Mostly the student speaking videos I post are the "good" ones – I'd rather showcase my students' successes than their failures. But lately I've been struggling with a profoundly undermotivated class called TOEFL1-T반. So two weeks in a row I've said if they were unprepared, I'd post their horrendous 45-second iBT Speaking Question answers online, and two weeks in a row they've been badly prepared. I posted these to the KarmaPlus video gallery where the Karma community can see them (it's a gated app so not open to the general public) but something made me decide to post them here, too.
KarmaPlus 중등 TOEFL1-T 반 Speaking Question Practice, January 9, 2014
KarmaPlus 중등 TOEFL1-T 반 Speaking Question Practice, January 2, 2014
This week has been a struggle because my health isn't intersecting well with my more-than-full-time commitment to work. I just work and sleep and eat and cough up disgusting things while trying to eat, mostly.
At right – some aliens.
Thursday night we had 회식 [hoe-sik = work dinner] to celebrate an apparent substantial uptick in Karma's enrollment with the new year. I went along despite my low affect, and ate some juk and some jeon and some of that weird, overly-salted egg concoction (like an ingredientless quiche, maybe) that Koreans serve as a side dish (and I don't know the name of it), while my coworkers ate hoe [sushi]. Curt went around letting everyone give little speeches so I even gave a speech, thanking everyone for their support over the past year.
As usual, I found the experience much more exhausting than work – because it consists of high-speed, high-content Korean for several hours, and I'm trying so hard to understand.
What I'm listening to right now.
The Afghan Whigs, "Going To Town."
[daily log (8 pm): walking, 5.5 km]