens long, whereas before it fit easily "above the fold." Using the nasty track-pad for scrolling on my netbook isn't fun – there's no handy scrolling wheel like on most newer mice.
And as always when programmers make changes, the keyboard shortcuts receive short shrift, are inconsistent from version to version (both of browsers and/or of specific websites, that also like to override default browser behavior, which itself is brutally annoying, by the way) and zero documentation support.
The expansions in real estate usage are even noticeable on the large screens of the computers at work.
Relatedly, I don't like the "fast flip" in the right hand column, either. Not that it's a bad idea, but it takes up way too much space relative to the possible benefit offered – it's still too small to read the content shown "right there" and so, like most thumbnailing features, I'd be inclined to turn it off, if I could. I've never found thumbnails to be particularly useful as a feature in any computer desktop context, as the images are too small to see directly and therefore serve no purpose except as a memory prompt for the semi-literate – but why would someone only semi-literate want to surf the google news site? I'd be perfectly happy to have no images at all, to be honest.
I would guess that there are ways to get back to more closely approximating the old format, using the news customization features – but because I don't allow google to store cookies or do site customization on my computer or in association with my login ID, that's ruled out. I don't allow the google customization not just due to privacy concerns, but also because it seems to make which of the news articles that get prioritized kind of strange – they become incomprehensibly driven by recent searches (which given my line of work and wide ranging imagination, aren't exactly current-events-driven) – these "recent search" driven news items are exactly what I don't want when surfing for general recent world news.
I found an extra car attached to my bulletin-board construction-paper town. It said “♥왜젤왯” – which tranliterates as “wae-jer-waet” – I think it’s an effort on the part of the student to write my name in hangeul, which I sometimes jokingly transliterate as “왜제렛” [wae-je-ret]. If that’s the case, it’s a sweet tribute.
Yes.
I’ve started a project to build a “town” with my 6th grade class. There are turns, they buy and sell property, start businesses, etc. A classroom economy.
Here are 3 shots of the first 2 days of the town. See how it’s growing, already? Hmm… I hope this works out – the kids (admittedly a small group) seem really into it – more than I even had expected. But they could lose interest. We will see.
I’m really proud of the traffic circle I made.
The school is a mess – a construction zone. Most of the teachers and, more happily, the administrators, are missing-in-action (they get longer vacations, because they’re “real” teachers, unlike the foreigner types). But I’m teaching “summer camp” classes. They’re awesome. No coteacher to have to work with or around or behind. I get to make up my own curriculum. And I know the kids already, so I already have some rapport.
I took some “class portraits” today, because I really want to make a serious effort to learn these kids’ names. Korean names are so difficult to learn, but except for the first graders I mostly have them down. So now I have pictures of them to study and to match up to names, as practice.
Here is my number-one super favoritest class – the 3rd graders.
And here are the first graders, behaving better than usual.
“좋은 놈, 나쁜 놈, 이상한 놈” is the title of a Korean western. Yes, western, as in western genre movie. It takes place in 1930’s Manchuria, which was a bit of a wild land at the time, with the Japanese trying to exert imperial control, while the Chinese, British, Germans and Russians tried to regain spheres of influence, and with disgruntled and outlaw-ish Korean freedom fighters and Mongolian tribesmen thrown into the mix.
The title is an homage to Eastwood’s classic American western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” – it translates as “the Good, the Bad and the Weird.” The title itself tells you there will be some interesting post-modern things going on. It’s over-the-top in terms of violence, but worth seeing.
I love how it includes all these seemingly out-of-sync cultural objects and references – 1920’s big-band dance music, Japanese soldiers, Korean merchants or black-marketeers, Mongolian tribesmen sitting on horses on hilltops looking like Native Americans… but I would imagine it might not be that far off vis-a-vis what Manchuria must have been like in that era. Of course, everything is exaggerated and re-imagined, just in the way American westerns re-imagine North American history, too.
I don’t normally like South Park that much. But sometimes I watch it, because the social and cultural commentary can be so amazingly intelligent and deep-cutting. One such episode I caught recently was the one entitled “Margaritaville” about the way that what we believe really drives the economy. Kyle becomes a Jesus figure, and saves the economy by taking on everyone’s debt (the way that Jesus takes on everyone’s sins) and thus allowing everyone’s lives to return to normal. It’s pretty funny, but scarily accurate in the way that it explains how the government bailouts are supposed to work.
And another episode where Mickey Mouse beats the crap out of the Jonas Brothers is funny, too, although much nastier and cruder, more in alignment with the South Park norm.
[UPDATE 2024-04-18: Originally there was a link to the episodes discussed, but that link rotted and I have no replacement link. Thank you, internet!]
“No printed word, nor spoken plea can teach young minds what they should be. Not all the books on all the shelves – but what the teachers are themselves.” — Rudyard Kipling
Walking along the Juyeop Park Esplanade yesterday in Ilsan in the humid, still evening, I watched the children playing among modernist statuary, parents playing ball with their kids, kids walking to or from hagwon as if they were college students, grandparents strolling, an old woman selling onions and garlic. All around, a rectilinear park-like environment, punctuated by a seemingly endless array of identical high-rise apartment towers of dubious individual architectural merit. This is Ilsan, a city of half a million that didn't exist the first time I came here, in 1991.
Yet unlike so many Modernist planned cities, Ilsan seems to work, at a very fundamental level. Imagine something with all the charm of Cabrini Green (Chicago's infamous 1960's era Modernist housing projects), but inhabited by a mostly Lake Forest demographic. The children play happily amid the soulless buildings, the parents are a bit overwrought, but deeply bourgeois. This is not typical Korea, either, but it feels very much like the future. The future that visionaries such as Le Corbusier and other Modernist "new city" proponents supposedly got so wrong.
Ilsan represents to me the proof of the fact that although most contemporary urbanist thinking seems to focus a great deal on the way that we can influence lifestyles through how we plan our urban spaces, when you get right down to it, there are very few elements of the physical urban space that are guaranteed to make a difference, positive or negative. Density is significant, but Ilsan is probably as automobile-reliant as any American city, if only because of the upper-middle-class status of most of its inhabitants – they need their cars, as aspirational objects, above all else. Perhaps it makes me a bit of a cultural determinist (read: marxist), but what makes urban spaces work has more to do with the socioeconomic position of the inhabitants than with how they are put together.
Seungbae es uno de mis mejores amigos coreanos. Anoche cuando llegué a Suwon, me dijo de inmediato, “I think you need Mexican food.” Así, claro que me conoce bien. Nos metimos en su pequeña van amarilla y manejamos a Osan, donde cenamos fajitas y quesadillas y horchata, todas hechas por cocineros verdaderamente mexicanos. Los chilangos de Osan, Corea, con su improbable proyecto de dar a los gringos (y ¡pochos! porque así son las fuerzas militares estadunidenses, en estos días) de la base aérea ahí un sabor de su continente extrañado.
Hablé con el cocinero sobre el problema de encontrar la masa de harina verdademente mexicana. Me explicó lo que ya había sospechado: por alguna extraña regla proteccionista, no se permite importar la harina nixtamalera en Corea. Ésta es la harina de maíz que se usa para hacer tortillas mexicanas frescas, tamales, sopes, pupusas, etc. Me decía que cualquier otra necesidad de la cocina mexicana ha podido encontrar en Seul, menos esta. Incluso a traído maletas desde Los Angeles o Chicago o DF a este país llenas de maseca (la marca mas conocida de masa de harina).
Después de comer Seungbae y yo hablamos algunas horas acerca de las dificultades de la vida, en nuestra singular mescla de español, inglés y coreano. Es un hombre muy inteligente, con buen sentido de humor. Acerca de mis dificultades digamos emocionales con mi lugar de trabajo, me dijo: “there is no good medications except for time.” Que es exactamente la verdad, e?
Estuvo bien. Hoy voy a ver a mi otro buen amigo coreano, en Ilsan.
