I recently found out that the new president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, is exactly one day older than I am. This is very weird – the idea that someone my age is the president of something like Russia. I suppose Obama is only a few years older, too, should he win the presidency in the US. That's an odd thing, when world leaders start being people who are one's contemporaries.
Quote.
"A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order." – Jean-Luc Godard
I was walking home and saw a very vivid orange moon. I took this picture but it didn’t come out very well. The moon was very bright and very orange.
I had a class today where none of them did the homework. This is normally a very devastating and difficult issue… but somehow, their refusal to work is of a different quality from previous experiences of this problem, as I actually enjoy these kids in class a lot, they can be funny, and are often engaged and interested during class. They’re just unmotivated with respect to homework, I guess.
So, today, I got a clue that there might be some “reverse-status” peer pressure, too – i.e. pressure to do badly. This is common with teenagers in the States, but not something I’ve seen much of here. The reason I think this may be occurring with this group is because it turned out, well into the class, that one of the students had, in fact, done her homework, but had apparently been embarrassed to show it to me. I saw she was copying an in-class exercise from a paper that suspiciously looked like the homework, and I got down in front of her and pulled the paper out, and she actually pulled back, before letting me see it. Lo and behold, it was the homework, and it was actually very well done! So all of her peers had zeros, and I gave Eunjeong a 100%. And she seemed sincerely unhappy with this. Very… odd. Kinda sad.
Here is a picture of an oldish building (or rather, design-to-look-oldish) I saw in Seoul recently, coming down a steep hill on side street, south of the river.
