Day: December 19, 2012

Caveat: The Ajummocracy Comes Out

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

I coined the word “ajummocracy” a while back in this blog. I think today is a good day to return to it – because now South Korea has an ajumma for president – although Park Geun-hye breaks the stereotype in many ways: most importantly, she breaks the stereotype by becoming president, rather than just running things behind the scenes.

pictureI was confident enough in my prediction that she would win to have published that prediction. My prediction was based mostly on following the news, and the atmospherics of my classroom discussions of politics with my middle-school students. I find the electoral map exactly matches the prediction I had made in my own brain, too – not that anyone cares. I think the electoral map is very interesting – I’ve written about that before too.

I want to be clear that I didn’t “support” Park, however. Most of my coworkers are either disturbingly apolitical (“what, me vote?”) or else vocally liberal (and therefore they voted for the opposition, Moon Jae-in). Several of them were rivetted by following the election returns on their web-browsers last night, and they were moaning and crying and gnashing their teeth. “Korean people are so stupid,” one of them remarked. Another said, “There are too many old people voting.” As you can see by these remarks, Korean electoral politics aren’t that different from in US: people get very partisan, and the tropes are similar.

I don’t really think it’s my place to say which candidate I personally prefer – it’s not my country. But I will say I think each of the candidates offered some important things. Park’s election is ground-breaking in so many ways: she’s a woman, she’s the daughter of an asssassinated dictator, she’s a leader of a conservative party but she’s made several quite progressive proposals, she’s unmarried – this last may be more surprising than the fact that she’s a woman.

So in February, Park will return to the Blue House – the home where she grew up in the 1960’s and 70’s. Can you imagine entering the presidential mansion, as president, and recognizing and remembering a closet where you may have played hide and seek when you were 9 years old? That seems novelistic, to me – psychologically interesting.

I’ll be intrigued to see how this plays out. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed – I almost always am, in politics.

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Caveat: December Busyness

Banalities & Journaling

Lately, work has been ramping up quite a bit. I think that December may be, on average, the most difficult month for foreign ESL teachers working in Korea (except, perhaps, university-level teachers, where the academic calendar is much more generous with time off). Unlike in the US, schools don’t typically start vacation until after Christmas day – in fact, for many Koreans Christmas is little more than a holiday similar to, say, St Patrick’s day in the US – it’s an excuse to go shopping or for a party or some kind of “ethnic” (i.e. Western) experience, not really more than that. So December is full of the end-of-academic-year stuff, and you have to be preparing for the winter classes (which are like summer school classes, in the US).

I really don’t like how much emphasis is placed on what they call 예비 [yebi = preparation] in Korean schools and hagwon – the process whereby immense amounts of classroom time, including entire special sessions, is dedicated to “prepping” for things – next levels, next tests, etc. It’s what they call “cram schools” in Japan. Why not just teach the stuff in the first place? If you teach the stuff that’s going to be on the test reliably and consistently in your regular curriculum, you wouldn’t need to stop everything and cram once every 3 months. But that would require a better designed testing system, too – so until that happens, the yebi remains. Grumble. I’m talking about it now because it’s ended – resuming the regular curriculum always feels like trying to start a new school year, but once every few months rather than once a year.

It was three years ago tomorrow that I finished my 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat – essentially living like a Buddhist monk. In retrospect, some of the lessons I learned during that experience have stuck with me, but my meditation practice has lapsed into disrepair.

I feel a little bit gloomy about that.

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