“왜저래” [weh-jeo-rae] is my “korean name” though it very much a joke, since its meaning is something like “what the heck?” When students call me “Weh-jeo-rae-saem” it’s like they’re saying “Mr What-the-Heck.”
The other day in class I found this (at right) written on the board at the end of class – I’d already left the room and come back to get some stuff I’d left in the room, so the author of the note was annonymous. It’s nice to know that I’m appreciated.
[daily log: walking km]
I received a phone text message from my student: “왜저래&KEVIN.” [왜저래 is a joking version of my name in Korean]. It was in commemoration of my reunion with Kevin the Alligator, who had been kidnapped by a student named Alex and was presumed “lost” or “dead” for 5 long, difficult, very sad days and was only returned Monday. Attached to the phone text message: the picture at left – me seated at my desk in the staff room with Kevin the Alligator.
Yesterday we had our “Simpsons” Debate Test in my Mon/Weds/Fri cohort middle-school debate class. Today we will have the same debate in the Tues/Thurs/Sat cohort.
I created a unit for my debate class that focuses on learning about the types of mistakes one can make in a debate – meaning reasoning errors and logical fallacies. To make it more interesting, I decided to go with a tongue-in-cheek, humorous theme, and so the debate topic is the “Simpsons” (all the kids love the Simpsons, of course). The other quirk of this unit is that I tell the kids I want them to deliberately make mistakes in their debate speeches. They really get into this – they’ve come up with some pretty humorous and silly reasons to support or oppose the proposition that “Bart is smarter than Lisa.”
One of my favorites, which I paraphrase: “Socrates once said a wise man is a man who says he’s not wise. Bart says he’s dumb, so he must be smart.” Yes, they’re really quoting Socrates (of course, they find the quote in Korean, and so it’s Socrates via translation through Korean, but I do remember a sentiment of this sort from him). Isn’t the internet wonderful?
I took some video and might post some of that later, if I get around to it. Meanwhile, here are some drawings by two of the talented students in that class. It’s a very small class – only 6 students. Claire drew a cartoon of the day’s theme.
Then she drew a class portrait. I’m not sure why she made the two boys in the class so small – Alex is taller than I am. And note that she gave me only 4 hairs on the top of my head. In the picture, my name in Korean is “왜저래” [wae-jeo-rae] which is a sort of joking “Korean name” for me, because of how it sounds similar to my name. If you type it into google translate, it says it means “What the hell?” – I don’t think it’s that strong, but the pragmatics are similar.
Finally, Jin drew a portrait of Claire.
My feelings of tweegret have overcome me, despite my long, strong efforts to resist it.
So I have become a twit – which is by far the best noun coined for those who tweet, using twitter.
But rather than give in to a phenomenon that seems so banal and narcissistic as to render even facebookland a veritable utopia of social altruism, I have decided to “double down.”
Here is my twitter manifesto, #sayitin14 – dedicated to minimalizing further the already minimalist tendencies in twitter:
I will only post tweets 14 characters in length or fewer. Note that this does not include links or hashtags.
Originally, I thought to make my rule a limit of posts to one word. But I decided that to better double down on the original 140 character limit, a 14 character limit was more elegant.
I would like to observe that in a unicoded, character-per-syllable language with essentially optional spacing between words, like Korean, 14 characters is still quite sufficient to post entire sentences.
English, with its relatively low information density (on a per character basis), is more limited, and the restriction will lead to a certain absurdism. I hope.
My username is @waejeorae (which is based on my joke “Korean Name” 왜저래 [waejeorae = what the…? , what’s up?] – because the pronunciation resembles that of my true name in Korean order: Way Jared). If you follow me, I promise to be disappointing.
As this late adoption of the now ubiquitous twitter platform shows, I am not really an “early adopter.” I certainly have been an early adopter in some realms: I wrote all my papers in high school on computer (1979~1983), I programmed my first spreadsheet app in 1986, I bought my first laptop PC in 1992, I published my first website (that people – namely, my students – actually visited) in 1995 (on geocities – remember that?), and this here blog thingy was started well ahead of the technology adoption curve in 2004. But I’ve been quite late in other areas: I only bought my first cell phone in 2004, and only got my first smartphone last year. And here I am joining twitter only past their IPO (which is a well-established signal of outright decline in the technology world). So whether I adopt some technology or not is largely connected with my perception of its usefulness, rather than some desire or interest in adopting new technologies for the sheer sake of being at the vanguard.
My student who goes by John wrote this too-short essay in his essay book.
Jarad Way always say 왜저래? so his mother really upset. Jarad be punished. So he was really sad. So, He changed his name 왜저래?
I've written [broken link! FIXME] before that I sometimes jokingly tell my students that my Korean name is 왜저래 [wae-jeo-rae = way-juh-ray]. It has a similar sound to my name when pronounced casually in Korean order (i.e. last name first): way-ja-red. And the meaning is something akin to "what the heck?" – it's not really bad cussing, but it's not exactly polite – this explains why my mother punished me, in the essay. It's a clever folk-etymology of my name (autoonomastics?), from a 5th grader.
Here's a bit of self-flattery to make up for the preceding – something encountered in 2nd-grader Lucy's essay book earlier today. Notice how she started to write alligator but decided that that was too hard, and wrote "Steve" – which is the current alligator's name.
My student, Dong-uk, drew this portrait of me last night, during class, and presented it to me proudly. The likeness is disturbing.
The text he wrote:
WANTED
Jared Way (AKA 왜저래 [wae-jeo-rae = “what the heck?” but very similar to my name in Korean order – a running gag])
A little bit alchol [hmm really? looks like it, but … not accurate, I swear]
Doesn’t smoke
K a r m a E n g l i s h A c a d e m y
1,000,000,000$
