Category: Banalities & Journaling

Caveat: K-Old School

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

내가 지금 듣고있어요.

O

유승준, "사랑해 누나" (1997년!)… 어차피, 내 학생들의 연령이 이 노래의 세 미만이에요.

가사.

나를 미치도록 찐한 사랑에 빠지게 했던 그녀는 나보다 더
나이가 훨씬 많아 아니 쬐끔 하지만나는 네 어깨에다 손을
올리곤 했었지 왜냐하면 내가 키가더 크니까
혹시나 하는 두려움은 모두 떨쳐버려 세상이 만들어 논 기
유승준 사랑해 누나 
준들은모두 버려 널 아끼고 너를 믿는 가슴속에 내 소중한
사람이 있다는 걸절대 잊어서는 안돼
아무리 날 노려 보아도 항상 내 이름을 불러대지
어깨에 내손을 올릴땐 새침한 그 미소가 너무나 예뻐
그 누구의 시선도 어떤 말도 겁낼건없어 그 무엇도 어쩔
수 없는 우리 사랑 있잖아
어리다고 나를 놀리는 너의 친구들이 싫지만 걱정하듯 나
를 비웃는 내 친구 두려웠지만
바보처럼 울어선 안돼 언제라도 활짝 웃어줘 내 가슴속의
사랑은 널 안기에 충분하니까

넌 웃는게 예뻐 그러니까 웃어줘 언제까지라도 눈물은 없을
꺼야 늘 담당해줘 우리 사랑앞에서 두려워할 것도 흔들릴
것도 없으니까 그게 잘 안 되면 아예나를 오빠라고 불러버
려 그것이 너에겐 더 편할지도 모르니까 약속해 줄께니가
기대 잠들 내 가슴은 언제까지 너만을 기다린다는 것을
아무도 우리사랑을 어떻게 할 수는 없을꺼야
언제나 네곁에 있을께 너만의 사랑인 날잊어선 안돼
다른 연인들보다 힘이 들고 어렵겠지만 영원히 널 지켜줄거
야 조금만 더 기다려
어리다고 나를 놀리는 너의 친구들이 싫지만 걱정하듯 나
를 비웃는 내 친구 두려웠지만
바보처럼 울어선 안돼 언제라도 활짝 웃어줘 내 가슴속의
사랑은 널 안기에 충분하니까
헤어지기 싫은 너와 나의 아쉬운 작별을 하고 힘이 겹게돌
아온 내 책상속에는 오늘은 또 너의 어떤 얘기가 있을런지
하루종일 궁금해하는 내 일기장 오늘은 그 미장원의 미용사
에게 너를 2시간동안 너를 뺏긴 얘기를썼고 항상 마지막 간
절한 마음을 적었지 영원히사랑해 누나~~

 

Caveat: Chaewon’s Diary

Banalities & Journaling / Kids / Teaching & Methodology / The Wonders of Work

I have a 1st grade (elementary) student named Chaewon. Her mother is making her do additional English homework that is not part of our curriculum – because it's never too early to overburden your kids with homework. She's making Chaewon write 2 English diary entries each week.

Here are Chaewon's first two extra-work diary entries. 

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My first reaction was just to recognize the heart-wrenching agony of being a 1st grader in such a demanding cultural milieu.

My second reaction was: how is it possible for a 1st grader to have written this, in English, when she's been at KarmaPlus less than a year and does not stand out as a remarkable student.

But my third reaction was to recall that Chaewon is not a regular student. I believe that before she came to KarmaPlus, she was in an English kindergarten in Dubai. Probably, that was an immersion environment. I was struck by her at the time she first came, that she was a bit like a very shy "native speaker" child of her age with some recent trauma in her past, who was very good at verbal communication with English, but only on her terms and when she was willing, but was also quite "behind" on literacy skills – she could barely spell her name when she came to us. Perhaps the recent trauma in her past was coming to Korea?

Korean hagwon-based English education is of course almost opposite in orientation from her strengths, then: it depreciates spoken ability in favor of a kind  of mute, passive, but grammatically precise literacy – even among young elementary students. Of course I  try to be a counterweight to that – but there's only so much I can  achieve, seeing kids one or two hours a week. But because she is so weak in areas that hagwon curricula emphasizes, she is perceived by her Korean teachers as being mediocre at best, and her strange alternation between shyness and aggressiveness makes her seem unmotivated if not rude.

And, still, with respect to Chaewon's diary, I wonder – did she write this without assistance? I'm not sure. The linguistics are quite strange – on the one hand, it seems very private and sincere and strikingly sad, too. But on the other hand, it seems that even if a native-speaking first grader were writing this, I'd have to wonder, because there's a strange self-aware craftedness to the prose that doesn't seem right for a child that age. For example, the almost literary-usage style of "but" in the sentence "My familiar voice is not the alarm but my brother's voice." That's in weird contrast to the mis-uses of the terms "used to" or "notice," both of which bespeak an over-reliance on literalist look-ups in dictionary or grammar text, which is the sort of error I more normally associate with middle school students of middle-to-high competence.

I'm curious now.  I may want to follow up.

[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: Oinkography

Banalities & Journaling / My Drawings & Paintings / The Wonders of Work

Yesterday during the staff meeting I was grumpy, because … well, it was because of something that was ultimately my own fault, for having failed to validate some work someone else had done. Anyway, I will have to adapt my curriculum for my Sirius반… 

I took these notes during the meeting. They are quite detailed, but don't really make clear what I need to do.

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Later, my student Hansaem made some minor additions to the notes in red pen, including her name and the name of an imaginary friend.

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: 눈 위에 서리 친다

Banalities & Journaling / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean) / 한국어 속담 (Aphorisms & Proverbs)

Here is a winter-themed aphorism from my aphorism book.

눈 위에 서리 친다.
nun wi.e seo.ri chin.da
snow over-LOC frost hit-PRES
Frost falls on snow.

This seems about the same as “out of the frying pan, into the fire.” But colder.
So far I’ve been very disappointed by the extremely snowless winter Korea is having. We had basically one snowfall. It’s just cold and dry. I guess that’s the whole Siberian thing, going on.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: Post-4000

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

According to my blog host, this is my 4000th blog posting.

My 2000th post was 2012/02/17, and my 3000th post was 2013/05/12 – a span of 450 days, or 2.2 posts per day – while this post is on 2015/01/13, a span, from Post-3000, of 611 days, or 1.6 posts per day.

Evidently, my rate of posting has slowed down. I suppose the cause of such a slowdown is in part utterly obvious: it’s the fact of having experienced cancer (or more specifically, its aftermath) for the last two years.

But… I think it is also a bit of a disillusionment with social media in general. Most strongly, I became substantially unhappy with the facebook: its echo-chamber and epistemic closure aspects, and also the feeling that they “owned” me in some way, viz. the commodification of my online persona. So despite some gratitude to the way it enabled me to stay in touch with far-flung friends and family so easily during the worst of my illness, I have essentially quit the book-of-faces, leaving it only as an abandoned “stub” to enable people to “find” me. Nevertheless, my disillusionment with web-based social media extends up to and includes This Here Blog Thingy™, too, which I obviously haven’t quit but for which I feel some reduced enthusiasm.

What’s it all for? The blog has introduced a sort of discipline into my previously utterly-undisciplined writerly life, but it’s also become one of the chief ways I avoid what I might charitably characterize as my more “authorial” ambitions (novels, poetry, short stories). It’s become a means of self-discipline with respect to writing, sometimes, but just as often it’s evolved into a means of willful procrastination that fails to actually lead to any kind of writing or even to any intelligent or critical reading. I’m not proposing to drop the blog – merely expressing my disappointment with my own failure to “leverage the medium,” as a businessperson might phrase it.

Caveat: meameamealokkapoowa oompa and other curiosities of googology

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Science & SciFi

Googology, apparently, is a subfield of mathematics dedicated to the study of large numbers. It has its own wiki. I found this wiki after attempting to read an old article by mathematician Scott Aaronson about big numbers. Actually, what surprised me about some of the material on the googology wiki more than anything else was that, in fact, I found myself making some effort to understand it, despite the dense mathematics.

I more-or-less understood the idea behind hyper-operators (and up-arrow notation), but became lost by what was called BEAF (a sort of systematic way of specifying functions with hyper-exponential growth, I guess), and I was eventually sidetracked by the plethora of whimsical terminology: big numbers beyond - way beyond – googol, with names like boogagoogolplex or meameamealokkapoowa oompa (which is defined by {{L100,10}10,10&L,10}10,10 , in case you were wondering – and no, I don't understand that).

There's a nice glossary of recently-coined, really big numbers (many created in response to Aaronson's original article) at an aesthetically-challenged web page called Infinity Scrapers. Note that the "meameamealokkapoowa group" appears at the bottom of the list (does this mean that it is really the biggest-of-the-big numbers? or just the most recently to be characterized?).

It is worth noting, for the uninitiated, that the absolute smallest of these numbers (but the largest which I can be assured that at least a few of my middle-school students, for example, might be aware of) is googol (= 10100), yet that number is still greater than the estimated number of elementary particles in the observable universe, 1086.

It's rare that I've tried so hard to penetrate a mathematical concept since my first year in college, when, after a semester of trying to make sense of the number-theoretical foundations of calculus under the unkind tutelage of Professor A. Wayne R__, nicknamed "B" Wayne R__ since he never gave A-grades. I concluded I wasn't cut out to be a math major, and abandoned ship for the more hospitable fields of the humanities surfing around to Religious Studies and English Lit before landing in Linguistics, which was a semi-return to the more rigorous fold. It's one of my few genuine regrets in life, I suppose. Not a regret at having jumped ship – rather, a regret to having found myself obligated to do so… which is to say, it's not really regret, more like disappointment with myself. 

[daily log: walking, { {}, {{}}, {{},{{}}}, {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}} , {{}, {{}}, {{},{{}}}, {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}}} } (=amount in km, represented set-theoretically using Von Neumann ordinals)]

Caveat: Canonize that Carpet!

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I discovered an interactive guide to aiport carpets of the world. This is soo useful. Didn't you ever wonder what the carpet would be like at some airport? Here is your chance to know.

They provide quirky, tongue-in-cheek, postmodern reviews. Here is the review of the airport carpet at Mexico City (Benito Juarez International): 

The carpet of MEX is unremarkable save for one important feature: the carpet changes color every other year. Since its installation in 1987, its colors have included a midnight blue, a dull grey, a lime green, and a hot pink. After years of study, Mexican scientists have declared MEX a mircale, and attempts have since been made to have the carpet canonized.

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: No Weather

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

picture

Sometimes the little "weather widget" I've got on the left-hand column of This Here Blog Thingy™ behaves strangely. This morning it told me there was "no weather" (see screenshot at right).

I checked outside, and sure enough, the sky was slate gray and the temperature was 0 C. That strikes me as pretty close to "no weather," actually.

But you have to admit, it's kind of weird.

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

 

Caveat: Meditations on tonguelessness, and the end of the world

Banalities & Journaling / Cancer / Found Online

I've written before about what I call my "meta hypochondria" – that nagging suspicion that I have some grave new illness, but which I then dismiss by turning my worry to the possibility that I'm suffering from some unreasonable, hypochondriac delusion instead. Since my cancer, this has become even more multi-layered and frustrating.

With any new persistent ache or twinge or discomfort, I immediately begin to think: "Is that it? Is that the metastasis I've worried about? Is that some new cancer growing in my mouth or chest or wherever it is I'm feeling discomfort?" Then I think, well, that's unreasonable, to worry about that – I've got my check-ups, every three months, with CT-scans and all that, and they would tell me, if something was going on. Then I waver, and think, "well, but they might miss something. It's not common for a mouth cancer to metastasize into a gut cancer, but I've had that stomachache for the last several hours – maybe this is it?"

Then I think, I'm just a hypochondriac. That's meta-hypochondria, when you think that. Especially if it turns out you're wrong, and you're not a hypochondriac, but in fact have something wrong. That's what happened to me – I put off dealing with the pain in my mouth for so long, thinking I was just being overly sensitive to some minor issue, and telling myself to stop being a hypochondriac.

The fact is, I don't have much time in my life, these days, when my mind is not swirling around some possible new health problem. I experience a lot of discomfort: not quite pain, but "almost pain" in my mouth (where my nerves were cut), in my body (who knows from what – just aches and pains of a body not well-maintained), wherever. It's a bit like having a cold sore in your mouth – you "worry it" all the time, with your tongue.

The metaphor is exceptionally apt, if somewhat inverted, because the sensations aren't exactly the same: I wonder to what extent the fact that it was my tongue that was stricken, broken, and reconstructed as a numb, dead thing… how that impacts my proprioception… I think about how babies, before any other thing, begin to experience their world through their mouths. They put things in their mouths. It's like the mouth is a place of origin, a "center" of the self-perceived body-as-body. And so, I am vulnerable to distortions in proprioception because my tongue is "missing" – from a sensations standpoint.

Tangentially (but not as unrelatedly as normal, perhaps), I ran across this video, just now.

[UPDATE 20180328: Video embed lost due to link-rot; no replacement found. Condé Nast videos website fail! Sad!]

Grim.

[daily log: walking, 4.5 km]

Caveat: University of malware… expected to do a rampant

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

Google translate is truly horrible, for Korean->English. I admit that at least for most major European languages, I am nevertheless impressed, and it does a great job. With those languages, there is a sufficiently large body of precisely parallel texts (mostly due to EU integration and language policies) that a statistical translation such as the google attempts can yield decent results. But Korean… the results can be truly weird.

Sometimes, I get text messages from my phone service (LG+). In case they are important, I will copy-paste them directly into google translate in an effort to decide if I can freely disregard the message or if I have to take some action on it. A message received earlier today was a great example where the google-translate version is hilarious and weird but nevertheless allows me to know that I can comfortably ignore the message.

The paragraph I laughed at came out in google as:

To celebrate the 24-year civil life cohesive, Courier, New Year greetings, New Year's gift quarterlies, University of malware, including entrance fees (SMS phishing) are expected to do a rampant.

The original was:

새해를 맞이하여 생활 밀착형 민원24, 택배, 새해 인사, 새해선물 연말정산, 대학 입학금 등 악성코드(스미싱)가 기승을 부릴 것으로 예상이 됩니다.

The gist is that I should watch out for spam SMS (which is definitely a problem in Korea – I delete 3 or 4 such messages each day from my phone), and maybe subscribe to their extra spam-fighting service … which I won't. I only pay attention to messages that are from a known source (e.g. a person I know or officially from my provider, like this one). It's hard to fall for phishing attacks in a language you don't know well. Speaking of which, when and how did some Russians decide I wanted to read vast quanties of Russian-language spam? Does anyone else have this problem with email spam in Russian?

And speaking of Universities of malware… maybe North Korea has one. Maybe there's a university of malware, doing a rampant, up the road in Kaeseong, 30 km from my home here in Ilsan. Somehow it's pretty easy to visualize.

 [daily log: walking, 6 km]

Caveat: Karma People

Banalities & Journaling / The Wonders of Work / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

From my boss – he writes a New Years note and sends an image of it via attachment to SMS. 

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I made a transcription so I could try to understand it better, although I got the general gist of it right away:

작년, 열심히 땀흘려 찍은 정들…
올, 2015년에 멋진길이 되어 우리 앞에 펼쳐질겁니다. Happy New Year! 카르마원장 올림.

I'm still uncertain of some of the words/structures (and I may have made mistakes in transcription due to unclear reading of his handwriting). Very roughly (not word-for-word):

Last year, we worked hard… for the coming [year], 2015 will wonderfully unfold before us. Happy New Year from Karma's Director. 

[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: A Historic Day

Banalities & Journaling

Happy New Year, y'all.

It was nice to have a day off because of New Years day, but the fact of New Years day kind of left me feeling vaguely nostalgic, though I'm not sure for what. It was very cold outside – I think the high was around -8 C  (17 F) today.

I forced myself to avoid the internet until about an hour ago.

I was reading history books (and did some writing on my own "history book" – which is fictional history, but still, kind of history bookish, anyway).

So it was a historic day. 

[daily log: walking, 1.5 km]

 

Caveat: Better

Banalities & Journaling

Well today was better.

I guess what had me down yesterday was just some difficulties with a certain set of three students, whom I sometimes call, uncharitably, the three stooges. That's not actually wise, on my part, to make up epithets of that sort.

They are a triplet of very frustrating middle school boys, who are quite smart but tend to engage in a kind of right-on-the-edge-of-bullying banter among themselves during class, generally in Korean which makes it hard to detect when they're crossing the line, but I can almost guarantee that they generally cross the line. Let's call it "locker room" banter. Some of it is innocent, or just insults traded among themselves, but some of it is offensive to the less confident students, and especially I KNOW there are girls who have been made so uncomfortable by these boys that they have quit the class. Yet it's extremely difficult for me to manage these boys, because I'm not sophisticated enough in Korean to call them on their Korean, and they seem to know that and exploit it, because the Korean-speaking teachers always say, essentially, "oh, they're little angels in my class." So getting disciplinary support from my coworkers is pretty difficult, too. 

But I run a speaking class – I can't just make them all shut up. Well… maybe I should. Anyway, I didn't have them today. So today was fine. I had good classes, today. My great new middle school cohorts, the new new TOEFL class of 6th-to-7th 예비중 excellent, my MWF cohort of 8th-9th graders is excellent too, all interesting, intelligent, curious. 

Anyway. It's new years eve. I don't care. Or do I?

[daily log: walking, -5 km]

Caveat: 2014

Banalities & Journaling / Year-In-Six-Sentences

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 2014 – it was written in the future.]
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Caveat: The Trouble I’ve Been Through

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling

One reason I claim that I'm in the right job, despite my frequent complaints, is that, on average, I am more likely to feel positive about my job at the end of my day than how I feel about it at the start of my day.

Today was not one of those days.

What I'm listening to right now.

The Limousines, "Dancing At Her Funeral." I'm afraid I don't fully understand this song. It seems kind of morbid. But it's a bit catchy.

Lyrics.

Decorated in lights
And surrounded by traffic cones
There was a car crashed wrapped
Around a telephone pole
With a soft layer of firefighter's
Chemical foam
The stranger's favorite song still
Playing on the radio

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen
The trouble I've been through

And as the ambulance takes her to the hospital
The only words she can say are, "Can you take me home?"
Before her spirit escapes her as a soft blue glow, oh, no…

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen
The trouble I've been through

And we'll be dancing at her funeral
Dancing at her funeral

Now they're digging a hole
Cutting her name in stone
Sending out invitations to her friends back home
Digging a hole, cutting her name in stone, oh, no….

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen
The trouble I've been through

[daily log: walking, yeh]

Caveat: White men come and ruin Mesopotamia

Banalities & Journaling / Kids / Teaching & Methodology / The Wonders of Work

Last Friday, on a whim (and because I had a class in my schedule that I hadn't planned for), I gave some 2nd and 3rd grade elementary students some pseudo-TOEFL-style speaking questions. Yun (a 2nd grade prodigy of sorts) attempted to answer the question, "What is your favorite type of museum?" This is an actual TOEFL-style question which I normally use with advanced 5th and 6th graders or even mid-level middle schoolers, and I was quite surprised at how well Yun met the challenge. He took some notes and planned his idea, and patters on quite successfully for the allotted 45 seconds.

What he says near the end about Mesopotamians is rather funny in a sad, "wow that's still going on" way – hard to catch it, I know – here is a transcription based on my having had access to his notes.

But later, white men come and ruin Mesopotamia, So today Mesopotamia's museum is not stay their seat. 

His use of the term "white men" might seem odd, but in fact it's just a direct, naive, dictionary-driven translation of the Korean 백인 (literally white-man), which has a similar semantic scope. He means Europeans.

[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: Treat them with injustice, their hatred will naturally follow

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Sometimes I read a blog called JF Ptak Science Books. That's a pretty dry title for a blog, but the author runs some kind of bookstore of rare and unusual used books and publications, and I find it endlessly fascinating.

Today, after coming home and having my increasingly customary but seemingly insalubrious Saturday post-work nap, I was browsing that blog and ran across a posting of this article excerpted from a publication called The Emporium of Arts, and Sciences (1814). I will not reproduce the entirety of it here, because I'm not sure of Ptak's policy on republication of materials, but here is the first facsimile, as a live link back to the blogpost. 

BooksAMuch of the advice could apply just as aptly to the treatment of our fellow adults as to children. But over all it's remarkable, in that it gets at the core of something it is far too easy to forget, with children especially – they learn as much (or more) by our example as by our "instruction" – whatever that is.

When I followed up on Ptak's reference to the supposed author of this 1814 article, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, I found the wikithing's entry far too tantalizingly brief – what, exactly, might a school founded on Rousseauian principles be like? He was translated by Mary Wollstonecraft? – A bunch of late 18th century hippies, I expect.

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: I don’t got time for holy rollers

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / The Wonders of Work

Another really long, exhausting day: I don't even remember having had a day off yesterday. I stayed at work past 11.

Anyway, December is almost over. The new schedules and cohort assignments and syllabuses will all fall into place soon and things will get more routine again.

What I'm listening to right now.

Spoon, "Inside Out."

Lyrics.

Time's gone inside out
Time gets distorted with
This intense gravity
I don't got time for holy rollers
But then they wash my feet
And I won't be their soldier

There's intense gravity
Yeah, there's intense gravity
I'm just your satellite
I'm just your satellite

Ooh, and I know that time's gone inside out
And now it's only like we told you
Hm, oh then they wash my feet
They do not make me complete

Break out a character for me
Time keeps on going when
We got nothing else to give
We got nothing else to give

Ooh, 'cause our time's gone inside out
I don't make time for holy rollers
Hm, there's only you I need
They do not make me complete

[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: the winter will crave what is gone

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Teaching & Methodology / The Wonders of Work

Last week at some point, while searching for some utterly unrelated pedagogy-related material, I ran across a PDF of a PhD dissertation by a Korean-American graduate student at Georgia State University. The title is "Korean Teachers' Beliefs about English Language Education and their Impacts upon the Ministry of Education-Initiated Reforms," and was written by Cheong Min Yook in 2010 (it is accessible online here). I was so intrigued by the premise of the dissertation that  I downloaded and read a significant portion of it, hoping to find some insight into the sometimes beffuddling beliefs my coworkers exhibit in the realms of pedagogy and TESL. The dissertation is pretty dry (of course), and frankly I didn't feel it was particularly revelatory, but there was something else that struck me most profoundly, and was quite dissappointing: there is an almost complete disregard for what is, in my mind, the primary locus of ESL in Korea: the hagwon industry. 

Aside from a few single-sentence, off-hand mentions of the fact that parents often resort to "commercial supplementary education," the author seems to view the existence of the hagwon industry irrelevant to ESL in Korea. This strikes me as naive to the point of seeming like an alternate reality. In fact, I think that the hagwon industry (and the Ministry of Education's preoccupation with it, in the negative sense) is likely the single most significant factor in why reform in Korean ESL is so necessary yet also at the same time so incredibly difficult (especially if researchers like this graduate student are pretending the hagwon industry is marginal and nigh irrelvevant). 

I have attempted, anyway, [broken link! FIXME] elsewhere, to go into the history and structure of the ESL industry in Korea, although I confess I probably need to get back to it and make changes as I no longer entirely agree with everything I wrote there. Without going into a lot of that, however, as I read Cheong (is that the surname? I'm not clear if US-name-order or Korean-name-order was used, but Cheong is a more common surname than Yook so I went with that as a guess) I got a lot of insight into the timeline of what was going on with respect to "reforms" and changes in the Ministry of Education's approach to public school ESL. I was struck with a kind of insight or brainstorm about how that must have had a direct and probably uninintended consequence in the hagwon industry. Here is a brief outline of that brainstorm.

The "boom" in the hagwon business which occurred in the early 2000s wasn't just demographic (which is always how I'd conceptualized it, before) – it was also a direct market response to the government's effort to emphasize a more modern pedagogy in the public school system. That is because the government failed to support their programmatic methodological changes meant for the classroom with sufficient reforms to the exam system (i.e. the 4-times-a-year 내신 in middle and high school, as well as the 수능 [Korean "SAT"]).

As a result, what ended up happening was that the reforms, oriented toward spoken English and CLT ["communicative language teaching"], which occurred in the public schools in the late 1990s and early 2000s, rendered English education – as it was being provided by the public schools – irrelevant to what parents wanted and needed. What parents want and need, always, is adequate preparation for exams. The exams remained focused on passive-skills – mostly grammar, vocabulary and reading, with the only, arguably fairly minor, reform being some increase in a listening component. (As an aside, it's worth mentioning that the intended nation-wide TOEFL-style [therefore CLT-based and with a speaking component!] English exam, NEAT, was an utter flop, although I'm not clear as to the reasons for that). Thus, to the extent that public school ESL focused on communicative competence and speaking skills, to the exact same extent it became irrelevant to the national exams. Parents essentially fled the public system (not by quitting, but by simply ignoring it and influencing their children to ignore it) and instead invested even more money and hours in private supplementary education (i.e. hagwon) in order to adequately to prep their kids for the exams.

That makes a lot of sense to me, when I reflect on it. I wonder, therefore, if the current drawback in the hagwon industry is therefore also not just demographic, but is rather also a consequence (intentional or otherwise) of further changes to pedagogy in the public schools. Certainly I think the effort to increase emphasis on speaking and CLT in the public schools has been scaled back substantially – abandoned in middle schools and reduced in elementary schools. Just look at the reduction in foreign native-speaking teachers being employed by public schools. One could argue that the government was disappointed by the results, but it seems just as likely that at some high, administrative level they realized their previous reforms were driving the hagwon industry to new heights (which they didn't want) and so they reversed direction. 

Actually, there is one other factor driving the current travails in the hagwon industry that I might as well mention, as long as I'm writing about it, which is that the cost of 과외 [private tutoring] has veritably plunged in recent years, driven, I suspect, by the increasing number of English-fluent Koreans in the country, mostly returned emmigres who abandoned the Anglosphere due to the economic hardships post-2008. Unlike me or other foreigners who must be here on business-sponsored visas (E2), these returnees can work however they want, as self-employed one-on-one tutors, and there is zero regulation. Given the choice of paying the same for one-on-one with a native speaker or time in a raucous classroom with a native speaker only half time if they're lucky, it's easy to see why parents would pull their kids out of hagwon and find a tutor for them.

By the way… uh, merry christmas? Frankly, it was a sucky Christmas. Bah humbug, then.

What I'm listening to right now.

Future Islands, "Seasons."

Lyrics

-Verse 1-

Seasons change
And I tried hard just to soften you
The seasons change
But I've grown tired of trying to change for you
Because I've been waiting on you
I've been waiting on you
Because I've been waiting on you
I've been weighing on you

-Chorus-
As it breaks, the summer will wake
But the winter will wash what's left of the taste
As it breaks, the summer will warm
But the winter will crave what is gone
Will crave what has all gone away

-Verse 2-
People change
But you know some people never do
You know when people change
They gain a piece but they lose one too
Because I've been hanging on you
I've been weighing on you
Because I've been waiting on you
I've been hanging on you

[daily log: what?]

Caveat: Christmas #50

Banalities & Journaling

So tired, again. I push hard but my endurance is lousy. So I put in my work day and then I'm exhausted and I have nothing left. 

I guess this gets to be a broken record, to have to see it over and over on the blog. But I feel like I should post something, and that's what I have.

As I pointed out at the beginning of the month, December is the hardest and busiest month in my experience as a hagwon teacher. This is entirely accurate. I get tomorrow off, but it's just a day, and back to work Friday. I may end up putting in more time this week than on a regular week, despite the day off. Certainly, even disregarding the time, I feel a lot of stress and I know my coworkers do too. Curt likes to criticize me about my lack of a "life" outside of work (my term, not his – he just says something like "you never do anything" or "you aren't very active"). I guess I don't have much of a life, it's true. Mostly, I don't feel up to it. Today he said I might as well be dead. Really, he did – I know he didn't mean it badly, but I felt pretty horrible after. Maybe it's true. I guess that work and doing nothing at home is all I'm up for, though. Is it really so bad? What should my life be for? I'm still alive. Doesn't that count for something?

[daily log: walking, 7.5 km]

Caveat: All this talkin’ Where’s it goin

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling

It was a very long day. Meeting after end of classes, arguing about placement of students in new cohorts. It’s all very complicated, and I often feel like my opinions about the students and their potentials and interactions and issues are disregarded. It makes me grumpy.
What I’m listening to right now.

Cold, “She Said.”
Lyrics

I’ll be here alone
Bury everything around me
Her destinations unknown
I can’t believe how she drowns me
Well I won’t deny, it’s all the
Little things she said

All alone
Searched the world until she found me
Her destinations unknown
I can’t believe how she drowns me

Well I won’t deny, it’s all the
Little things she said

All this talkin’
Where’s it goin’
Take the needle
Rewind the show

[daily log: walking, 6 km]

Caveat: the socio-psychology of a collective delusion (AKA Santa)

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Why teach kids to believe in Santa? Will Wilkinson explains his opinion (at the Sullyblog):

Now, one of the most interesting truths about the empirical world is that there are all these powerful systems of myth that are kept afloat by a sort of mass conspiracy, and humans seem disposed to pick one from the ambient culture and take it very seriously. But it can be hard to get your head around the way it all works unless you participate in it. Santa is a perfect and relatively harmless way to introduce your child the socio-psychology of a collective delusion about the supernatural. The disillusionment that comes from the exposure to the truth about Santa breeds a general skepticism about similarly ill-founded popular beliefs in physics-defying creatures.

I don't ever remember believing in Santa. I vividly remember even at age 5 or 6, as I opened up the present under the tree labeled "from Santa" thinking to myself, "this is just a sort of story people tell because it's a fun idea." If I went through the disillusionment, I was too young to remember, but I suspect, based on my parents parenting style, that they never tried to deceive me, but instead explained it in a very adult-like and objective manner even though I was only 4 or 5. I think that perhaps in the long run, Mr Wilkinson is wrong: an even better way to teach kids about skepticism is to simply model it, honestly and forthrightly.

[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: The Post That Wasn’t

Banalities & Journaling

I had this idea I was going to create an in-depth post today about some reading I've been doing on the topic of "English Education in Korea." I have been reading the article, and looking some stuff up online, but I'm not ready to post anything. And I have no alternative post prepared and it's gotten late.

I'm not doing very well – I just can't seem to get past the flu-like thing that swallowed me up over a month ago. I had a week or so when I was feeling past it, but it reasserted itself fiercely this past week (and overworking didn't help, I'm sure). So I basically spent this weekend pretending I was in a hospital. Lying around. 

[daily log: coughing, 5]

Caveat: Money

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Quotable

"If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to." – Dorothy Parker.

Last night there was a kind of freezing-rain/snow/ice storm, and there was a thin coating of ice on all the sidewalks. It made my normally routine walk to and from work a bit hazardous, but I managed it without falling down. 

[daily log: walking, 5.5 km on thin ice]

Caveat: Still Teaching

Banalities & Journaling / The Wonders of Work

I had a kind of terrible day. Probably, just being so tired from yesterday, I wasn’t at my peak. I had some issues with feeling adequate to managing my classrooms, and not fulfilling one function I think is important in the role of teacher-as-moderator: preventing kids from being unkind to each other.
Anyway, prior to those bad classes, I had a kind of good moment: a former student from 2008 stopped by. That was a time when I was working for Curt, and with Grace, at LinguaForum, in a location about a block away from where I work now. Juyeong was in 6th grade then. Now he’s starting university at Yonsei (which is, arguably, “Korea’s Harvard”). So I felt proud to see him.
Here’s a “reunion” picture from today, with Grace, Curt, Juyeong and me.
picture
Here’s a picture reposted from my blog from 2008 in which Juyeong plays the role of befuddled 6th grader, on the right, while I go psycho with a plastc alligator.
picture
picture[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: Mean Teacher

Banalities & Journaling / The Wonders of Work

13 hour day: Open house for parents, lunch with coworkers, a dozen speech corrections, six classes. The lunch is probalby the hardest part – I have to sit and try to figure out what the topics of conversation are, and I always feel exhausted after such intensive Korean listening undertakings, which are hardly successful most of the time. The classes were hard, too. When so many students don't do their homework, I have to be a "mean teacher" which is always more tiring than being a "nice teacher." 

Anyway. Good night.

[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: Flight into a reality

Banalities & Journaling / Kids / Not My Poetry / The Wonders of Work

We listened to a fairly long passage about the history of air transport, focusing on the role of Pan Am in the pre-WWII era. My middle school student Brian wrote a summary that begins:

The sky was limited. Pan Am is the first flight bring the passengers into a reality.

As a summary of the passage, it's utter nonsense and incoherent. As poetry, I admit I rather like it. 

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: Birria

Banalities & Journaling / Food & Drink

Sometimes I get weird food cravings. I have moved in the direction of ignoring them, because every time I go to satisfy one of those food cravings, I’m deeply disappointed. My food memory is intact, but my actual taste and “mouth-feel” mechanisms are essentially permanently rearranged since my surgery.
picture
Today, for whatever strange reason, I found myself remembering and craving the birria that I used to buy as a lunchtime snack at one of the puestos on San Cosme (in front of the subway station) where I lived in Mexico City. I suppose that birria (a kind of goat-meat soup or stew – which it is depends on consistency, and the kind I got was always more brothy than stewy) would be hard to come by in Korea in any event. So it’s just as well that I mostly let these cravings just pass by. But it’s a fond memory in any event.
Here’s to birria – the picture is a random picture found online that matches what I used to get pretty closely.
It’s strange…  the random stuff that pops into one’s mind.
picture
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: can’t lose

Banalities & Journaling / Quotable

A minimalist Sunday. I had a relapse of my flu.

"Success is a lousy teacher," Bill Gates once said. "It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."

[daily log: walking, 1 km]

Caveat: There will be words and fault lines to fill the hours of the days

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

Walking to work in the falling snow, I saw a sign that announced that Goyangites (is that what people who live in Goyang can be called?) should clean the snow. I was struck by the fact that I just kind of “read” the sign without really working at sorting it out, just overlooking the words I didn’t know. That felt like a kind of banal linguistic milestone. This picture utterly fails to show the sign – I thought it would when I took it, but I was wrong. It shows the snow, though.
picture
What I’m listening to right now.

Son Volt, “Dust of Daylight.”
Lyrics.

Hand in hand there are angels that are holding warning signs
Show you the way like teachers and prophets of doom
Everyone has their idols, there will always be a story to tell
The search goes on, a balance in the final say

When you’re lost in folly, out of luck in the worst way
Love is a fog and you stumble every step you make
The dust of daylight holds you down and makes you wait
Love is a fog and you stumble every step you make

There will be words and fault lines to fill the hours of the days
There are ways to buy trouble but a bail bondsman finds friends in jail
Time to leave now, time to pack up all that you’re leaving
Your contest’s here but you’ll be judged just the same

When you’re lost in folly, out of luck in the worst way
Love is a fog and you stumble every step you make
The dust of daylight holds you down and makes you wait
Love is a fog and you stumble every step you make
Love is a fog and you stumble every step you make

picture[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: Just Another Day

Banalities & Journaling / The Wonders of Work

After about a week of "special classes," which provide a kind of transition for middle-schoolers between the 내신 (exam prep time) and the post-exam regular schedule, I had my first full-schedule of regular classes today. I don't really like doing the special classes – mostly because the middle schoolers are all so depressed-seeming and desultory in the immediate aftermath of their exams, but also because the odd schedules mean that I get mixed bunches of motivated and unmotivated students who don't know each other well because they're not in their regular cohorts. It's often challenging to put together a successful one-up lesson plan. 

Anyway, today I got my regular middle-school classes. So that was good, I guess. But very tiring. I always feel compelled to be a little bit "scary / hard" with returnees, so they don't start off on the wrong the footing.

Meanwhile, though, with my elementary honors class we had fun. We were getting ready to do a debate, and the kids said they wanted to be different "characters." Once, when I was doing one of my schticks where I have the whole debate myself (meaning I argue back and forth with myself, taking both sides), I made it more interesting by giving each person in the debate I was playing different personalities or "characters": so there was a lazy debater, crazy debater, stupid debater, annoying debater, etc. They wanted to play characters. I let them. I'm not sure it was a very good debate, but they sure had fun. I like seeing the kids being creative that way. Sally did an excellent job being shy, Fay was so good a being a confused debater that I thought she was really confused and wanted to correct her – I said, "you're arguing the wrong side," she said, "I know. I'm confused," and gave her winning grin, shrugging. It was a good class.

[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: Inventing Modernity. Or Not.

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

pictureI finally actually finished a book. I read Arthur Herman’s popularizing history about the Scots, entitled, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It.
Scottish history is a topic I haven’t actually read that much about – although I felt comfortable in my understanding of the broad outline of English History (and therefore British history post-Union), I never really spent any time studying Scotland, specifically – unlike Wales or Ireland. So I picked up the book in hopes of filling some of that in. In its purely historical aspect, I got a lot out of the book, including a much better understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment and some of the historical events surrounding it (Knox, the Covenanters and the Scottish Reformation; Bonnie Prince Charlie; etc.).
In fact, my main complaint about this book is probably the same as one of the other recent history titles I made a brief review of some time back, which is: good book, bad title. The title’s thesis (i.e. the idea that Scots invented modernity) seems unproven (and unprovable). It occured to me in looking up the text online just now that the title might not even have been the author’s chosen title, but rather the work of some hyperbolizing editor.
In any event, if the title had been something more modest to the effect of the Scottish Enlightenment’s impact on modernity (Hume, Smith, et al.), and their disproportionate contribution to the Anglosphere’s modern global cultural dominance, I’d have been less preoccupied with trying to decide if Herman did an adequate job proving his main thesis. As it was, I kept hoping the next chapter would explain exactly how it was they invented modernity. I’d say inventing modernity was a collective endeavor, in which the Scots definitely played a suprisingly outsized role.
picture[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

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