Caveat: Details

During yesterday’s staff meeting, I listened carefully. Really, I should take my dictionary to the meeting – as it was, I didn’t take very useful notes. In fact, here are the notes I took during the meeting. All of them.

picture

The agenda for the meeting looked like this.

picture

You can see why I have no idea what’s going on. Although I can generally make out the topic-headers and try to pick out things I might need to ask about later, as pertaining specifically to me.

Really, this weekly experience builds my empathy for my students, who sit stone-faced and politely incomprehending, as I prattle on in class.

Curt likes to put little sayings and aphorisms on his meeting agendas. The one on this one says,

내가 원하는 사람이 되기 위해서는…

당신이 되고 싶은 사람이 되기 위해서는
하고 싶지 않은 일을 해야 하고,
듣고 싶지 않은 말을 해야 하고,
만나고 싶지 않은 사람을 만나야 한다.
워치 않은 일을 하지 않고
진정 원하는 일을 하는 사람은 없다.
우리는 누구나 당장 하고 싶지 않은 일,
어려운 일보다는
편하고 쉬운 것은 찾게 됩니다.
그러나 당장 하고 싶은 일,
편한 일부터 찾아하는 사람은
자기가 되고 싶었던 원래 모습과
가장 멀리 있는 자기 모습을
발견하게 욀 가능성이 그만큼 높아집니다.
– 조정민, ‘사람이 선물이다’에서

I may have made some typos in transcribing it. I wanted to try to translate it, but I haven’t, yet. Maybe sometime. I tried googling a translation (as opposed to googletranslating, which is utterly bad) and failed – so if you want a translation effort, you can plug it into googletranslate but don’t trust the result.  The author, 조정민 [jo-jeong-min = maybe Cho, Jungmin] wasn’t even particularly googlable – I think (but I’m not sure) he’s a preacher or pastor. I can’t sort out the search results on Korean websites very well.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: Typhoon Holiday

I went to work today, and because of the typhoon, classes were canceled. We still had a long staff meeting, and everyone had some stuff to work on – I worked on my debate class materials for a while: since I have no textbook, I have to put my own materials together.

Sitting in staff meetings is quite stressful for me – perhaps the most stressful aspect of my job. They are conducted in Korean. I can only understand the broadest aspects of the content.  I compare it to taking a listening test that is too far above my ability level.

I got out of work early and walked home in the wind. I still think this typhoon is pretty wimpy, although there was plenty of leaves and branches being blown around.

Back to Top