Thursdays are slipping into a kind of routine of going to the hospital in the morning. Today, I went to get my stitches out, from my procedure last week. It was fairly perfunctory, but I ended up waiting a long time. That happens sometimes.
Lately, I have been fascinated by the winter shapes of trees. I tried to capture them as I walked home over the hill. Limited success.
[daily log: walking, 11km]
Last week, because of my little surgical event, I missed a few days of posts to my "work blog." As I was catching up on these posts, yesterday at work, I noticed I had reached 1000 posts on my work blog.
Compared to this blog, I think for most people my work blog wouldn't be very interesting. Then again, this blog isn't that interesting, either.
The "work blog" is not really a blog, at all – I'm just using the blog format (which I'm comfortable with) as a way to post a sort of "diary" about each class that I teach. My students, their parents, or my fellow teachers can consult it to find out answers to burning questions like, "what's my homework?" or watch the kids doing one of my videographed speech tasks. Indeed, although it's a minority, I have many students who use the blog to find out their homework or to watch their classmates embarrassing themselves for my camera. The Korean web portal I use as a platform makes the blog accessible to the students even from their ubiquitous smartphones.
Since sometime in the Spring, I've been diligent and faithful about posting an entry for each class I teach – if only to minimally write, "We had class. No homework." Normally, there is at least a sentence about homework. On about 20% of posts, there is some collateral, i.e. a video embedded or a scanned image of some student work – although sometimes I get a little bit behind (as I am now), so the most recent blog entries sometimes contain little place-holders "" where I will insert video when I get around to posting them (which is not that hard but is a bit time-consuming, so it has to happen during "free time" at work, currently hard to come by).
So 1000 blog entries means, roughly, 1000 class sessions taught.
I wish we had a platform, at work, that was in some way like this but was being maintained by ALL the teachers. I think it would go a long way toward solving Karma's perennial marketing problem and allow us to establish our own "web presence" – which it's really hard to conceive of a business not having in 2016. Yet… such as it is. We don't have an IT department. I'm not personally able or willing to take on that role, in a context where every interaction with a computer or Korean website must be tackled with a dictionary (because these computers, here, they speak Korean, y'know).
[daily log: walking, 6km]
Walking home from work today, the sky was bright and sunny. A strong breeze was blowing.
And it was -11 C (12 F).
This kind of weather always makes me nostalgic for my years living in Minnesota.
Thinking about those years causes me to listen to Bob Dylan, and read websites about linguistics or Spanish literature.
What I'm listening to right now.
Bob Dylan, "Desolation Row."
Lyrics.
They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they're restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row.
Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he's moaning,
"You belong to Me I Believe."
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend
You'd better leave."
And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row.
Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortune-telling lady
Has even taken all her things inside
All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everyone's either making love
Or else expecting rain
And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing
He's getting ready for the show
He's going to the carnival tonight
On Desolation Row.
Ophelia, she's 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness
And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row.
Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
NOW, he looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row.
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They ARE trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser
She's in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
"Have Mercy on His Soul"
They all play on the penny whistle
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row.
Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
In a perfect image of a priest
They are spoon-feeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls
"Get outta here if you don't know"
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row.
At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row.
Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting
"Which side are you on?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row.
Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the door knob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Or was that some kind of joke?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now I can't read too good
Don't send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row.
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]
I was joking around with my HS3M cohort on Wednesday night. I try so hard to get along with those boys, but it remains a difficult class.
They were trying to teach me the Korean slang term 양아치 [yang.a.chi]. It's hard to translate. The official dictionary translation is useless, as it says "ragpicker." I told my students that that might have meant something to my great-grandparents' generation, but it means nothing to me.
During class, I got the idea it might mean something like "slacker," but in researching it online (in various Korean-English slang dictionaries that people post on their blogs), I've decided it might be more faithfully reflected by something like "punk" or "thug." But as such, it's a "poser punk" or "poser thug" – not the real thing. These are the "wannabe bad-boy" clique in school, maybe.
Anyway, after they'd tried to teach me the meaning, they said there were a lot of Yangachi in Gangnam (a kind of high-status area of Seoul). Jinu said there was a whole Gangnam Yangachi Army. I said that sounded alarming, but added that it would be a good name for a rock band. The boys rather liked this idea, and riffed on it for a while.
I'm going back to work today after my post-op rest yesterday. The pain is pretty bad, but I guess trying to function normally is the best distraction.
[daily log: walking, 6km]
I went to the hospital this morning, and in typical Korean healthcare fashion, things moved fast.
I had a minor outpatient surgery. I guess "minor" in the sense that it was outpatient, only about 30 minutes long, and not life-threatening in any way. But it was damn painful.
A molar was extracted, and some necrotic bone (bone dead or damaged by the radiation 2 years ago) was scraped away on my lower right jaw. It all seemed to be a very "brute force" affair – inject some local anaesthetic, then rip open the gum and yank and pull and scrape and grind, but the doctor seemed optimistic as it concluded. I have some stitches in my mouth, and a command to rest and avoid talking for the day – so I've been granted a day off from work. I think Helen and others can fill in for me – Thursday isn't too difficult a day, schedule-wise.
Curt was at the hospital with me, which was nice because after I couldn't talk, he helped interpret my needs as we went through scheduling the follow-up. I am indeed grateful for his friendship, despite our sometimes locking horns at work.
After it all, I walked home. I feel it helps to do this after time at the hospital – it helps me feel grounded in the world. The cold (about -8 C, 17 F) felt weirdly good on my numb face – temporarily numb on the right side, in addition to the now thoroughly accustomed left side, permanently numb since my surgery.
The anaesthetic is wearing off and the pain is quite intense. I am watching TV rather mindlessly, and contemplating what and how I'm going to eat… I should eat.
There will be a follow-up next week to remove the stitches and check for infection, and then after that they may need to scrape more bone and after that they will definitely need to install a collagen "plug" – since my bone isn't capable of normal healing. There is also some concern about my jaw bone being fragile in the wake of this. I'm not sure what impact that will have.
More later.
[daily log: walking, 4 km]
I was trying to frame a debate for my HS3T cohort (9th graders) a few nights ago, where I'm doing a kind of "reboot" of my debate program since there are some new students, and the oldtimers could stand a review, anyway. I had chosen the fairly elementary (and ubiquitous, in debate curricula) proposition of whether money or passion is more important in choosing one's career.
A student, who goes by Kevin and who rarely participates (and whom I've known since his elementary years), raised his hand and said that the topic didn't make sense. I asked why. He said (I'm paraphrasing), "I have a passion for money. So which side am I on?" The other students found this humorous.
Of course this is a very legitimate point. At first, we tried to reframe the debate as money vs happiness instead of money vs passion, but that still didn't really solve the problem: one could say, in the same spirit, "Money makes me happy."
Finally, I ended up digressing, explaining that one strategy for the CON team in a debate is to "deny the validity of the proposition" – which is the sort of argument we were discussing. This made the students unhappy, though, because they felt it should be a valid strategy for the PRO team, too. So I was trying to explain that in a debate, the "government" – the PRO team – typically has a more difficult task, since they have to accept the proposition as framed, while the CON team is allowed to challenge the terms of the debate. In fact I was happy to to see some of the students relatively engaged with such a complex digression – perhaps this was even useful to the more advanced students, but those with less experience with debate just let their eyes glaze over.
Actually, I was pleased with this whole development – it's perfect for a reboot, where the topics are ostensibly "easy" but where we can go into more depth about how debate really works.
[daily log: walking, 10.5km]
When the days are smoggy, it's hard to know whether to blame China, or instead Korea's endogenous smog-makers. These days, I'm more inclined to assume it's Beijing's latest export across the Yellow Sea, rather than completely home-grown smog.
Today, walking to work, it was strange, vaguely apocalyptic weather. Heavy yellowish-brown haze hung in the sky, evidently smog, but it was also lightly snowing – big, fluffy flakes that normally make one think of the "clean" feel of fresh winter weather. I think smog mixed with snow should be called "smow."
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]
I went to see the dental surgery specialist this morning, per the Cancer Hospital's referral. The outcome of this consultation left me feeling a bit frustrated, but anyway I have a better understanding of the issues.
The current underlying issue is really a simple dental problem. I have a cavity in a lower right molar, which probably had already started when I had my surgery 2 years ago. It was essentially benign until recently, meaning it was causing me no discomfort and I really didn't feel anything amiss. But a cavity, in the wake of radiation treatment, is not a simple cavity – the tooth is dead, because of the radiation. So the cavity gets to flourish unimpeded – it owns the tooth.
Now that the cavity is causing me pain and has grown, the molar needs to be extracted. Without the cancer-related issues, this, too, would be straightforward – contemporary dentistry is quite good at this kind of thing, and does it without complication all the time. However, because of the radiation necrosis – not just in the tooth but in my lower jaw – suddenly a simple dental extraction is a big deal. The reason is that, under normal circumstances, after an extraction the flesh and bone have a high capacity to heal and repair the damage. However, with the necrosis, there is a substantial risk that the damage done by the extraction will simply never heal. I will be left with a permanent gaping wound in my mouth, which either has to be managed or has to be artificially repaired somehow with additional surgeries.
So what the dentists are afraid of are the complications after the extraction. The simple extraction becomes a medical issue that requires ongoing monitoring and management.
Basically, the dental surgeon said to me, politely, that he didn't want to do this extraction, because of these complication risks. Hence my feeling of frustration. He said that it was likely something that should be done, perhaps as inpatient, at the cancer center. The cancer center had referred me to the dental surgeon because they wanted avoid that, but this surgeon's answer is, it can't be avoided.
I will return to the Cancer Center on Monday.
The dental consultation was actually a bit painful, too. To take the various xrays and poke at the various parts, they needed me to do various things with my tongue – think about how often your dentist tells you to "move your tongue up," "move your tongue down," etc. But my tongue is not a normal tongue – I don't have full control over it – it's partly disabled. So the dentist and her assistant, after I'd made some frustrating attempts, was compelled to reach in and pull my tongue here, push my tongue there. It hurt.
This is why I had been dreading to see the dentist, and avoiding it. And now I suffer consequences… the karma of unright action.
This morning, going to see the dentist, I had to take the subway to Hwajeong, a neighborhood in the "other part" of Goyang City, closer to Seoul. Goyang geographically is divided into two halves – a newer, Western half (called Ilsan) and the older, Eastern half. Between, there is still open farmland, preserved, I guess, by zoning laws mandating a kind of greenbelt around Seoul (which is to say, Ilsan is outside the belt, while old Goyang is inside it). The subway goes across the greenbelt above grade rather than underground, so it's quite nice sometimes to flash through the rural district on the short trip from one side of the city to the other.
This morning, looking out the windows of the train, the fields were covered by the light dusting of snow we'd received, unforecast, yesterday, and everything glittered white and clean. A Siberian cold had settled over the landscape, and wisps of steam rose from the rampart of apartment blocks on the horizon. This type of weather, combined with the rural vista, inevitably conjures visceral memories of my year in Korea while in the US Army – I spent a lot of time in bitterly cold rural Korean landscapes while in the Army.
I don't really feel nostalgic. I just end up feeling sad – about lost opportunities, about unrecoverable mistakes, about my own moribundity.
[daily log: walking, 8km]
I guess this past Sunday, David Bowie died – of cancer. There are not very many musicians that have had a more profound influence on me – not that that means much, but Bowie has prominently occupied a top spot in my life’s soundtrack for more than 3 decades now. There are very few others about whom that is true. His music has aged well, at least in my estimation.
I thought his song “Ziggy Stardust” would have made a great obituary, but I already included that song in this blog, so I thought I’d find something different.
What I’m listening to right now.
David Bowie, “Oh! You Pretty Things.” The song’s message seems vaguely fascistic, or at the least, transhumanist in philosophical stance (both tendencies being things Bowie openly professed at various points in his long career), but I rather like it anyway.
Lyrics.
Wake up you sleepy head
Put on some clothes,
shake up your bed
Put another log on the fire for me
I’ve made some breakfast and coffee
Look out my window and what do I see
A crack in the sky
and a hand reaching down to me
All the nightmares came today
And it looks as though they’re
here to stay
What are we coming to
No room for me,
no fun for you
I think about a world to come
Where the books were found
by the Golden ones
Written in pain, written in awe
By a puzzled man who questioned
What we came here for
All the strangers came today
And it looks as though
they’re here to stay
[CHORUS:]
Oh You Pretty Things
Don’t you know you’re driving your
Mamas and Papas insane
Oh You Pretty Things
Don’t you know you’re driving your
Mamas and Papas insane
Let me make it plain
([second time:] Let me say it again)
You gotta make way
for the Homo Superior
Look at your children
See their faces in golden rays
Don’t kid yourself they belong to you
They’re the start of a coming race
The earth is a bitch
We’ve finished our news
Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use
All the strangers came today
And it looks as though they’re here to stay
[CHORUS]
[daily log: walking, 6km]
As my students know, the fact that crocodiles and alligators are different is important to me, and I always teach them.
I showed some students this video, and asked them why it was "obvious" that it was an alligator, and therefore the man's indifference struck me as truly terrible.
A transcription of the man's words: "'M sick 'n' tired of people putting these logs across the pa… Oh! That's a crocodile… or alligator. Whatever."
I'd already told them some background on the differences between crocodiles and alligators, and so after watching the video, I let them brainstorm why it was obvious to me. It took them a while, but one of them actually figured it out.
He explained, "It's in America, so it must be alligator." His thinking, which I helped him elaborate: since America is home to wild alligators, but not wild crocodiles, right?
Another student asked, astutely, "How do we know it's America?"
I said, "Well, in this case, you know it's in America, because I told you earlier. But I know it's America because of the man's accent." This gave me an opportunity to digress on the matter of different English language accents.
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]
On Tuesday, I got good news – I continue to be cancer-free. Given the typical pattern of my type of cancer, this means, statistically, that I seem to have beaten the odds, since metastases after 2 years are uncommon.
Unfortunately, there is also some bad news. I returned to the hospital this morning for a follow-up. To be honest, I didn't exactly understand what the follow-up was about, when they gave me the appointment on Tuesday. Given my linguistic limitations, sometimes I don't understand everything my various healthcare providers are telling me, since although my primary oncologist and primary diagnostician both have excellent English, many of the other staff I need to interact with don't. I just go with the flow, and try to go where they say and do as they ask, trusting that they know what they're doing.
So I went to the follow-up, at Oral Oncology (which seems more like a dental clinic than a cancer clinic). Although I am cancer-free, I do have an issue: radiation necrosis in my lower jaw and teeth. Some of the living tissue in my lower jaw and inside my teeth has been damaged or is in the process of dying due to the radiation treatment I completed 2 years ago. This is part of the faustian bargain that is implicit in contemporary cancer treatment regimens. Because of the location, it also seems to occupy a kind of grey area between dentistry and oral surgery, so now I have to spend some time with a dental specialist, I guess. I have a referral.
This is not at all life-threatening, as I understand it. However, it has the potential to substantially impact quality of life, both due to issues with chronic pain as well as further damaging my abitlity to eat normally. I suppose, in fact, it's more than "potential" – it seems already to be having some impact, otherwise I wouldn't have noticed and complained about it to my doctors.
I feel depressed and frustrated, at the moment – partly because I didn't completely understand the referral process, and so I'm going to have to rely on Korean-speaking friends to help me sort out what my next step is, and I hate relying on other people, especially in a way that hammers home my failure to learn Korean adequately.
More later.
[daily log: walking, 10km]
This week I learned that a certain student had “dropped out” of Karma, for whom I felt an odd attachment.
Her English name is Gina; she is an elementary 3rd grader (moving into 4th grade).
Gina is the youngest of three sisters, and I’ve mentioned these three sisters before. Their family name is Song, and so I made a punny little rememberance in my mind, walking home from work the other day.
Song of patient worry.
The oldest sister, who goes by the English name Irene, was a 7th grader in one of the first cohorts I taught in Korea, in 2007. I vividly remember her puzzled but slightly aloof face, in the front row of that dark classroom, on the 5th floor of the northeast corner of the very first hagwon building I taught in, on first week of class, and thinking, “These kids have no idea what I’m saying.” I don’t think I ever mentioned her specifically, but she was the “quiet one” in the group of girls I eventually dubbed the “princess mafia,” which I mentioned collectively many times in my blog, starting in January, 2008. Irene is now a university student and majoring in English. I most recently saw her when she stopped by Karma shortly before we moved into our new location, last February.
Irene was the quietest of the sisters, and the most intellectual, I now realize, although at the time I thought of her more as being a daydreamer and an airhead than being studious – but I think in retrospect that it was more one of those fronts that middle-schoolers put up defensively. She also was, as I recall, the least confident of the three, at least as a student. She was plagued by that bane of language learners, perfectionism.
Song of kind confusion.
The middle sister goes by Sunny. I taught her in 2011-2012 or so, during her late elementary years (5th and 6th grades). She was the kindest – I remember her as being one of those “teacher’s helper” type students, she was good at getting her peers to stay on task, and despite her own lack of academic interest, she was always keenly engaged in class. For Sunny, it was a social experience, though, not a learning one. She never improved in her English ability in the time I taught her – she was on a sort of plateau, with high communicative competence but chaotic grammar and pragmatics. She was kind of the mirror image of her older sister in some ways – gregarious on the outside, but not very interested in the academic side of things on the inside. I vividly remember a time when I was checking homework, and many of the students hadn’t done their homework, and Sunny said to me something like, “Teacher, aren’t you angry?” I shrugged – I have always been very laid back, especially compared to Korean standards, about student compliance with homework – especially with elementary students. Sunny’s face became grave, and she said something like, “You should be angry.” She then turned to the rest of the class, and scolded them, in Korean, on my behalf, for not doing their homework. But instead of being cold about it, she presented it as a kind of, “let’s show some class spirit, and do homework” – like a kind of pep rally.
Song of brash joy.
Gina, the youngest sister, I have taught for the last two years, through 2nd and 3rd grades. She is the most confident of the sisters (or perhaps that’s just an aspect of her being the youngest at the time I’ve known her?). She is clearly a happy and well-centered child – to the point of being a bit annoying – somewhat annoying to her teachers, but most notably annoying to her peers, who often end up feeling bullied by her. I have experienced a lot of frustration with Gina, because she would hurt other students (mostly unintentionally, I think) and create a toxic classroom environment. A while back, I wrote about her as a mini dictator. Despite all this, her intelligence and firm engagement with the learning project has led me to consider her one of my best students. Every class, she learned something new, and this was evident because she is extremely verbal, so she is constantly practicing things she’s learned or figured out, or “explaining” them to herself in her own never-ending monologue (mostly in Korean, but I get the gist of it). This monologue is another thing that makes her annoying to her peers, but as a teacher, I found it to be a fabulous resource – it told me what I was actually teaching (as opposed to that common teacher’s illusion: what I thought I was teaching).
Since these days I post videos of all my students’ speaking exercises, I have extensive video of Gina. One example is a recent short speech she gave – she is first in the video below.
So now, in the end, it’s just a Song of farewell.
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]
It has become a bit of a tradition for me to post to my blog from the waiting room at the hospital. I guess I do it partly because sitting in the hospital waiting room is boring, but mostly it’s to remind myself of the time when posting to my blog from my phone was the only way I could do it, because I was in the hospital without a normal internet-connected computer.
I am at the hospital for one of my periodic follow-ups, where they do a CAT scan and look around, to make sure I don’t have any metastasis.
Always here I get a strange feeling of stress-mediated calmness. I think the place evokes that paradoxical mix as it is strongly associated with such intense memories, traumatic but ultimately life affirming. The mental state is similar to something I feel in a temple or church or sacred-seeming place of natural beauty. . . a feeling of sublimity tempered by pathos.
I lie down inside the machine and let the acolytes read the signs under my skin.
Update (a few hours later): The signs having been read, the acolytes spoke in short obliquities of long life and long odds overcome. My earth-residency visa has been extended.
[daily log: walking, 10.5km]
I’m not sure what the difference is between an aphorism and an idiom – I have a book of aphorisms and a book of idioms, but a lot of what they have is the same.
I found this four-character idiom in my book of idioms.
同苦同樂
동고동락
dong.go.dong.rak
together-bitter-together-enjoy
This might be equivalent to something like the English aphorism, “Stick together through thick and thin.” My intuition is that this idiom would be used in the same context as discussions of 정 [jeong] (which I’ve discussed in detail before on this blog).
There was another interesting thing that made me laugh about this idiom: when you paste it into googletranslate, and accept its intention to translate from Chinese, it tells you that the English meaning is “Fun with pain.” This is accurate, but the English has an agential ambiguity that the Chinese lacks, I think – is it pain mixed with fun, or are we having fun with pain? If the latter, that’s more of a motto for a BDSM club than an aphorism for the thick and thin of life.
Apropos, I was thinking about jeong the other day when things got so bad at work. I wanted to turn to Curt and say verbatim what he had said to me those years ago: “you have no jeong.” I resisted that urge. But I definitely was thinking, in that moment, that his actions had been weirdly “jeongless” (I say “weirdly” since, presumeably, as a Korean, he has lots of jeong). I wonder just how one might accuse another of jeonglessness, idiomatically, in Korean. It’s a commonly-enough expressed sentiment, I think. Just a few weeks ago, I had a student complaining to me about the Japanese (I have many students who complain to me about the Japanese – they’re merely echoing the discourses that appear in the Korean media, of course), and she said, “they have no jeong.”
Notes for Korean (finding meaning)
[daily log: walking back to work after the short holiday, 6km]
I have a short New Years Holiday. But after such a busy December, and facing an even busier January, it's hard to feel motivated to do anything. I decided to spend my weekend being a computer-potato (like couch potato but with a different focus, I guess).
What I'm listening to right now.
Someone arranged video clips of Obama's words so that he sings the rock group Korn's "Freak On A Leash." A great cover for a great song.
[daily log: not on Holidays]
Last night at work there was a bit of an emotional conflaguration. It wasn't that pleasant.
When things get intense and unpleasant at work, I always retreat into a kind of "well, I can always leave if really want to." I return to the eternal, tenuous calculus of my stay in Korea, and my never-ending, simple dilemma: should I stay in Korea, or should I return to the US?
Of course, I was struggling with this problem even before I got cancer. When I got cancer, that felt like a kind of fate – it made the decision for me, at least for a substantial period. Many people here showed me great kindness and loyalty, too, and that kept my heart here, even with the many frustrations and difficulties.
Lately, I feel like my frustration with my goals and life in Korea has become intractable. I continue to fail to learn Korean. I feel great despair about the project, and shame, because I am supposed to be a linguist and a language teacher. I continue to be be a poor teacher with respect to the hagwon environment. I am dissatisfied with curriculum, but I lack the talent and capiticity to bring to reality any alternative. After all these years, I doubt I really understand the business environment of an English hagwon very well.
So I have great dissatisfaction with what I decided (during my hospital stay) were the two most important goals in my life: trying to become a better teacher, and learning the Korean language. The reason I nevertheless continue at Karma and in Korea is really because of my sense of loyalty to the people around me, and also because of a kind of laziness: no change is easier than change. Finally, there is an aspect which I tend to emphasize in conversation but which isn't actually as emotionally important as I make it out to be: I continue to stay in Korea because I feel a lot of fear about the healthcare system in my home country – American healthcare is quite chaotic and unreliable, and very expensive, compared to Korea.
So to simplify the above, I can identify five reasons to stay in Korea:
Taken together, these are good enough reasons. But items 1 and 2 in the above list are not feeling particularly compelling, lately, and experiences like last night's cause me to question whether my loyalty (item 3) is perhaps misplaced or substantially irrelevant.
And so that leaves items 4 and 5. But in fact, don't you think that laziness and fear are poor reasons to do anything? Including, am I really only staying in Korea, at this point, out of laziness and fear? That seems pretty stupid.
Somewhat relatedly…
In a moment of weakness and frustration, I forgot my facebook boycott. Perhaps I will start my blog cross-posting here, again – but I haven't decided. I don't like feeling OBLIGATED to keep track of facebook, or misleading people into thinking that I am paying attention to it – which was a major problem with the automated cross-posting from my blog: people thought I was looking at facebook because my blog posts were appearing here, and became upset when I didn't "notice" their comments.
So perhaps I will turn on the automated cross-posting to the facebook again. Let me know (not on facebook but via my preferred contact methods) if you think this is a good idea.
[daily log: walking, 6km]
I continued living in Ilsan.
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 2015 – it was written in the future.]
What I’m listening to right now.
Neil Young, “Old Man.” I suspect that the line in this song, “Love lost, such a cost,” was the origin or source for the recurrent word “lovelost” in some poems I wrote when I was 18 years old – I was certainly listening to Neil Young quite a bit during my freshman year in college.
Lyrics.
Old man look at my life,
I’m a lot like you were.
Old man look at my life,
I’m a lot like you were.
Old man look at my life,
Twenty four
and there’s so much more
Live alone in a paradise
That makes me think of two.
Love lost, such a cost,
Give me things
that don’t get lost.
Like a coin that won’t get tossed
Rolling home to you.
Old man take a look at my life
I’m a lot like you
I need someone to love me
the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
and you can tell that’s true.
Lullabies, look in your eyes,
Run around the same old town.
Doesn’t mean that much to me
To mean that much to you.
I’ve been first and last
Look at how the time goes past.
But I’m all alone at last.
Rolling home to you.
Old man take a look at my life
I’m a lot like you
I need someone to love me
the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
and you can tell that’s true.
Old man look at my life,
I’m a lot like you were.
Old man look at my life,
I’m a lot like you were.
[daily log: walking, 6km]
Last night I had my final class with my HS-M cohort (9th graders). They will be moving into the High School prep classes and I don't think I will be teaching them any more. I will miss this class. I never had a "bad" class with them. They were as unruly and sometimes as lazy as any other group of middle-schoolers, but they were remarkably intelligent and good-natured, and in the end, they are one of the best debate classes I've ever taught. They wanted to "play" during the last class, but I made them do a debate exercise where I gave them difficult propositions and randomly assigned PRO or CON positions, and with only a few minutes to prepare, they had to give little position speeches. The fact that they did pretty well with it tells me that they must have learned something. I wish I had taken video, but I'd removed the camera from the equation to help them feel less like this was a test and just show the skills they'd learned.
I've had some of them for 2-3 years now. I told them that they were a great class. I will miss that class. When I was having a bad day, having them as my last class was always a nice experience. Now my last class is likely to be the quite difficult successors to this HS-M cohort, the up-coming 8th graders.
Life goes on.
[daily log: walking, 6km]
The other day was the first time I ever used a “four character aphorism” appropriately in conversation.
I said to Curt, “한국말을 배우할 수 없으니까 나는 자포자기가 됐어요.” He understood what I meant, so that’s a sign I must have used it more or less correctly. It wasn’t entirely spontaneous – I’d been pre-composing some sentences involving the idiom, and suddenly the context made one of the sentences I’d worked out appropriate.
Roughly, this means “Because of being unable to learn Korean, I feel despair.”
The four character idiom is:
自暴自棄
자포자기
ja.po.ja.gi
self-furious-self-abandon
“despair”
I made some kimchi fried rice today, because I received a large amount of home-made kimchi from a co-worker, and some years ago, I used to make dish quite often. I stopped making it, because it hasn’t been so easy to eat since my surgery, but sometimes I crave things I used to eat, even though it rarely is very rewarding to actually eat them. It ends up being a kind of eating-for-nostalgia.
Notes for Korean (finding meaning)
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
I have blogged before about the social construction of popular feelings and emotions. I had fun yesterday, for Christmas, but I was acutely aware that "fun" is a social construct, and I could have been miserable, quite easily. This alternate interpretation lurked around the edges.
I was invited for a family fun day by my friend Curt and his family. We went to a sort of mall-slash-theme-park here in Ilsan, a few blocks from my home, called "One Mount." It has a a "water park" and a "snow park." The day being Christmas, it was logical to visit the snow park. Curt and I agreed that "snow park" is a pretty liberal interpretation. It is, mostly, a glorified ice-skating rink. Since the vast majority of Koreans had the day off, they did what Koreans do on holidays. They went shopping and out to a family-fun theme park. The place was so crowded, you sometimes couldn't see the ice.
I tried ice-skating. I've skated before, but I'm pretty rusty, and with grandmothers and small children on diverse sled-like-objects crashing into me constantly, I didn't feel very much like I was actually skating.
Curt's kids tried skating. His daughter, a teenager now (suddenly), was sullen and teenagery, and quickly took off her skates went to sit somewhere and look at her phone. His son was all legs and arms flying around, but spent a good amount of time trying, gamely. I got sore feet (I think I'd put on the wrong size). We ate Christmas ramen at a food court, and went down a strange sort of waterless water slide, on the roof of the one-buildinged theme park. Overall, I saw a lot of people having fun, but I kept asking myself, why was it fun? Simply because they'd decided that it was.
Anyway.
I took a picture looking toward my neighborhood from the roof (which is landscaped and full of rides and attractions).
I took a picture inside, looking down on the main skating area.
I took a picture of people having fun on the ice.
I finally felt tired and came back home.
[daily log: walking, for some not-well-defined distance]
I received a very heartwarming Christmas card from one of my students last night. I think I felt especially touched by it for two reasons – it was clearly her own initiative and work, but also, she isn't the happiest student in the world, normally, so I felt glad that beyond her gloom-and-doom, laconic exterior she has some feelings and that I'd made an impression on her.
I am certain it was her own initiative, because no parent or teacher is likely to think it is a good idea to give a Christmas card on the theme of trash. She taped some scraps of paper on the front of the card (picture right), and labeled each one trash. This would seem strange if it weren't for a running joke in her class, where, to encourage the kids to pick up after themselves, I have told them repeately that I love trash, and that I have a special collection of it (in the trash can, of course). Sometimes when they leave the classroom they will hand me wadded up wrappers of scraps of paper and say "here is some trash for you, because I hear you love trash."
So she is just extending the story. Inside is some word play on the basis of my name.
Finally, there is this message (left), which I transcribe.
To. Jared teacher.
Hi! Jared! It's me! Narin. First, Thank you for te eaching me in Karma. I was bit of afraid cause I was afraid to new people. But, Now I'm more good at en glish, So I'm proud of myself. The point is Merry Christmas!
※ P.S. My grammer is awful, But please understand. Also, sorry for not doing homework, sometimes!
I really liked the phrase "The point is Merry Christmas!" When I shared this with my coworker Kay, Kay astutely observed, "that sounds like the same way you talk." It is definitely what you might call a "TOEFL-style" phrase, to say the "The point is…."
I also received some other touching and charming cards, but they weren't quite at the same level, having been clearly generated at the prompt of one of the other teachers, rather than a spontaneous, bespoke creation. Nevertheless, I was happy to have received them.
[daily log: walking, 4.5km, skating, 0.7km]
This is a four-character aphorism from my Dictionary of Korean Idioms.
一字無識
일자 무식
il.ja.mu.sik
one-letter-not-know
“ignoramus” / “dumb as a doornail”
I think I need to know this. I don’t know why.
I feel like I’m getting dumber as I get older.
[daily log: walking in the China Smog, 6km]
More hard, long days at work.
So, from my "stockpile" of entertaining student writing, I present the following.
In James Bond movies, where do Bond Villains come from? I mean, what social/cultural circumstances cause one to become a Bond Villain? I ask this, because I think my student Henry might be a future Bond Villain, with a bit of "meta" going on, too. He writes:
If I had one billion won I would buy 007 movie and sell the movie. than I
get lots of money. I buy fishing pole and I go to fishing and than I make
Aquarium. so people come Aquarium I lots of money. then I buy
boat and fishing go to the sea take a boat. then I make a very big
Aquarium. People come to the Aquarium I lots of money.
I make nuclear I nuclear boom the bank and bank is boom.
I make two nuclear I nuclear boom Earth!!
[daily log: walking, 6km]
Yesterday was a pretty horrible day at work. Very long, but also, a feeling that for all the polite listening to my ideas, they are fundamentally irrelevant to the decisions that are made. I ended up pretty upset by the time I left at 11 pm.
The one highlight – in my HSM debate class (9th graders) we had a debate on the "absurd comedy debate" proposition, "This debate is boring." Last class, they chose the topic from a long list, and I explained that in fact, it wasn't such an easy topic. It is as hard to be deliberately boring as it is to be deliberately un-boring, and both are beyond the reach of most second-language-learners such as my students.
Nevertheless, Jihoon made a very impressive effort to actually write comedy in English, combined with taking to heart my suggestion to try to "use as much vocabulary from your vocabulary book as you can – use words you never used before."
Although, because of his shortcomings in grammar, he doesn't quite pull off the kind of humor he is attempting (which demands near-perfection to be coherent, I guess), the intent shines through and over all it is some of the most subtle writing I have ever received from a student. His wordplay is clever, with a fine grasp of sesquipedalian excess in the PRO and playful alliteration in the CON.
Pro:
Hi, this is Jihoon. Debate needs logically intrinsic reasons to support. Maybe that correspond boring debate. As you know, spontaneous less debate can cause detrimental consequences, so to speak renounce to do debate but to have relentless equivocal time, like prodigious deviation. Maybe presumable reason that is straight forward to people can do the debate amusing. As a rule of thumb, what is too deep to understand can cause the fragmentation in everything. As you can see as I can see, what is seen in debate that we can see is that prerequisite of tedious debate is all in here, this class. So I think that this debate is the archetypal type of aridity debate which sparks instantaneous aging process and innumerable counterproductive facet.
Con:
Hi this is Jihoon. This debate is not as boring as some of you bored. I can prove that this debate class is not boring. Maybe the prove I provide can get approval. I hope to pose poser point to opposite’s point as a poser to point the possibility of positive point. Let me see your ayes from your eyes in the end. We can have useful usability in utility utilitarian use of perspectives about particular propositions properly after having a debate class. Some got bored to go down as a board behind me, and some got anxious that they can’t speak affirmatively as a mute like a mite in class. But think; How happy happening happens to us that we can talk, take a time together to think about topic? Have a sight and see the significant stuff of the specific side of speaking, I think this class is not that boring than we can learn from.
[daily log: walking, 6km]
My students in my Honors1 cohort made their own debate topic last week, I guess in reaction to some offhanded comment I'd made as a joke. The proposition: "Jared is an alien." Unexpectedly, the class took the CON position, i.e., that I was not an alien. I think the point was that they wanted to hear me argue that I was, in fact, an alien.
One talented 4th grade student wrote a pretty good (if error-filled) analysis of the CON position.
Our debate topic today is ‘Jared is an Alien’. I’m in Con team with John and Narin.
We each have five reasons so I have five reasons, too.
Firstly, Jared is not like an Alien. I thought Aliens were UGLY. Then if Jared is an Alien, then why aren’t he ugly?? He’s not that hansome but he’s not so bad either….
Secondly, Aliens don’t wear glasses most of the time. Aliens have something special that humans don’t have. And that can be good eyes.. Good eyes don’t make them wear glasses. But Jared is wearing glasses. See?? It makes perfect sense..
Thirdly, Aliens do not have sugery but Jared had tongh sugery. I believe that Aliens are 10times healthier than humans. Because they’re Aliens. They are ALIENS!!!!
Fourthly, Aliens don’t have hairs but Jared have many and little hairs. I think Aliens are bald. Of course some Aliens can have hairs, but most of the time it can….
Lastly, Aliens can’t be a teacher from Earth. Aliens live in a different planet. But we have to have a passport to go another countries or planets. But if Jared’s passport says “I’m an Aliens”.Then he can’t even come to Korea or other countries.. I am kinda serious about how he got to America. Aren’t you serious like me??
I guess overall, it's a reassuring document.
[daily log: walking, 6km]
…absque explicatione ulteriore
[daily log: walking, 6km]
Yesterday dawned as the first truly cold day of winter – my phone reported to me that the outside temperature was -8°C (17°F). When the temperature drops, my sleeping is disrupted because of Korea's ondol heating system – the floors themselves are heated with hot water, radiator style. But, since I sleep on the floor… well, when the floor becomes hot, that wakes me up – I don't understand how Koreans can sleep on hot surfaces, but they do: even when they use Western-style beds, they put heating pads on them for winter. I often have to migrate to my sofa in the winter for sleeping, because of the hot floor problem. I find sleeping on a hot floor unbearable.
Anyway, I had strange dreams because of my hot floor, before I woke up.
I was in some global-warming future, I guess. That makes sense – the hot weather part. I was amid some sort of cluster of industrial warehouses, looking for a way home. I was lost, but I didn't feel any anxiety.
I was dreaming that I was very old. I was so old, it was the future. Buildings had forgotten the ground, and engineers had become heroes, who were remembered in parades. Televisions knew my name. I was so old that the future thrummed above me in the sky like a drone, and so old that my death was planted in the ground beneath my feet on the street, like the cracks in pavement that come about as the roots of trees burrow beneath. There were white plastic faucets sprouting from the walls, but they had no water. Only poetry would flow from the white faucets. I was so old, that the president was a child, so I finally was allowed to leave school. I stood in the street. I remember that I was wanting to make one last poem. I lived in all the cities, but all the cities were only one city, and their maps streamed and sparkled like liquid around me, like raindrops in beams of sunlight.
I woke up and tried to write it down, but even as I wrote it, it was like the end of 100 Years of Solitude, and it all faded away.
[daily log: walking, 6km]
I used to post, on This Here Blog Thingy™, a little item I called "Notes for Korean" – these were just an effort to record vocabulary I had run across or had some difficulty in puzzling out, and so I wanted to record it, mostly for my own future reference. I stopped doing it, first because of laziness but also because it didn't really seem to belong in a "blog." But I have decided that it was sufficiently useful to me, in the context of this blog's role as a personal aide-memoire, that I shouldn't worry about the latter, as long as I can overcome the former. Hence, with very minimal fanfare, I resurrect my…
Notes for Korean (finding meaning)
The other day, for an 11-hour work day, because I attended a "training" meeting for some new teaching software the Karma is investing in (called "Cappytown").
When I went back to review my notes just now, I found this written in the margin: "Sitting in this kind of meeting makes me want to quit my job."
Indeed, it was one of the most frustrating moments I've had in recent work experience, because, of course, the training, and all the software's administration documentation and online management framework is in Korean. There is nothing at all wrong with that – this is Korea, after all. But it hammers home to me just how inadequate my Korean language skill is, how little it seems to be progressing, and how utterly useless I am, outside the classroom, at my current job.
I guess, fortunately, I am considered to be valuable in the classroom. Nevertheless, it makes problematic my desire to be a true member of my workplace team, and it also is a grim reminder that for all my enthusiasm as a language teacher and as a lifelong observer of languages (i.e. as a linguist, by training and avocationally) am an utter failure as a language-learner, in this Korean incarnation.
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]
With my recent discovery that a large Mormon church is being built in my neighborhood, I became curious about Mormonism in Korea. The more I learned (most of which confirmed my preconceptions), the more surprised I am that this church is even being built.
The Mormons actually are not doing well in Korea, in comparison to other non-mainstream, exogenous religious movements (e.g. Jehovah’s Witnesses). I found a very detailed, academic analysis of the situation at a Mormon mission-supporting website called Cumorah. As I already suspected, Mormons are not being very successful at converting Koreans, who, perhaps because of their own plethora of home-grown fringe-Christian sects (see Moonies, et al.), are inured to the promises Mormonism. Indeed, Koreans have a long history of domestic, Mormonesque cultural phenomenon (Cheondoism, Won Buddhism).
Furthermore, the previously fairly successful Korean Mormon community (which arose in the wake of proselytizing by US military personnel and by converted returnees from the US, in the 1960s and 70s, and was sufficiently large that a Temple was built in Seoul in the early 80s), is apparently emigrating en-masse to Anglophone countries, where they can find larger and more cohesive Mormon communities, less overt discrimination and social stigmatization, and better economic prospects. Thus, in fact, the Mormon church in Korea is shrinking.
So is this church being built in Ilsan as a kind of stopgap or anticipatory effort, to increase support for a moribund or imagined community? Or is Goyang bucking the regional trend? Certainly it is true that I see Mormons on mission tromping about almost every day, in Ilsan. Is it the area’s American-style suburban cultural ethos, high relative socioeconomic status, and thus somewhat un-Korean in character (what I call the “Ilsan bubble”), that draws them?
I guess I’m just curious. I am not, per se, pro-Mormon or anti-Mormon. I find their theology absurd, but I find the sociology of the group interesting. I just have a weird fascination for the group, for reasons I’ve explained before.
[daily log: walking, 6km]
I have been slowly working my way into a very dry and dense textbook called Task-Based Language Teaching, by David Nunan. When the intensity of work goes up, I tend to spend even my free time thinking about more work-related things. I'm not sure why this is – it strikes me as counter-intuitive.
Actually, I think it's about trying to assuage the feelings of insecurity about my teaching abilities that tend to arise during periods of work stress.
I think that the idea of "task-based language teaching" is mostly irrelevant, in the Korean EFL context – at least as conceptualized by the author and by other practitioners in the field. That can be best explained by examining this short aside that I found in the introduction to the book:
It [i.e. the just given definition of a "target task"] describes the sorts of things that the person in the street would say if asked what they were doing. (In the same way as learners, if asked why they are attending a Spanish course, are more likely to say, 'So I can make hotel reservations and buy food when I'm in Mexico,' than 'So I can master the subjunctive.') – page 2
In fact, most Korean learners will say something similar to the latter, if asked why they are studying English (i.e. not specifically that they want to master the subjunctive, but some other similarly abstruse grammatical concept). The reason is that most Korean students study English because they want to do well on certain standardized tests (e.g. 수능 [Korean SAT]). Those standardized tests are far from having been in the remotest way touched by concepts like "task-based language learning" or communicative language teaching strategies.
Farther along in the book, the author mentions the field called "English for Special Purposes" (such as English for Business, or English for Engineering) as being an outgrowth of the task-based language teaching movement.
In that vein, I'd like to propose a new "English for a Special Purpose": namely, English for Korean Students (hereby written 'EKS'). This particular special-purpose English is characterized by a slavish focus on the ancient "grammar-translation" style of language learning, and targets a profoundly non-communicative, decontextualized use of language. Just like any other special-purpose English, EKS is a real necessity for the millions of Korean students who need it. This being the case, we could have a sincerely task-based language instruction curriculum, true to the methodological philosophy, that focuses on grammar-translation and on preparing to take these tests. This is because "passing the tests" is the real-world "task" in question.
It leads to a bit of a methodological paradox… If our goal is a progressive desire to give students real-world utility from their language instruction, we should teach them using the grammar-translation style from 100 years ago, because that's what's useful to them – much more useful than teaching them how to speak communicative English as tourists or travelers or workers at large, international companies.
[daily log: walking, 6km]
Recently I had a "special" class that I taught to 7th graders for a few weeks, in the context of the test-prep period. It was supposed to be a grammer-focused writing class, and because most of the students were fairly low level (although it was a mixed group and there were some high level students too), I decided to basically focus on a single grammer object: the "to" infinitive forms of English, since they are used in a lot of ways and in a lot of different expressions.
As part of this, I found myself wondering about the etymology of the "to" particle, which is most definitely not the same as the homonymous preposition by modern linguistic descriptions, but which seems to bear some weird traces of what one might call "prepositionality." Was the origin of the "to" particle related to the preposition "to" or was it a coincidence (a linguistic merger)?
It was actually a bit difficult to research, but finally I found some text that confirmed that the infinitive "to" is, in fact, derived from the preposition "to." That is interesting to me, and because it was so hard to find out, I decided to blog about it, so if I want to go back and look it up again in the future, it's in my aide-memoire blog thingy.
Here is the authoritative quote I found:
The English so-called 'infinitive marker' (or 'infinitive prefix', 'infinitive particle') to derives from the dative-governing preposition used with an inflected infinitive to express purpose. In this sense, it can be considered to represent the universally well-known grammaticalization path 'purpose > infinitive' (Haspelmath 1989; Heine & Kuteva: 247-248), whereby the preposition is desemanticized and acquires distributional properties not found with, or not typical of, noun-governing prepositions. - from John Ole Askedal, in Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory: The Rosendal Papers, page 63.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
During an exceptionally frustrating staff meeting yesterday, I wasn't understanding much that was being said, and misunderstood at least one important point. This is due to my linguistic handicap (i.e. not having mastered Korean).
So I withdrew and drew on the margins of my new class schedule. Here is what I drew.
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]
