Month: November 2007

Caveat: Three Months

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

So I'm closing in on the end of my third month here.   Three months ago tomorrow, on a Saturday afternoon, I arrived in Korea.  And I'm having feelings of ambiguity, as in most things in life, I suppose.

On the one hand, despite all the frustrations, I still like my current job better than my last one – it's easier to look forward to, and less stressful, and sometimes downright fun.  And I have moments when I really enjoy where I am and the bits of the language I'm acquiring and all that.

On the other hand, I haven't felt like a particularly good teacher, at least lately.  Perhaps a bit of a crisis of self-confidence – these are not uncommon, for me, are they?  And although I often enjoy solitude and definitely require a great deal of it, I confess to feeling some loneliness, of late. 

Caveat: Ephesians 6:12-19

Banalities & Journaling / The Wonders of Work / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

One of my coworkers has the following posted prominently at his desk:

12 우리의 씨름은 혈과 육에 대한 것이 아니요 정사와 권세와 이 어두움의 세상 주관자들과 하늘에 있는 악의 영들에게 대함이라   
13 그러므로 하나님의 전신 갑주를 취하라 이는 악한 날에 너희가 능히 대적하고 모든 일을 행한 후에 서기 위함이라   
14 그런즉 서서 진리로 너희 허리띠를 띠고 의의 흉배를 붙이고   
15 평안의 복음의 예비한 것으로 신을 신고   
16 모든 것 위에 믿음의 방패를 가지고 이로써 능히 악한 자의 모든 화전을 소멸하고   
17 구원의 투구와 성령의 검 곧 하나님의 말씀을 가지라   
18 모든 기도와 간구로 하되 무시로 성령 안에서 기도하고 이를 위하여 깨어 구하기를 항상 힘쓰며 여러 성도를 위하여 구하고   
19 또 나를 위하여 구할 것은 내게 말씀을 주사 나로 입을 벌려 복음의 비밀을 담대히 알리게 하옵소서 할 것이니   

This is from Ephesians, chapter 6 – I used the amazing world wide web, to figure this out.  The same section of King James begins this way:

12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.   
13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.
….

I'm going to come straight out and say: looks like more apocalypse, to me.

I have been feeling a bit under the weather, again.  But hardly apocalyptic.

Caveat: Twisted discourse and green giraffes

Banalities & Journaling / Language & Linguistics / My Drawings & Paintings / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I was telling a few of my students about some tongue-twisters today, and they particularly liked the one about woodchucks.  But then they surprised me by teaching me a Korean tongue-twister, that I actually was able to understand with a minimal amount of parsing:
“내가 그린 기린 그림은 잘 그린 기린 그림이고 니가 그린 기린 그림은 잘 못 그린 기린 그림이다.”
Since it’s a tongue-twister, for the full effect, here is a transliteration:  “Naega geurin girin geurimeun chal girin geurim-igo, niga geurin girin geurimeun chal mot girin geurim-ida.”
And, for your reading pleasure, here is a rough translation:  “My picture of a giraffe is a good picture, [but] your picture of a giraffe is not a good picture.”
pictureHowever, there is the additional confusion that 그린 could be a Konglish rendering of “green,” which makes me think of green giraffes.
I really, really like this phrase.  I think it’ll be my motto for the month!  Boy is it hard to say, though.
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Caveat: It was foggy

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

It was foggy today around noon when I left my building.  The ground was damp, and it felt like Minnesota does sometimes in early Spring after an unexpected thaw.

I walked to the Starbucks at Juyeop (which is indirectly on the way to work) and had a 4 dollar latte.  The recent descent of the dollar has brought up prices of things that are tied to the dollar and the global economy, here.  But I suppose on the good side, this means I'm earning my wages in won at a good time relative to the global economy.

I read my Economist magazine, and tried to study my giant-and-always-growing list of Korean vocab items, and stared out the window.  About 40 minutes later, I walked the rest of the way to work, and watched a street sweeping machine snorting up the orange leaves from the street gutters.  The sun came out. 

Caveat: No caveats

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online

Totally lazy day… reading, listening to the radio.  I decided to take a little one day break from doing anything at all.  So… this is a very peremptory entry, I guess.  Just to be consistent.

An engineer was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I`ll turn into a beautiful princess".

He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket.

The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week."

The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket.

The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I`ll stay with you and do ANYTHING you want."

Again the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket.

Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I`ve told you I`m a beautiful princess, that I`ll stay with you for a week and do anything you want. Why won`t you kiss me?"

The engineer said, "Look I`m an engineer. I don`t have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog, now that`s cool."

Caveat: A better bookstore

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

I found an even better bookstore, and very conveniently located next to my Saturday hagwon.  I spent a few hours there, bought some magazines and a philosophy book (a collection of essays by Deleuze), and a matching pair of manga books:  volume one of "Deathnote" (which I learned about based on seeing a graffiti on a desk at my work), in both English and Korean translations – I've been thinking for some time that reading a manga in Korean might be a good way to work on my skills – especially having access to the English version too.  Manga are very popular here (they're called Manhwa) – there are whole sections in bookstores devoted to them.

Caveat: More thanks

Banalities & Journaling / The Wonders of Work

These last two days, I have gone all-out to approach my teaching and my world with a sort of broad gentleness, and an attitude of thankfulness and kindness.   Partly in the spirit of the holidays.  Partly in the spirit of the kindness of my employers, who, despite their recent criticisms of my abilities, remain genuinely decent, fair-minded people, whose foremost concern is the kids – in this respect, I seem to have lucked out over the more mass-production language hagwons that seem to predominate here.

But mostly, because I have become more and more convinced that my best personal cure to episodes of anger and frustration is simply to "think" myself out of it.  That's the cognitive behavioral therapy thing, right?  So…

And the honest truth, the last two days have been much happier and less stressful days at work.  Not perfect… no, those T2's are still… well, no comment. 

But the T1's – wow, what a smart group of kids.  We're doing a unit on biology.  I put together a lecture on the Monerans for Wednesday, and we kept on it today, answering quiz questions via discussion and reading more material.  I got to talk about stuff I'd long forgotten and have been reading furiously to remember from my almost-minor in botany back as an undergrad at Minnesota:  prokaryotes vs eukaryotes, the symbiotic origins of chloroplasts and mitochondria, the carbon cycle, taxonomic systems and phylogenetics.  And for the most part, at least half are keeping up with me. 

And though not quite the same level, academically, the Monday/Friday 수능 cohort, are just plain pleasant and fun, as we talk about democratic movements being suppressed in Egypt and Korean Presidential politics (they'll have elections in December) – I got them to make a prediction that 이명박 would be the winner.  We'll see if this pans out – I have this vague recollection of reading somewhere that, in the U.S. anyway, polling teenagers is a better predictor of presidential race outcomes than polling adults.    Perhaps because they know what their parents are thinking and saying, and report more sincerely than adults self report in polls?

And then I came home to a wonderful, entertaining, uplifting email from my best friend Bob, demonstrating again why he's my best friend.   And now I'm watching David Letterman on my TV, eating some delicious ramyeon with mystery vegetables (and chopped tomato and way too much chili paste added), and writing my blog.

It was suddenly a bit warmer today – maybe 15 C.  And raining earlier, and now foggy.  I'll go to my Korean class tomorrow.   I've actually begun to remember some bits of vocabulary, too.  Maybe there's hope for that impossible project (ie. actually learning this baroque, beautiful, convoluted language), too!

Caveat: Thanks

Banalities & Journaling

Today is Thanksgiving.  But… I'm in Korea, and that's one U.S. holiday that simply hasn't made it over here.  I was realizing that this is the first Thanksgiving that I haven't commemorated in any way in my entire life.  So I bought some chocolates and gave them away to my students, spending a few minutes in each class discussing the holiday and tossing them candy.  This seemed to go over well.  Food is the key to most people's souls, isn't it?

So.  Happy Thanksgiving.

Caveat: Unfunness

Banalities & Journaling / Teaching & Methodology / The Wonders of Work

Welcome to my world:  the unfunness.

Today, I asked for, and got, some critical feedback on my teaching.  Not really a positive review.  My own fault for asking, right?

Primary concern:  I am unfun.  Too serious….  I always have been too serious.  I was too serious as a child.  As a student.   And certainly, I am too serious as a teacher.  Still… I have trouble reconciling this with how much fun some of my classes can be, especially the younger kids, on the one hand, and the most highly motivated advanced classes, on the other.  But the criticism is certainly compelling in light of those recalcitrant T2's.

Secondary:  classroom management.  I don't really control my classrooms.  That's the uber-democratic hippy-quaker thing showing through.  I'm not a disciplinarian, at heart.  And I resist being urged to take more control… and have trouble reconciling the idea of being more "fun" on the one hand with being more controlling on the other, though I recognize, intellectually, that it's possible and even necessary with some groups.

Next:  I speak too fast.  I know this is true, and have no argument here – it's the hardest single thing to remember, as I teach – that I'm working with language learners, and even when they nod and pretend (quite convincingly) that they understand, they aren't necessarily getting much of what I'm saying.

Next:  I give the kids too many choices.  They're not supposed to have opinions about what they should be studying.  This is, again, my countercultural background showing through.  And is certainly even less popular a viewpoint, here in Korea, than it would be in the U.S., though even there it would be a less than universal approach.

No defense, no excuses.  I will keep trying to improve.

Some general observations, however.  I'm an introverted person – perhaps not best suited, in some ways, to being a school teacher.

But on the other hand, I am really pretty good at "teaching" – but only in the context of highly motivated learners.  I am not, at least constitutionally, a motivational speaker – not by any stretch of the imagination.  Thus, I do fine interacting with those who bring a desire to learn to the classroom, regardless of their level of innate intelligence or degree of preparation.  But, when it comes to the motivationally challenged, I am clueless and incapable of pulling them along.  Perhaps this is because that's my own internal demon?  Not sure….

Caveat: Chat

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

At this instant, I'm chatting online in a weird mixture of Korean and Spanish – I signed up at this website called hanglingo.com to try to meet people for "language exchange" and just got an instant message from someone.   This will be interesting…

Caveat: First Snow

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

I left work this evening and it was snowing.  It was a hard-falling slushy snow.  But by the time I got to my apateu it had fizzled to a weak drizzle. 

I bought some vegetables yesterday.  I don't know what they are… green shoot thingies.  I often buy vegetables I am unable to identify… just for the adventure I guess.   When I decided to chop some of it into my ramyeon this evening, I found a label:  "Product of China."

This is stunning, for some reason.  More stunning than the zillions of dollars worth of electronics and plastic crap and everything else China exports.  Because it's so easy to remember that within my lifetime, people were starving in China.  And now they export fresh vegetables to their neighbors.  I suppose this doesn't mean people aren't starving there, any more – after all, people starve in places like Guatemala, while bananas are exported.  But it's just weird, I guess.

Most fruits and vegetables in Korea are grown locally – even tropical varieties and even out-of-season – they have bazillions of acres covered in greenhouses.  It's weird to think that South Korea is almost self-sufficient in food, yet one of the most densely populated countries on earth – more densely populated than any other "large" country except Bangladesh.   Into an area of just under 100,000 km sq. (about the size of Kentucky, and similar topography), they cram 50 million.

I love snow.

I wish they would give me some kind of performance review or even the vaguest fragment of feedback at work.  I'm in the dark.  It's… frustrating.

Caveat: A Sunday Walk

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea / My Photos

It was the first day that the high temperature was below freezing, I think, since I’ve been here.  And a strong wind from the northwest.
So I thought, today I’ll take my camera and take a walk around my neighborhood.  I took almost 100 pictures, and here are some I particularly like.  All these pictures were taken within about a kilometer of my apartment, as I walked a roundabout route past the subway, up through the park with the little hill, around past near where the Tomorrow School is.  They’re shown in the order I saw them, roughly.
This is a street about 4 blocks east.
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This is the entrance to the Jeongbalsan subway station.
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This is a government office near the subway station.
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This is the same office from the other side, and a flower on a trellis.
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This is a path up the hill.
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This is a view looking northeast from near the top of the hill.
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This is a friendly dog I saw in someone’s yard.
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This is a rather posh American-looking house.
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This is a backhoe and a tree.
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And finally, proof that my students have opportunities to apply their hard-earned English skills out in the real world, right in their neighborhood.
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Caveat: Chase Cult Up Grade Personality

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

The above was emblazoned proudly on a man's jacket, I saw on the subway coming home from my Saturday Korean class.

I'm so uplifted by the knowledge that clothing-marketers' English is almost as bad as my Korean.  But seriously… I think that it should be the name of a novel.  A complex study of eschatological metaphor and post-modern epistemology, set in an imaginary Asian country dominated by American consumerist values and inhabited by largely identical tribes of evangelical christians and half-hearted, retrograde buddhists.

Is there any room for a devoutly atheist, libertarian marxist half-quaker such as myself? 

It might snow tonight. 

In the bookstore where I went to buy my magazines for the week, I heard Abba.

Caveat: The longest war

Background Noise / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

I overheard on the radio part of a book review of Susan Faludi's new book, Terror Dream.  Without having read the book, I'm probably as skeptical as the reviewer with respect to Faludi's apparent core thesis:  that Bush/Cheney's war-on-terror is resulting in significant rollbacks of feminist gains of previous decades.

Nevertheless, one sub-thesis that the reviewer mentioned, that I found compelling and powerful, was the idea that, far from being a strange and unwonted new type of war, the new "war-on-terror" is, in fact, America's oldest and most formative experience of war:  after all, wasn't the idea of a besieged city-on-a-hill at the heart of the White Man / Native American conflict, from the time of the first British settlements in North America?  A community of "innocents" victimized by fanatical, unknowable others who, "unprovoked," would come into the community and attack civilians.  As a nation, after a long period of aberrant integrative practice, we've finally reconnected with our long lost old demons, now conveniently externalized into the broader world.

In this sense, we've been fighting the war-on-terror since the mid 1600's.  By comparison, all other wars are irrelevant internecine squabbles.  Regardless of the validity of the parallel, the drawing of it is quite thought-provoking.  Are these Islamic fundamentalists, our fellow humans, the new Injuns?  Wow.

Listening to:  Magnetic Fields' "Strange Powers;" "The Trouble I've Been Looking For."

[Youtube embed later as part of Background Noise.]

Caveat: USFK TV

Banalities & Journaling

Well, it turns out that with my new television, despite not having cable I'm able to receive one English-language channel after all:  the U.S.Forces-Korea TV network.  There are about 40,000 U.S. service members and civilian support personnel here, and they get their own TV station. 

There are no commercials, but it's a steady feed of popular network television shows, including a rebroadcast of Jay Leno at around 11 p.m. (of course, this is in reruns right now due to the Hollywood writer's strike) and the Simpsons show up at like midnight, some nights.   In between the shows and where there would be commercials, instead you get these military public service announcements.  I swear, some of these public service announcements are exactly the same ones that ran on the USFK TV when I was stationed here 16 years ago.  "Drive safe, winter's coming;"  "A gambling habit can get you in trouble;"  Etc.

I find I have a very low tolerance for these announcements, as the military community outlook reflected in these announcements seems terrifyingly narrow and often eerily unaware of the surrounding cultural context.  Or maybe it's just because it reminds me of some unpleasant memories:  all night watch duty at the company HQ, days off duty, but locked onto post with nothing to do but read ancient copies of Dostoyevsky, watch TV, or clean the bathrooms again because my (married-back-in-the-States) squad sergeant had volunteered us before disappearing somewhere with his (local) girlfriend.

Last night I dreamed I was driving through a blizzard in Minnesota or Iowa or somewhere like that.  Where did that come from?

Caveat: Pale Cement, Aging Peach

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / My Photos

I walked to work this afternoon at about 3.30 (Wednesday have the reduced schedule), and it was hazy, about 12 degrees (54 F?). The sun looked like an aging peach resting on a pale cement sky – it was sufficiently overcast that there was no glare to look directly at it, but the disk was a perfect deep orange color, like you see sometimes at sunset.  Hmm… is this the Gobi sand sky you get from Mongolia, in the winter? I sort of remember some kind of phenomenon like that.
I took a picture of the path among the apartment buildings with my phone.
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I had awoken this morning dreading my T2’s today. But Danny had given them a good talking to during his class, and when I got them at 8.40, they were moody but gamely putting in a sincere effort. I’d been remonstrated too, by my coworkers.
And so, all of us chastened, we made a go of the excruciatingly boring TEPS book (TEPS is a Korean high-school level English proficiency exam – the students’ motivation levels are not aided by the fact that the exam’s status is in flux currently, as there is much talk of it being replaced across the board by the TOEFL, which would make the test-specific instruction less-than-relevant).
Walking home, I took another picture, showing the view from a pedestrian bridge I use to cross the boulevard I call “broadway” in my mind (this is the still nameless “main drag” in my part of Ilsan City), looking northwest toward Juyeop station, and further along, toward Kim Jong-il’s socialist workers’ paradise, lurking out there in the night like a bad business proposal.
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Caveat: Apocalypse News

Banalities & Journaling / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

It is probably a bias of the BBC/NPR axis – the sort of radio I listen to – but it seems to me that news-radio programming has been harping a subtly apocalyptic set of themes lately, focusing on such issues as sustainability, global warming, the obesity epidemic and rampant consumerism.  Frankly, despite the self-evident importance of these issues, I find them more depressing than the more standard war/murder/terror/chaos/scandal fare.  That's because it's possible to be optimistic for the long-term future in the face of the latter, as we've been living with that sort of thing throughout history and things nevertheless persist in getting better.  But the former themes of environmental degradation and ecological imbalance are genuinely scary vis-a-vis the long term, and there's little precedent for a human society successfully overcoming such dangers, while there's plenty of evidence of societies succumbing to them (e.g. Jared Diamond's well-documented histories of the Maya or Easter Islanders).

I listen to these radio articles about the upcoming virtually inevitable end-of-the-world and I find myself ideating (is that a word?  it is now…) pulling a Kaczynski – go live in the mountains and be anti-human.  Of course, my family is rife with tendencies in this general direction, anyway.  So I'm predisposed.  But seriously, what can one do in the face of 7 billion people hell-bent on consuming themselves into extinction?  On the other hand, is this just another episode of apocalypto-science, like the malthusian alarmism of an earlier, pre-"green revolution" era?  Because human societies seem to crave an end-of-the-world narrative to keep things interesting….

Caveat: Worstest

Banalities & Journaling / Teaching & Methodology / The Wonders of Work

We're in the new school location.  Things a bit chaotic today.  Most classes went fine, despite feeling a bit unprepared for them because of the chaos of the move.  The one class I went out of my way to prepare for, however…. 

Worster than Friday.  They patently refused to do anything.  Perhaps part of my problem is that the disciplinary "chain of command" here isn't really clear.  What is it I'm supposed to do, when an entire class refuses to do anything?  The administrators are busy people, especially with the move – and they both carry teaching loads as well.  It's not like this is a regular public school, where grades are submitted and meaningful – it's all about preparing students for exams and / or interviews, etc., for their careers as "foreign school" students.  So I can't threaten anyone with flunking out, either.  Oh, what a mess. 

This "T2" cohort and I have been circling each other like sumo wrestlers for several weeks now, and last Friday I thought it was going to end.  But, I think today was the collision.  Argh. 

No solutions.  And I know I'm not a lousy teacher, intellectually – my other classes go well, are fun, but sufficiently imperfect to leave me assured I do know how to handle problems when they arise….  But, it sure is hard on one's ego to be so patently rejected by a group one is supposed to be supervising and helping.

Caveat: Go TV

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

And here I thought I'd seen it all.  Everywhere you go, middle-of-the-night television is pretty dull.  But I didn't think I'd ever see a game of go (the japanese game, with white and black stones) televised, and commentated.  Awesome way to spend 20 minutes at 1 am!

Caveat: Leaving

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

The leaves are leaving the trees.  I really should go out and take some pictures… they're quite beautiful.

I got lost on the purple line (Line 1) of the subway today.  This is not something that happens to me often, but line 1 is a bit odd… it's really just the old commuter rail lines, grandfathered into the subway.  As a consequence, there's a lot of branching of lines, and each direction goes by on multiple platforms.  Anyway… I didn't mind getting lost, but it took me 3 hours to get from Gangnam to Jonggak. 

Last note:  I heard a radio bit this morning about a new sport that's being tried in Germany, called "chess-boxing."  Competitors alternate rounds of boxing with rounds of speed chess.  This is intriguing for all the wrong reasons.

Caveat: The best and the worst

Banalities & Journaling / Teaching & Methodology / The Wonders of Work

I had one of my worst classes so far today.  And one of my best.  I guess that's good… lots of variety in a day.  Kind of a roller coaster.

One class, I nearly gave up and just walked out.  I had nothing left to say to them, no way to get through.  They chat and write notes and do work for other classes, and if I tell them to stop, they stop, but then they sulk and pretend to understand not a single thing I say.  Reminding me of something  I heard recently about the Buddhist monks in Burma, who as a way of protesting don't exactly go on strike, they just become obdurate and uncooperative and generally opaque to the authorities.  Call it an attitude strike.

Then another class they were interested, engaged, asking creative questions, getting excited about learning and the possibilities of knowledge and all that.

Why such differences?  I don't know.

The school is moving this weekend – to a new building a few buildings down from our current one.  I don't have to be there for this, but I'm looking forward to vast amounts of confusion and distraction when I come in on Monday.  Meanwhile, I have hagwon tomorrow.

And at the moment I'm doing laundry and watching a Korean game show… I have no idea what's going on, but I find the Korean more interesting than the dialog in dramas or news shows (the other options) because there's a lot of mugging and impromptu and informal speech, which are the bits I most desperately need some skill in understanding.

So… more later.

Caveat: Television

Banalities & Journaling

I just acquired a free television – sort of inherited from the recently departed teacher.  I haven’t owned a tv for almost a decade.  I immediately began watching the most garish and least comprehensible program I could find – some kind of game show.
There are only about 5 broadcast channels here, that I can find.  I’m certainly not going to get cable.  But being able to watch Korean tv might help with my language skills, I rationalize.  We shall see.
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Caveat: Professoriality

Banalities & Journaling / Life is a Dream / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

A while back my best friend Bob sent me an email in which he responded to a comment I made a few weeks back about always ending as the "professor" at the teaching jobs I've taken on.  I was working on writing back to him finally, just now, but realized this could be a more general comment on the "state of Jared's life."  So here goes…

Bob wrote the following: 

    I wonder whether your multi-lingual, bi-continental, bi-millennial career of being nicknamed “professor” means that you should actually become one? I know you have trepidations about how much backlogging you’d have to do to start a degree in a new field, but shit, if you got a doctorate in anything, you could probably market yourself to teach anything else, perhaps in some cool, alternative-type institution and/or exotic locale. I don’t know how many such places actually exist, but I do seem to detect a trend within academia away from specialization towards more interdisciplinary courses, majors, and so on. Not sure I really know what I’m talking about—perhaps I’m just unwittingly fantasizing about my own dream job.

He's right, of course.  I should become a professor – I've always thought that's where I should be headed.  But getting a PhD is not trivial – especially when one is as unfocused and vaguely dilettantish as I seem to be.  Last fall, as part of my relocation back to Minnesota, I made an extended self-examination around the idea of returning to graduate school.

I audited a doctoral-level seminar with an old professor I really liked on the topic of good old Cervantes, who occupied the position of honor in my abandoned doctoral dissertation proposal when I was in the Spanish Lit program at the Univ of Pennsylvania.   This audit experience merely confirmed the fact that, as much as I love Cervantes and the whole lit-crit game, it's not what I would want to do a PhD on at this point in time.

I had some interviews and conversations with another old professor at the U of MN, who had been my undergraduate advisor and is now attached to the Philosophy Department, wondering if I would do a program in that subject area.  But as much as it attracts me, it's difficult for me to nail down what, exactly, I would do in the field of philosophy.  I'm not really a philosopher as much as a philologist… but we just discarded the philology line in the previous paragraph.

How about linguistics?  I could see doing this, sometimes.  And certainly, that's the subject area that dovetails best with my current pursuits – teaching and learning language(s).  In an aside, I had a fun moment in a class today, as I demonstrated for my terminally bored teenagers a few moments of my experience on their side of the hagwon divide (i.e. my Saturday Korean class):  I did one of those back-and-forth dialogues, where I played both student (myself) and the teacher (my Korean language seonsaengnim), and demonstrated conclusively that I, too, could be profoundly clueless in the face incomprehensible linguistic input.

OK.  No answers.  Just thinking "out loud" here.

I'm having some ramyeon and boricha and listening to Minnesota Public Radio's morning show at eleven at night.  More later.

Caveat: Birthday Cake with Chopsticks

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea

Yesterday at work we had a birthday cake for Grace, one of the teachers.  It was a very western looking birthday cake, and we sang happy birthday in English.  Somehow this made the fact that we all dug into the cake with chopsticks seem all the more alien, somehow.  Odd, the things that strike me as alien here.

I've been working pretty hard Monday and today… I'm feeling like I need to put more prep time in, to be a better teacher.  Some classes go very well, and others, not so well.  With some classes I seem trapped in a spiral:  students don't do their work, come unprepared, so I "crack down," giving more homework, checking things more, and this quickly becomes profoundly frustrating for both sides.  I need to work on not getting caught in these loops.  But that's a minority of classes.  Most of my classes are quite fun, for the most part, and the students are engaged at some level or another.  And with this new schedule, I have pretty fun classes at the end of my daily run, each day.  So this is nice.

Caveat: Oops, missed a day

Banalities & Journaling / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I was on such a good roll, posting each day to my blog.

I was awakened yesterday morning to my phone ringing, but when I answered "hello" there was dead silence.  I thought it was a telemarketer – there are as many of those here as there are in the US, but usually a few sentences of English discourage them quickly enough.   They also like to send you little text messages all the time.  Anyway, my phone rang a few more times after this, and finally I shut off my phone and tried to go back to sleep.  It was about 10 am… but I'd not gotten to sleep until 3 am the night before – my schedule here is so late, usually, which I don't really like, but I have nevertheless become very accustomed to it.  Sigh.  I couldn't sleep, so I pulled out the book I've been reading and several hours suddenly disappeared.

Net result: yesterday was a total write-off.  I did none of the things I'd intended to do, I was lazy and read all day.  But I guess sometimes I need days like that?

I finally made the dreaded "ne" mistake, which English-speaking learners of Korean often complain about.  I was in the convenience store downstairs, last night, stocking up on cold coffee and orange juice, two of my staples, and the woman asked me if I needed a bag.  I still have no idea what exactly they're saying when they say this phrase, but I hear it often enough I understand the drift of it and recognize it when I'm being asked.  So I shook my head and said "ne."

Here's the problem:  "ne" means "yes."  But it sounds too much like an English negative, don't you think?  So far, for whatever reason, I had successfully avoided this bit of linguistic confusion, but yesterday, whether because of my recent accelerated efforts or day of escapist reading, I slipped up.  It clearly confused her, that I was shaking my head no, and saying yes.   She gave up trying to give me a bag, because I was leaving the store, but she was obviously thinking "crazy damn foreigners!"

The proper word for "no" is "anio" (or even "anyo" like Spanish "año"), where the key negation syllable is "an" (which is also attached to regular verbs to negate them).   

There are other issues with affirmation and negation in Korean, which show up frequently with my students.  Koreans always say yes or no to questions in the spirit of "confirm" or "deny," thus, I will ask a student "So you didn't do your homework?" and she will blithely nod and say "yes," meaning she didn't do her homework.

In English, we typically say yes or no to a question in the spirit of the underlying content of the question, and asking the same question of a native speaker would get "no" as an answer in reference to the same basic facts.  So… lots of confusion.

Perhaps it's best to avoid yes-no situations as much as possible?  Stick with the gray middle ground.

Caveat: The other side

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

So I found myself on the other side of the hagwon divide: I'm now officially taking a class to help me with my Korean.  It's at a little school in Seoul's Gangnam district, and happens Saturday afternoons, which makes it compatible with my schedule – the main reason I chose the program, despite the long trip to get there:  a little over an hour on the subway.

The class is well-suited to my ability level, I think.  I'm a little ahead of the curve on grammar and verb conjugation stuff, but behind the curve on vocabulary, definitely.  Which is typical of my language-learning experiences, I suppose.

Gangnam is a very trendy area "south of the river" (which is basically what the name means).  After my class I walked along Teheran-ro, one of the few streets in Seoul that everyone seems to know the name of (perhaps because it's a foreign name?), and the address of a lot of trendy and high-rent stores, among other things.  After that, I took a round-about ride on the green line of the subway around the east side, across the river (where the train goes on a bridge) and saw a fabulous just-after-sunset rose-colored sky, with all the bridges and broad avenues along the banks with elegant high-rise apartments, random modernist arches, fall-colored orange and gold trees.  But the Youngpoong bookstore didn't have the latest Economist magazine yet.  So I came home on a crowded train, and bought some cabbage and delicious cherry tomatoes at the high-rent grocery in the basement of the Lotte on my way out of the Jeongbalsan subway station, and walked home in the cold wind while a drunk couple argued lovingly in the middle of the street.

Caveat: Psychogeographie et l’art de la dérive

Banalities & Journaling / Language & Linguistics / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I was listening to Warren Olney's (sp?) "Which Way L.A." radio program last night, and he had as a guest a man named Will Self who is a practitioner of Guy Debord's psychogeography – a 50's situationist pseudo-artistic movement that endeavored to move around cities in unexpected ways, thus  "reading" urban landscapes  in some way via the subconscious.  Or something like that.  But I realized that I may actually be a long-term  psychogeographer, given my love of wandering about urban spaces without plan, map or program. 

Will Self had just spent the day before walking in a straight line from LAX to Watts – about 11 miles, and something very much like what I would do – indeed, more than once while living in LA I would take long undirected and notably untouristic walks, once walking from Long Beach to San Pedro, for example.  And just recently I've taken some rather random jaunts around Seoul, as well as last Saturday's long hike from Imjingang to Munsan-eup.

It's a rather high-falutin'-sounding term, though.  I like better Debord's concept of 'dérive' – "drift."  This suits me just fine.  I think I'll pursue it.

Caveat: Not much to say

Banalities & Journaling

There, I've said it.  I haven't got much to say.  So now, since I can only use each title once in this blog, I can never say it again. 

It was strongly breezy today.  We had a farewell lunch for Marlene, the teacher from New Zealand, who isn't being replaced since enrollments at the school are down somewhat.  Danny and Diane, the school's owners, seem to be taking this decline with a certain amount of aplomb – I suspect there's some cyclical aspects to the 학원 (after-school academy) industry.  Some classes have been consolidated, and I like my new schedule better, mainly because the most difficult classes (which is to say, for me, the classes with the least motivated students) are no longer at the end of the day.  I like having a more fun class as my last of the day.

I'm pretty much resolved to try to find a for-pay Korean tutor and/or a Saturday class.  I'm thinking that if I can get up and get motivated early enough tomorrow, I'll go into Seoul in the morning and check out this Korean language academy in the Gangnam area. 

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