Caveat: Frog, Hen, Cow, Snake

I recently ran across a website that agrees with my theories about the importance of "art" in language teaching. I mean, it's not a deeply academic site, but it's nice to see teachers that have the same instinct and approach that I do. Creativity is how to get kids (and even adults) to not just study but to actually learn to use foreign language. Anyway. In that vein, here's a really good drawing done by an otherwise low-ability and low-motivation fifth-grade student named Ahyeon, based on a story we read about Boe the Frog, who counts feet (as in: "that hen has 2 feet, one, two"; etc.).

Cow 001

Caveat: Redemption From Piracy @ 99¢ a pop

Haha. I did something, today, that I haven't done in about a year: I paid for music. I was listening to KCRW, and there was a track I liked. Normally, I respond to this by doing a youtube search for a posting of the track, and then I use a little conversion utility to grab an mp3 file of the audio part of the video – no questions asked. This is piracy, of course.

I have rationalized this behavior (or justified it, or something) with the excuse that, since having come to Korea, I have continuously run into problems which can be summed up by this paraphrase: "Sorry, [this music-selling website, e.g. amazon etc.] is not authorized to sell this material in your country." After a few encounters with this type of barrier, I gave up, and became a pirate. It was too easy, not to.

But today, I couldn't find this track in the youtubes, and so I clicked the "buy in amazon" link in the KCRW track-list; just for giggles, I went ahead and attempted the transaction, and lo and behold, it went through, despite my nefarious Asian IP address.

Damn! I might have to give up piracy. Amazon wants my money, and my poor citizenship in the capitalist machine just lost its backing logic. Ah, redemption.

51IlaEwHksL._SL500_AA280_What I'm listening to right now.

[So I couldn't find a youtube of it, right? You can get it for $0.99 on amazon.com]

The Baldwin Brothers, "That's Right."

[Daily log: walking, 4 km; running 4 km]

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