There is a fifth-grade girl named Hye-min in my ED1-M cohort. A smart girl, but more impressively, she's quite "academically motivated." Yesterday, there was the following conversation.
We were doing an exercise in class, basically a kind of rudimentary, note-taking and/or summary effort from a bit of example writing.
Hye-min: "This is very boring."
Teacher: "I know."
Hye-min: "That makes me angry!"
Teacher: "I see."
Hye-min: "So then, I work really, really hard."
Teacher: "Hm. Because you're angry?"
Hye-min: nods.
Teacher: "So that's why you're such a good student."
Hye-min: "I know."
It wasn't exactly funny – it was more, just… insightful.
One thing I spent some time on over my little holiday was in trying to cannibalize my old notebook computer.
I had this idea I could take out the hard drive and install it into my desktop. The notebook computer is the one I bought immediately prior to coming to Korea, in 2007, so it is 10 years old. The screen died a few years ago so I quit using it, but I had it lying around with this idea to salvage the hard drive, and I finally attempted it.
I succeeded in extracting it, and plugged it into my desktop (using the CD/DVD drive connectors – they're all standard connections, and plug together like legos). But the drive was unreadable. I guess it decayed or froze up or something.
Anyway it was fun taking the old notebook apart. In the picture: the hard drive on the lower right, the CPU is the little square thing in the middle right. It was a good computer, and served me well. At one point, I had it running three operating systems (triple boot: Linux, Windows 97, Windows Server).
Walking around my neighborhood yesterday (picture at right), I saw this one tree, a few blocks from my apartment building (near the district prosecutor's office, behind the Lotte Department Store).
The tree seemed to have been unclear on the signaling involved with respect to the arrival of fall. It's far ahead of any of its peers. Why this one tree?
I think I've also seen the same tree changing "too soon" in previous seasons. Is it a genetic freak? Or maybe it's ensconced in some weird microclimate? Perhaps the district prosecutor's building exudes some strange air that tastes strongly of coming winter.
Yesterday I had a very strange work schedule, because this week is the giant "Korean Thanksgiving" holiday (추석 [chuseok] harvest festival). In order to maximize teaching time while still providing at least most of the government's mandated days off (which are greater in number this year than in past years), Curt got creative with the schedule. I had a full-on schedule but it started in the morning instead of the afternoon. It was a pretty hard day, but anyway that's why I didn't post to my blog except for my little poem.
Part of why the holiday is longer this year is because Chuseok (which floats dates each year, following the traditional lunar calendar) managed to drop right between two Gregorian-calendar holidays, "Foundation Day" (which is today) and "Hangul Day" which is next Monday. So in theory we have a full seven days off, including bridge days Friday and Saturday. In fact, the schools and government offices were closed yesterday, too, leading to a 10 day holiday with 3 bridge days, but Curt opened yesterday and will open next Monday, too, leaving a 6-day block.
So here I am at the beginning of my long government-mandated-and-mostly-observed holiday. I have made a strong commitment to not do very much – I did a lot with my personal holiday to Australia a few weeks ago, and so now I'm OK with doing basically nothing. I am not an ambitious person anymore – if ever I was one.
I will work on my writing, maybe take a few hikes if the weather doesn't get too hot or sunny, maybe do an in-depth cleaning of my apartment (the dust on the bookshelves is embarrassingly deep).
My students in the ED1 cohort had been developing an obsession with a toy called 액체괴물 [aek.che.goe.mul = liquid monster] in Korean, and typically marketed as “Slime” in the US. It’s not exactly a toy. It’s free-form goo, like runny play-dough. The kids carry their slime monsters around in buckets or tupperware containers. It’s easy to make your own at home, and many do that, apparently, but then keep the ooze like pets or something, and whip it out to play with it in the breaks between class.
The slime monsters were becoming a distraction, however. And getting on things (like the walls). They had to be banned.
The problem was that I knew, more or less, how it was pronounced, but couldn’t for the life of me figure out the Korean spelling, and I didn’t want to ask because I like to try to figure things out – I remember things better when I do that. The online English-Korean dictionaries weren’t being helpful. I finally figured it out yesterday, so now I can blog about it.
There are lots of sites with pictures of kids making and playing with slime. It’s huge. Not just in Korea, either – it’s popular in the US, too. [daily log: walking, 7km]
I was with my ES2-T cohort. They're really low level. We were talking about what their parents' jobs were (i.e. My dad is a building manager). A fourth-grader named Tim insisted that his mother was a "Cactus Manager." Of course, I had no idea what a cactus manager might be. I suspected a bad translation, but even after we messed with the dictionary on my phone for a while, that was all he could come up with. I think there might be some kind of hole in the dictionary's knowledge (not unheard of). I drew pictures of cactuses and stick-figure moms managing them, and Tim thought this was entertaining but I don't think he even realized what I was trying to say.
The name of this blog post is a tribute to Tyler Cowen's economics blog – he's always finding "those new service sector jobs" that are strange or unexpected.
There's been a major earthquake in Mexico City, 32 years to the day after the 1985 quake. I didn't experience the 1985 earthquake, but I moved to Mexico City in January, 1986, and the city was still full of rubble and broken buildings at that time. I experienced a major delayed aftershock during my first months there, which was a bit scary.
Now, I read through the news and see buildings with addresses that could very well be places I visited during my time living there. I'm not well in touch with anyone from that period of my life, but I hope they are OK. The Delegación Benito Juárez ("delegación" is like a borough in NYC or a 구 [gu] in Seoul) was apparently particularly hard-hit. My recollection is that that same delegación was also hard-hit in the 1985 event – I think it's related to the underlying geology combined with the age of the neighborhoods – the buildings are in the majority low-rise (5-10 story) apartment buildings built during the city's rapid growth in the 1930's-1950's. They're old, poorly built, crowded, and not well-maintained. Benito Juárez is working class.
When I lived in Mexico City, I used to take the subway to random subway stations throughout the city and then walk home (often 5-10 km distance). I'm sure I've walked many parts of Benito Juárez – the subway station names are intimately familiar to me, especially along line 3 (olive green): Etiopía, División del Norte, Coyoacán…
For nostalgia's sake, here's a rather bad picture of me in the garden at Leon Trotsky's house (now a museum), which happens to be right on the southern boundary of Delagación Benito Juárez. I visited there with my dad in 2007. Maybe that rickety brick tower fell down?
I very much love Mexico City. In many respects, it remains my favorite city in the world. So I feel very sad.
Last night we had a 회식 [hoesik = work-related dining and drinking experience, for which I think there is no useful English Translation – maybe 50's style "Business Lunch" with lots of alcohol, but late at night].
As is so often the case, I found out about it only because of my efforts to be attentive to the Korean-language patter around me – they just assume I understand what's going on, anymore, which places the obligation on me to pay attention.
So I turned to my coworker Kay and said I would go, but I hate these "last minute" versions – as I've mentioned before on this blog. She was momentarily quite confused. We went back and forth a few times, before she finally said. "It's not last-minute. Curt announced it in the Kakaotalk last week."
I checked my Kakaotalk (a kind of facebook messenger type app ubiquitous in Korea) on my phone. "Uh… you mean this?" Last week, there was the following exchange, in Kakaotalk (which I'd had while still at my mom's in Australia):
Curt: Happy day jared let's have a party soon~
Jared: Thank you! We can have an English-teaching party on Monday.
Curt: Ok let's.
Kay nodded.
I said to her, "You realize I was joking when I said 'party,' there? And I thought it was obvious."
I use the word 'party' in this joking sense ALL THE TIME, at work. I use it with my students, as in, "uh-oh, I guess we need to have a homework party," in response to a class where the majority haven't finished their homework. I use it with coworkers, as in, "We're having a comment-writing party, I think."
I don't know where I picked up this ironic usage of 'party' – maybe during my years working in tech in Los Angeles. We would have 'coding parties' and 'testing parties' for software. It seemed pretty common in the circles I ran in.
Kay was dismissive. "I knew it was a joke. But Curt didn't. So he made it a plan for a party."
I just laughed.
And later I went to the party.
It was at that meat place near the cancer hospital where Curt knows the owners, I think. It's OK – though this Korean-style barbecue-at-the-table is not my favorite cuisine, anymore. Requires careful chewing.
It made my first day back at work after my vacation VERY LONG. "Party as adverse experience." Hard to adapt.
When I was young – in high school, I guess – there was this kind of schtick I had with my mother sometimes.
It started like this. She was a reader and teacher of English Literature. So there were books by poets around the house: poets like William Butler Yeats and John Keats.
It always rather annoyed me, the incipient rationalist, that English spelling is so inconsistent with respect to pronunciation (as it does my students now, no doubt). Of course I knew the correct pronunciations of their names. But I would point to the book by Yeats, and mispronounce his name. "Yeets," I'd say.
"Yates!" my mother would insist, annoyed.
I'd point to a book by Keats. "Kates," I'd suggest, snarkily.
"Keets," she'd mutter, no doubt understanding my point, but refusing to yield.
So this went on for years. Whenever she had a book by either of those authors in her proximity, we'd play out this little drama, or even if either of those poets would come up in conversation. Given her specialization, and my own long interest in poetry, this was probably more common than anyone could expect.
Well, a few days ago, at my mother's house, we were standing and gazing at her shelf of books of poetry. So of course, there he was. How could I resist?
"Yeets," I said, a call-back to our ancient exchanges.
"If you say so," my mother sighed.
I looked at her in surprise. I paused for a moment, not sure I'd heard correctly. I pumped my fist and leaped around the room, excited. "Victory! Victory, at last," I proclaimed.
My mother looked on, dismayed and maybe alarmed. "What?"
I had to remind her of the old exchanges. I said that in all the years of those interactions, never had she yielded ground on the sacred, canonical pronunciations of those poets' names. Once reminded, she rather got the point, I guess.
She said gently, "I guess I don't see the point in arguing any more."
Somewhat to my surprise, my single surviving houseplant (out of the some 6 or 7 I had a few years ago) managed to survive my 13 day absence. I was quite impressed.
I had left it in the sink, with some water underneath it in a flat, wide, pan, figuring that might work like a kind of "water table" that its roots could suck water from via the holes in the bottom of its little plastic pot. I guess it worked.
Anyway, I was feeling very proud of my plant.
So I bought it a friend today. Perhaps the old plant can tell the new plant the secret tricks for surviving under my inept stewardship. Picture: old "survivor" on left, new plant on right.
Yesterday I spent most of the day on an airplane. Although there's not much to do on an airplane except eat, sleep, read, and watch things on the video, it still always feels exhausting to me. I think it's just the rarefied air and body's intuitive apprehension of its own displacement. It's slow-motion teleportation, and it's unpleasant.
So I survived. I ran away from the airplane as soon as I got back, and the arrival, in the chaotic Korean tradition, was weirdly efficient. I am now home. I am not feeling particularly motivated.
Here is a picture from Brisbane, where I spent the night Wednesday night.
Actually, that was the first time I visited there. I thought Brisbane wasn't bad, as small cities go – it reminded me of many US second-tier cities – San Diego or Austin or Minneapolis for that matter. The one thing that was unexpected was that the downtown is actually rather hilly. I had this impression, because of the map with its meandering river, that it was probably flat, but that was clearly a wrong conception. In that way, it was like St Paul – it looks flat on the map, but really isn't flat at all.
Later today I will be saying goodbye to my mom and driving back down to Cairns. I fly to Brisbane tonight, where I will have an overnight layover and fly back to Seoul tomorrow.
I have had a good visit with my mom, although I have probably been less useful than I might have been. It's easy to get a bit lazy when on vacation. I read some books, anyway. I am also taking some books with me – a bit of a random selection from my mom's library, I suppose. There are these old books on Latin/Greek philosophy, probably from her college days, and a some poetry or such. I always end up taking some books when I visit. These books are well-travelled, anyway, given they were all originally acquired in North America, have spent a few decades in Queensland, and are now off to Korea.
I'll be back in Seoul on Friday – originally I was slated to work on Saturday, but I think I don't have to, because of the naesin (test-prep) schedule for the middle-schoolers. So I'll have a nice 3-day weekend to "recover" from my vacation.
Today being my last full day here at my mom's house, we decided to do some tourism type stuff.
We drove down to the rainforest at Mamu (Wooroonooran National Park) where I walked a trail and saw some rainforest and some mountains and a river valley. It was beautiful.
Then we drove to the "platypus park" at Malanda, where I saw some platypi. It was the first time – in all my visits to Australia, I've never actually seen a platypus. So now I have.
Then we drove to the Hasties Swamp, where there were many migratory birds, and we came back to Ravenshoe via Herberton.
I took a lot of pictures, but they are a bit scattered and I need to go through them on my phone. Perhaps I'll post some additional pictures after I have gone through them. For now, here is a quick snap of the cute Herberton post office building as we raced by in the car.
So I took a long walk in the wind – up to the "T" in the road, which I estimate to be about 4.5km from my mom's front door. So it was a 9km walk, round trip.
I saw no wallabies. So I can only offer an unexotic assemblage of some sun-dappled goats, instead.
The whole time I've been here, it has been quite windy. The skies have been mostly clear, just occasional clouds scudding by. A sustained period of windy days feels a bit unusual to me – Korea doesn't really have them, for more than a day or two at a time. So it's been a long time since I've experienced it.
My mother makes fires in her fireplace at night, though the temperatures drop to around 12 C (maybe 55 F) at lowest. I'm enjoying the cooler weather, though in fact the week before I left Korea we were having a taste of early fall, with a few nights at similar temperatures.
This morning is more overcast than it has been, with actual periods of sunlessness. The wind continues – the equinoctial clouds being herded up the Tully River gorge from the Pacific – over the sugar cane plantations on the coast, over the rainforest on the Eastern-facing slopes, and over this sclerophyllous plateau. Everything here is very dry. I went out to the driveway and took a picture of an orange flower hovering over lichen-covered rocks. In that moment, I could feel like I am in a poem by Robinson Jeffers, where place is stronger than species or idea.
If you have watched this blog over many long years, you know I happen to like pea soup.
My mother likes to cook sometimes, so when she asked if there was anything I was craving, I told her I hadn’t made pea soup for myself in a long time. I think I just got lazy, after the cancer thing dulled my tasting ability, and I just haven’t bothered in recent years, since everything I make that I crave ends up being a bit disappointing.
Anyway, we bought the ingredients and she made pea soup. In fact, I already knew it wasn’t something she commonly made – I grew to like it after I was living on my own – it’s not anything like a “nostalgia” dish from my childhood. But I was quite surprised when she announced, after we were eating it for dinner, that it was the first time she’d made pea soup.
It was a good pea soup, I think. [daily log: walking, 2.5km]
In fact, hanging out at my mom's house, I have a lot of free time. A true vacation, I guess.
So I read books, as I tend to do.
I have nearly finished this history of the Roman Republic which I picked up at random the other day.
Sometimes I am struck by the parallels, culturally, militarily, or whatever, between late Republican Rome and the modern United States. Who shall be our Caesar? Julius Caesar was little more than a charismatic gangster, according this particular historian I'm reading. And it all makes sense. President Turnip is no Caesar, but is he a Marius? A Crassus? One of those guys, perhaps. Study your Roman history – I bet it's relevant.
I thought I might, because I went on a drive and walked around the rainforest at a national park (Mt Hypipamee) about 30 km north of here for a while.
Cassowaries are type of giant, flightless bird, maybe a bit emu-ish. Apparently they are somewhat dangerous (there was a sign that said, "Beware of cassowaries: Do not run" – I guess if you run they will chase you).
The closest I came to seeing a cassowary was a group of German tourists who claimed to have just seen one.
I did see a forest turkey. Some random pictures, below.
We drove to the BIG town today. Atherton, Queensland, has maybe 15000 inhabitants, and it's the giantest city around. It's about an hour's drive north from here. It's a pretty long drive for just going grocery shopping, but that's my mom's lifestyle. That's where the store is. I suppose I would adapt, but it's really hard for me to imagine, given I have a hard enough time working up the gumption to go downstairs to the store in my building.
Shopping becomes an EXPEDITION. This combines with the need to compare all the prices and choose the exact right brand. I simply don't do this, in my own life – decades ago I decided it seemed to be more stress than the savings procured were worth. In essence, I pay a "premium" or "tax": I pay in the form of not necessarily getting the best bargain on any individual product or purchase, and in return for this premium or tax that I pay, I experience very little stress for day to day shopping. I just grab the things that match my vague notion of what I need, and NEVER look at prices. I still end up spending very little for groceries, I think, compared to many people, by the simple expedient that I never buy stuff I don't actually NEED. And even given that, I hate shopping. I think if I tried to hunt bargains, I would never shop again.
Alien as it is to me in my current incarnation, she navigates her lifestyle quite competently, though. Actually, I was pretty impressed with my mother's driving skill on the drive up to Atherton and back. Her age doesn't show in her driving at all, that I could see – she seems the same as decades ago.
In Atherton I walked around a bit, and saw a VW microbus. I have always had a weak spot for old VWs, so I took a picture.
There are flowering trees in the background (it's Spring here, after all), and on the hill behind you can just make out a store called "Big W" behind, which seems to be a kind of Australian version of Wal-Mart, roughly (though there's no relationship to Wal-Mart, despite the "W" – the "W" comes from Woolworths, the huge Australian retailing conglomerate).
In fact I don't have much to report. I am definitely on vacation. I spend a great deal of time talking with my mom, about all kinds of things. When I'm not doing that, I look around outside at the somewhat exotic (to me) locale, or listen to the unexpected sounds of birds. And there are books. I pick up books from the shelves – sometimes books I've read before, sometimes books I haven't read before. She has a lot of history books, which as people know, I read a lot of these days. I started reading a history of the Roman Republic. Just a random book from the bookshelves. This was the environment I grew up in – the environment was in California at the time, but the books followed her when she moved to Australia decades ago, and so the bookshelves are the "home" that I come back to when I visit my mom.
Later we will drive into town. This is a fairly involved undertaking. More later.
I saw some wallabies in my mom's driveway. They were cute.
I took a walk up to the main road. It's about a kilometer and a half each way – so it's a bit of walking. I could walk to town – that would only be 10 kilometers or so, right? The town has a store and a gas station. Frankly, it seems like a tropical, Australian version of Garberville, CA – which will mean nothing to you unless you're a denizen or former denizen of Humboldt, in which case you now have a pretty good picture of Ravenshoe, Queensland.
Ten years ago, today…
On September 1, 2007, I arrived in South Korea for my first teaching gig. I didn’t blog about my arrival until a few days later – I still hadn’t adopted the one-blog-post-per-day habit.
My first place of work was in a building less than two blocks from where I work now. One of my coworkers at that first job is still a current coworker, despite an intervening complexity of 6 different institutional employers. I had met two others of my current coworkers within the first 6 months.
Although Goyang is a city (suburb) of over 1 million residents, the Hugok neighborhood where I work is a village within the city, and over the decade it’s really changed very little, and many of the faces are the same.
The intervening 10 years have seen a few memorable adventures (including my year teaching down south in Jeollanam in a public school) and a long, drawn-out near-death experience: cancer, anyone?
I believe that the latter experience has fundamentally changed my personality. Perhaps not even for the worse – but I seem to have a much less adventurous spirit, now. I rarely fantasize about travel, anymore, whereas that was a near constant in earlier versions of myself. That, of course, is on my mind, since I’m going to be traveling, starting tomorrow, for only the second time since the cancer thing.
I still don’t have any clear feeling that this Korean life is permanent. There are strong reasons why it might not be – there’s some precariousness to it. Nevertheless, on a day-to-day basis, I operate on a fundamental assumption that this Korean life has, indeed, become my permanent lifestyle. It’s convenient to think that way, even if it’s not really true. It’s comfortable.
More later. [daily log: walking, 7km]
Actually, in the moment, I have nothing much interesting to say. I'm trying to get ready for my departure, Saturday. I have a lot of things to do, because I procrastinate a lot. So my focus is poor.
Meanwhile, for your entertainment, I recommend this humorous and insightful article about the current state of the US political economy (in the vaguely post-marxian sense, I guess), vis-a-vis culture.
Yesterday morning, I predicted I would have a hectic week. In fact, yesterday was more than hectic – yesterday was downright insane. My coworker Grace failed to return from her vacation as scheduled (maybe an airplane travel problem? I wasn't clear on the situation). But her substitute teacher was no longer available. We had no teacher for 6 classes, and about 30 minutes to adapt.
So Curt shuffled the schedule, combined some classes, and we made it through. I had a full schedule, needless to say. 8 classes, straight through, no breaks.
For the combined and non-standard classes, mostly I taught non-standard lessons. I'm pretty good at ad-hocing it. So it went OK. I had one combined class with 20 students, though – which is HUGE by hagwon standards. I haven't faced a class that large since I taught at the public school down south in 2011. They were the younger kids. We played bingo. It went smoothly.
Several hilarious student anecdotes eventuated.
I was giving a planned, really hard month-end essay writing test to my ED1 cohort, but being a bit frazzled, I wasn't being very sympathetic or helpful to my poor students.
A boy named Sean, who never pays attention, looked up in the middle of the test, and asked, "What's a film festival?" Perhaps that seems innocent enough – a gap in vocabulary, no more. However, in fact we had been reading, brainstorming, discussing, and trying to write essays about film festivals for the past month. The core of the test, in fact, was to write an essay about an imaginary film festival, for which I gave some made-up details (location, schedule, etc.). So this was a rather glaring gap. Rather than try to help the boy, I just started laughing. I think the students were disturbed by this performance.
I laughed so hard I nearly cried.
Later, in one of Grace's speaking classes, I asked a 6th grade boy named Kai if he was in any clubs. We had been discussing clubs such as a taekwondo club, computer club, chess club, or that kind of thing.
Without missing a beat, he said, "I'm in the night club. Every night." He mimed a disco dance move. Where did that come from? I laughed again. That might seem like a pretty clever pun for a non-native speaker. Actually, it makes a bit of sense. "Club" is a borrowed word from English to Korean (클럽 [keulleop]), but only in the "night club" meaning – thus that's the central meaning for Koreans, rather than what we think of as its main sense, which is just a social organization of some kind.
I had a plan to do some things to get ready for the fact I'm going to Australia next weekend: various projects, hovering in the wings. But after making it to the store yesterday, I got absolutely nothing done. I just lost momentum – last week was a hard week and I just needed the downtime, I think.
I listened to random new music in pop and rap genres.
So now I'm going to have a pretty hectic week, I think. More later.
What I'm listening to right now.
The Weeknd, "Starboy feat. Daft Punk." This song intrigues me: the kind of sweet, ballad-like production and melody contrasting with the hardcore street-culture braggadocio lyrics. That makes it a more introspective effort than either genre in isolation.
Lyrics (NSFW).
[Verse 1] I'm tryna put you in the worst mood, ah P1 cleaner than your church shoes, ah Milli point two just to hurt you, ah All red Lamb’ just to tease you, ah None of these toys on lease too, ah Made your whole year in a week too, yah Main bitch out your league too, ah Side bitch out of your league too, ah
[Pre-Chorus] House so empty, need a centerpiece 20 racks a table cut from ebony Cut that ivory into skinny pieces Then she clean it with her face man I love my baby You talking money, need a hearing aid You talking bout me, I don't see the shade Switch up my style, I take any lane I switch up my cup, I kill any pain [Chorus] Look what you've done I’m a motherfuckin' starboy Look what you've done I'm a motherfuckin' starboy
[Verse 2] Every day a nigga try to test me, ah Every day a nigga try to end me, ah Pull off in that Roadster SV, ah Pockets overweight, gettin' hefty, ah Coming for the king, that's a far cry, ah I come alive in the fall time, I No competition, I don't really listen I’m in the blue Mulsanne bumping New Edition
[Pre-Chorus] House so empty, need a centerpiece 20 racks a table cut from ebony Cut that ivory into skinny pieces Then she clean it with her face man I love my baby You talking money, need a hearing aid You talking bout me, I don’t see the shade Switch up my style, I take any lane I switch up my cup, I kill any pain
[Chorus] Look what you've done I’m a motherfuckin' starboy Look what you've done I'm a motherfuckin’ starboy
[Verse 3] Let a nigga Brad Pitt Legend of the Fall took the year like a bandit Bought mama a crib and a brand new wagon Now she hit the grocery shop looking lavish Star Trek roof in that Wraith of Khan Girls get loose when they hear this song 100 on the dash get me close to God We don't pray for love, we just pray for cars
[Pre-Chorus] House so empty, need a centerpiece 20 racks a table cut from ebony Cut that ivory into skinny pieces Then she clean it with her face man I love my baby You talking money, need a hearing aid You talking 'bout me, I don't see the shade Switch up my style, I take any lane I switch up my cup, I kill any pain
[Chorus] Look what you've done I'm a motherfuckin' starboy Look what you've done I'm a motherfuckin' starboy Look what you've done I'm a motherfuckin' starboy Look what you've done I'm a motherfuckin' starboy
I was yelling at my HS1-T cohort the other day, as is so often my wont these days.
It's a very frustrating group of students – a collection of obstreperous, very smart but extremely rebellious 6th and 7th grade girls (yes, all girls – by some grave misfortune).
So I was yelling. The standard stuff: please focus on your work and quit talking about your favorite pop star idols; please speak English during class; please do your homework, next time.
Maybe the "pleases" were getting thin on the ground. I was pretty annoyed.
One girl (whom I won't name) said, "You know, you're not very good at being scary."
I sat down, deflated.
"I know," I sighed. The girls all had a laugh, and went on their merry way.
What I'm listening to right now.
Communist Daughter, "Soundtrack To The End"
Lyrics.
You put on a pretty face And we never saved our money And then we got stuck in place And I lost my milk and honey
And all the songs were new And they broke our hearts in two While we walked away So I just pushed on through And I made my muscles move 'Cause I could never say
And all our hearts were breaking There was music all around And the walls were always shaking 'Cause our love was the sound Our love was the sound
We took six of one And nothing from the dozen I guess I'll never need another hand to stay awake Oh, get me right up to the brink I'll break one way or other
Some of the best of us are already home Still singing softly through the stereo Although we tried to make the only amends Now it's just a soundtrack to the end
And all the songs were new And they broke our hearts in two But we still walked away So I just pushed on through And I made my muscles move So I don't have to say That it's not right to carry on It might be old but she isn't gone And you never listened anyway
All our hearts were breaking There was music all around And the walls were always shaking 'Cause our love was the sound Our love was the sound
And all our hearts were breaking There was music all around And the walls were always shaking 'Cause our love was the sound
I was doing a prospective student interview yesterday at work, with a 2nd grade elementary student. My task in these interviews is to try to decide which class to place the student in, based on current level, but where the kids are too young or too low-level to be able to do a typical Korean-style diagnostic test.
I had the student attempt to read from one of our elementary readers, then we tested a few random flashcards from our phonics series. Finally, I tried out our "phonics diagnostic," which is a kind of graded set of sheets where we attempt to gauge how well the students can sound out unfamiliar words.
The boy really wasn't very good at any of this, but he was pretty good at catching my meaning and understanding my directions, in spoken form. We get a lot of students like this, who've attended some kind of pre-literacy "immersion" (in quotes because it's often not very immersive) kindergarten – they have some rudiments of English in spoken form but are very weak on alphabet and reading/writing.
Anyway, I always conclude these interviews with a very short writing test. I have the kids draw a picture of their favorite animal, then have them try to write something about their animal. At his level, I didn't expect much, but in yesterday's case, the result was a bit odd.
The boy drew a picture of a very implausible dog (at right), then smiled and confidently wrote, "Thia bag hippe."
"What's that say?" I asked.
"This dog happy," he said.
Hm: not strong on phonics or sight-words, then, and maybe not even completely clear on the whole alphabet concept, but, for all that, apparently confident.
Contrary to all expectation or intention, 10 years on I am still in Korea.
I was at the immigration office this morning, doing the annual ritual of visa renewal. It was completed completely without hitch – Curt and I have it down to science, and we spent a record minimum amount of time on the paperwork this year – maybe 30 minutes, total¸ plus driving time to the office and waiting time in the waiting room.
There are many reasons why I wasn't sure I would be there this year, but none of those worries have come to fruition, so far, and so, I have once again renewed.
Picture at right: the back of my registration card, my main ID in Korea.
Sometimes my friend Bob, an academic professor of music and conductor in Wisconsin, sends me snippets of Spanish song lyrics to translate, because he actually needs them for his work. He knows I don't mind this, and even enjoy it.
Perhaps I should add to my blog's various tag-lines, at left, the phrase "The Only Spanish-to-English translation service operating in the Korean Peninsula!" I would be pretty confident this is true, though who really knows what Kim Jeong-eun is up to in his secret cultural propaganda factories in the basements of Pyeongyang.
Yesterday, Bob sent me a song in the genre of candombe (see the wiki thing). He was hoping I could translate it and/or offer some cultural observations. Here's what I sent back to him this morning.
Here's an in-line translation, mostly "on the fly" with a few checks with the RAE (Royal academy of Spanish Dictionary website). There are a few disorganized notes below the translation.
Candombe del seis de enero
Verse 1
Es por todos sabido que el 6 de enero Everyone knows that January 6th es el dia de los Reyes Magos is the day of the Three Magi [Epiphany] y en honor de uno de ellos, el más negro and to honor one of them, the darkest, se programa una fiesta en el barrio. a party is arranged in the neighborhood
Es por todos sabido que es el más negro Everyone knows that the darkest, el rey de los santos candomberos the king of the candombe saints San Baltasar es un santo muy alegre Saint Balthazar is a very happy saint dice la mama Inés y mueve los pies. that's what Mama Inés says, and she moves her feet
Refrain
Listos corazones Ready hearts van con el candombe come with candombe y con este ritmo a profesar, and with this rhythm, to show los rojos colores the bright colors con festón dorado, with golden edging le gustan al rey San Baltasar. they love Saint Balthazar
Verse 2
La comuna convoca y lo venera The troupe gathers and venerates por la estrella lucero que el ciclo espera under the Wandering Star that the calendar will bring San Baltasar se hamaca sobre las aguas Saint Balthazar rocks over the waters de un mar de promesantes que canta y baila. of a sea of worshippers who sing and dance
Conversa el ronco bombo mientras avanza the husky drum speaks as it moves forward repican tamboriles en las comparsas tambourines sing out in the dance-lines fiesta criolla de negros y blanqueados a high-caste party of blacks and whites together cuando cambian de toque cambian de estado. when the rhythm changes, the whole mood changes
Refrain
– by Yábor (Uruguayan folk singer, b 1950) – in-line translation is mine
Possibly controversial translations:
* criollo as high-caste – normally criollo is translated as "Creole" but that, in colloquial English, is tightly associated with Franco-Carribean culture, which obviously is something different than what we have here. So I went back to the original Spanish meaning (actually originally Portuguese), which is a reference to a specific rank within the complex caste system that existed in Spanish colonial America – the criollos were the locally born white folk, thus at the top of the caste system. But criollo also developed a broader meaning of "locally born" as opposed to "foreigner" (immigrants and "peninsulares" i.e. Spaniards) – especially during the 19th century. So in that sense, the "fiesta criollo" might just mean "a party for and by locals". In the first half of the 20th century, it even became a kind of term of pride that was essentially unifying as opposed to divisive. Probably that's what's intended, here, but by using the term "high caste" I'm getting at the word's problematic roots.
* toque as rhythm – that's not a dictionary translation, but it seems to fit the context. It really might be wrong, but "when the touch changes" feels meaningless to me, so I made a guess based on my feel for broader semantics of the word toque – much wider than English "touch" – and my vague recollections of interactions with Spanish-speaking folk musicians (a few in the 1980s, and one, a close friend of my dad's, in the 2000s).
The most notable thing about this song, to me, is the clear implication that whites participate and enjoy, too ("a high-caste party of blacks and whites together"). This is underscored by the insistence that Saint Balthazar is the "darkest" – it's announcing a kind of "Africa Day" for the whole community, which is unifying in a pre-PC way. That's how I read it, anyway. Cynically, if Yábor is the author (and I think he is), as a white Uruguayan folk singer, he would naturally want to emphasize this aspect if he decided to author a candombe. In that sense, this song most definitely is a bit of cultural appropriation, but perhaps no less authentic or meaningful for that – it represents a genuine if somewhat starry-eyed effort at racial unity in the complex landscape of Latin American racial politics (which, we must always remember, work differently than US racial politics, as much as we want to notice the obvious parallels and similarities).
