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$
Each Thursday there is a little staff meeting at work. It’s generally in Korean, so I don’t worry too much about paying attention, as I know that if some point or aspect is important and relevant to me in particular, someone will make sure I’ve understood. Not to mention the fact that the meeting always starts at around 3:30, which is when I actually have a class to go teach.
On the little meeting agendas that the boss makes and hands out, he is fond of putting these little pep-talks or aphorisms or proverbs. For some reason, I more-or-less understood the one on yesterday’s. It said: “가르친다는 것은 오직 희망만을 얘기하는 것이다.” Roughly, it means: “Teaching is nothing more than talking about [or encouraging] hope.” I thought it was a nice thought.
Yesterday was one of those days when I’m reminded of why I have decided that teaching is the right sort of job for me. It was one of those days when I start grumpy and end happy. It’s the only job I’ve ever had where it often (though, obviously, not always) works that way.
I was feeling really frustrated and down after yesterday, and after sleeping badly, and feeling unhealthy and all that, besides. Not to mention the fact that some charmless woman on the street accidentally wacked me in the face with her umbrella on the way to work.
But then I had 6 hours of good classes. All strung along in a row. Each different, but each positive or successful in some small way. Connecting with kids, or having fun, or joking around, or making a point and being taken seriously.
So by the end of the day, I still felt tired, but I felt positive about my work, anyway. My boss asked me if I agreed with his little aphorism, mentioned above. “Well, not completely,” I extemporized.
“You always have to argue,” he joked, shaking his head in false exasperation. It’s a bit of a running gag, I suppose. It’s one way in which I am utterly, characteristically un-Korean, this business of declaring my differing opinion to my coworkers or boss. Korean culture is full of agreement and (verbal) harmony and lip service and (feigned) consensus. The proper Korean answer to his question would be, “Yes, boss.”
A couple of the highlights from the students.
A girl named Eun-sol (who I don’t actually have for a class right now) saw me in the hall between classes and when I said “How are you?” she said, triumphantly, “I’m not hungry.” Normally, this would be a non-sequitur, but with Eun-sol, it made perfect sense, and was funny. Eun-sol is always hungry. And I joke with her about it. So she was reporting a major accomplishment, or life-milestone, in not being hungry. It seems small, but these are the “real communicative moments” that make language-teaching seem interesting, to me.
Later, in another lowish-level class, a we had read a passage about history. Some European war that is utterly contextless and meaningless to these Korean kids, who aren’t even exposed to non-Asian history or social studies in the public school curriculum until sometime in high school. So after talking about it a little bit, I asked what seemed a not-too-difficult question: when was the war? The date was right in the passage, on the page in front of them – one of them was bound to figure it out. But the silence was epic. And it lasted a long time, against further hintings and promptings. Finally a boy named Hyeong-uk tentatively raised his hand. Excitedly, I called on him, and repeated the question, “when was the war?”
“Past,” he answered, deadpan.
I had to laugh, of course. This was brilliant, both in being indisputably correct and yet utterly devoid of useful information. I couldn’t stop chuckling about it, for the rest of the class, in fact. Sometimes when students say exceptionally clever, funny things, I will write them on the board, in a corner, so we can admire them. That’s what I did.
Working in an environment where everyone has a cellphone with a camera, it’s inevitable that students take pictures of you, I suppose. I got this picture (at right) attacthed to a text message the other day. It’s kind of small format – but it’s a montage of four candidish pictures of me taken with a cell phone, and the word “smile” in the middle.
What is this, an homage? Some kid killing time, I guess. I’m glad I make them think of smiling, right?
I was really exhausted after work yesterday. We’re getting a lot of new students, which is a typical part of the hagwon business cycle, since it’s summer vacation and parents are looking for ways to offload their kids – what better way than to enroll them in a hagwon or three? But anyway… I don’t have much to say. New students are a lot of work, mostly because of the shambolic curriculum, meaning that each new student requires a great deal of photocopying of materials and “catch-up” counselling. One thing I really appreciated at LBridge, in retrospect, was how smoothly incoming students were integrated into the tightly programmed curriculum. Because all the teachers followed the same texts, in the same pattern, on a published (via website) schedule, new students and the intake (front-desk) people could find out where the student should be and what materials they needed before they even came to class. Often, kids would show up for their first class already having done the homework, even.
OK – it’s easy to wax nostalgic for previous experiences – there were things that made LBridge a terrible place to work, too. So each place has its positives and negatives, right? I’m going through one of those inadequate-feeling phases with work, I suppose.
I was watching Colbert, thought this was very funny: he’s interviewing “Ham Rove” – a stand-in for Karl Rove. Note that’s a Sauron figurine behind Ham Rove to the far right. I think Sauron is Obama. Colbert definitely has his funny moments.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware that nature is our teacher.”
This is #77 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
…
75. 자연에 순응하면 몸과 마음이 편안하다는 것을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware of the tranquility of body and mind as they accommodate [the demands of] nature.”
76. 자연이 생명 순환의 법칙이라는 것을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
“I bow with a thankful heart and become aware that nature follows the law of life cycles.”
77. 자연이 우리들의 스승이라는 것을 알게되어 감사한 마음으로 절합니다.
I would read this seventy-seventh affirmation as: “I bow with a thankful heart and become aware that nature is our teacher.”
There are pigeons that keep crashing into my windows. What are they trying to teach me?
I was dreaming…
that I was trying to explain “the dialectic” to someone. I said that it’s like if you are showing how thinking about a story about a girl isn’t really about a girl. I pulled up an image of a girl, a kind of black-and-white, 1950’s photograph of a rather nondescript girl. “This girl looks like… just a girl. But the dialectic is realizing that something else is actually going on,” I explained.
I said to my invisible interlocutor, “It’s about that moment when you wake up.”
And then I woke up. It was perhaps 11 pm. I had fallen asleep with my face in the book – very much not my tendency or habit, these days. I had fallen asleep, while studying.
This was a former character trait of mine; I was reprising it from years ago: it’s from old, academic years. It developed due to the inevitable sleep deprivations of graduate school, perhaps.
The air around me was close and thick and hot – my window was open, but the earlier rain had stopped. The florescent light, on in the apartment directly across the alley from mine, seemed extraordinarily, unnaturally bright. It was shining rudely out and illuminating all the unmovingness outside with its overconfident yet highly limited repertoire of wavelengths. I listened to the sounds of the city, vague echoes of a woman singing, buses trundling past on the Jungang-no. I lay very still.
And I lay there, breathing a little bit fast, feeling like I was on the edge of understanding. I felt surprised at how I could have just woken myself up from a dream by suggesting, in the dream, that I could reach a moment of understanding at the moment of waking up. Really, it was nothing short of startling myself awake by confronting the concept of waking up.
The clear image of that story about the girl, from the dream, was falling apart very quickly, like a wet piece of tissue paper. I’m not sure it was important, though. It didn’t feel important, at all, to what had just happened. It was arbitrary, I felt myself thinking. I watched myself thinking….
I tried to visualize a slug walking along the edge of a very sharp knife: it just doesn’t work. Not funny. What if it was a fly, landing on that edge – would it… hurt itself? I was momentarily embedded in the digression of a Haruki Murakami novel. I’d been working on digressions earlier in the day – my own writing. Polishing a few novelistic digressions, like so much antique silverware – wishing they were whales.
I feel like this strange, crystaline moment hasn’t brought me one iota closer to understanding the dialectic; but it was nevertheless a very surprising, lucid dream. It was like an epiphany devoid of epiphanic content. Epiphany for epiphany’s sake.
One might ask, why was I dreaming definitions of the dialectic? The answer is not so obscure… I’d fallen asleep reading a recently purchased book: Valences of the Dialectic, by Fredric Jameson. I’m barely to page 15, in the first chapter, which bears the title, “Three names of the dialectic.” How about that Diego Rivera on the cover, by the way?
I’ll get back to you if I figure it out. I might not figure it out, though. I’ve not made much progress with feeling comfortable with this essential philosphical tool, over the years. Perhaps I’ve always invested too much in it. Perhaps, with Karl Popper, I am at core uncomfortable with the seeming solution-in-contradiction. But I’m particularly drawn to it as it is so ancient, so inherent – it’s one of the underlying intellectual tools that unifies Eastern and Western philosohpy. It is possibly something innate… even structural, a la Chomsky’s “language faculty.” A dialectical instinct? The insight presented by the dream, if any, is that there exists the possibility of a sort of recursive definition of dialectical practice.
Hmm… recursion as praxis? That’s a whole other post, maybe.
I needed to get out of the house yesterday. I took a long walk – along a route I took before… some years ago. I took the subway into the city and got off at Oksu, on the north bank of the rain-swollen Han River. I walked across the bridge into Apgujeong. From there I went to Gangnam, and after stopping at my favorite bookstore, I ended up at GyoDae (University of Education). I walked maybe 7 or 8 km. It was heavily overcast but it wasn’t raining. It was kind of steamy hot. I took a few pictures.
Looking back down the stairs up to the bridge. The subway runs in the median of the bridge, that’s Oksu station on the right.
I love the view along the river, here. For some reason it makes me think of Italy – maybe it’s the arches along the river bank and the way the buildings climb the hillside.
The bridge itself, with its embedded subway tracks and industrial feel, is New Yorkish.
Apgujeong (and all of Gangnam) is a very high-rent area. I would compare it to New York’s Upper East Side, LA’s Westwood/Brentwood.
But there is still the occasional cardboard-carting ajeossi, blocking the forward progress of honking Mercedeses.
The view at dusk looking east along Teheranno, one of Gangnam’s main drags, just west of its intersection with Gangnamdaero.
Here is a rather famous recently-constructed building that even had a write-up in the Economist, if I recall correctly. It’s your basic glass-and-steel box skyscraper, right? But it’s wavy. Wiggly. And there’s a giant sculpture of golden hands, holding up the sky, in front – you could stand under the outstretched hands to shelter from the rain, for example.
By the time I was headed home on the subway, it was starting to rain again. Just a sort of humid drizzle. I got home and made some tricolor rotini pasta with olives and pesto (I found jars of pre-made pesto at the Orange Mart across the street).
I did a lot of reading today.
