I was happy with some kids in my lowest-level Betelgeuse-반 yesterday.
They put on a very nice performance of an adaptation of the old "Gingerbread Man" fairy tale, using stick-puppets.
Here is the video.
I like the little songs, and I was daydreaming about making some kind of postmodern adaptation of the story. I think it would be good as a kind of background theme for an AI-goes-amuck type story.
[daily log: walking, 6.5 km]
In a follow up to yesterday's post… in my Tuesday Honors class yesterday evening, we did eulogies for Kevin the Alligator. I think they did fine.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
A truly sad day: my large green plastic alligator died yesterday. He fell on the floor and broke his fat, plastic head.
He has been with me for 6 years, having been given to me in 2009 by my friend Tammy’s daughter in Moorhead, Minnesota. He has worked hard in my many classes, and has appeared in many blog entries.
His head is severely damaged, and he can no longer bite children. Perhaps this is for the best. On a spontaneous whim, I had one of my writing classes write letters of condolence. They were quite touching:
Dear silly Alligator, how are you feeling. I’m so happy to heard you got hurt. You are so ugly, but now you are uglier. Your ayes are very big, but your face is very big. Your face not match. I hope you do cosmetic sugary [surgery]. I know you don’t have girlfriend. You have to handsome andy ou have to diet, your weigh is 68kg. Your age is 12, but you are so fat. You have to eat vegetables. Don’t be sad by my advice. It is very important for yourself. I think I’m so kindness friend. From Rena.
Here is a picture – you can see the large crack in his head. The hinge is also broken inside. He is unrepairable.
In another class, we had a moment of silence – this was the students’ suggestion, not mine.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
My coworker taught me this aphorism. So, for a change, it was actually contextual when I learned it, instead of it being simply something I ran across in one of my books or online. That was cool.
밑빠진 독에 물 붓는다
mit.ppa.jin dok.e mul but.neun.da
bottom-lack-PP jar-IN water pour-PRES
[…like] pouring water into a jar with no bottom.
Maybe this means something like "bailing water from a leaky boat" or even "in one ear, out the other." My coworker used it in the context of describing a frustrating student who never seemed to actually acquire any knowledge from her constant efforts to teach him. It made me laugh when I figured it out.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
I haven't even touched my [broken link! FIXME] IIRTHW ("if I ran the hagwon") effort in more than a year. I kind of gave up on it as excessively idealistic and not relevant to my goals. But of course, the nature of my job means that I nevertheless think about it frequently.
Yesterday I was having a conversation with my boss about his constant casting-about for new, more effective approaches to curriculum.
It's odd, because I feel like we've reversed roles, somewhat, in comparison to when we first met, years ago. Back then, I thought, and argued frequently, that curriculum design was important, while he said, much to my consternation, that a "good teacher" ought to be able to work with whatever curriculum was on hand.
I resented this at the time, and took it to mean that my frustrations with curriculum were symptomatic of my not being a good enough teacher.
Yet over the last several years, I've evolved to a point where I more or less agree with the sentiment. Much to my dismay, yesterday, Curt seemed to essentially disagree when I said something to this effect. I had said that we should focus on improving our teachers, rather than on improving our curriculum. And his reaction was that he didn't see teachers as being the problem. It wasn't a direct rejection of the earlier philosophy, but it certainly felt like an about face to me.
The context in which I suggested focusing on teachers instead of curriculum was actually a sort of brainstorm I had, during our conversation, about curriculum. Curt is looking at alternatives to the fairly fossilized "Reading-Listening-Speaking-Writing-Grammar-Vocab" subdivision of material that prevails in hagwon. I first went with my prefered notion, what he called "Immersion" but that I think of as "subject-driven" – teaching "subjects" in English, integrating the various functional components.
When Curt rejected that, for the same reason he always does – the dearth of native-speaking teacher to serve as a focus for that style of teaching (a rejection that strikes me as utterly rational if not completely necessary), I decided to suggest another alternative arrangement that I've been mulling over lately, mostly out of frustration with the seemingly excessive complexity of our modest hagwon's schedule.
This alternative would essentially say we only have 3 types of classes, which is really my observation that we have three basic types of teachers in our hagwon:
1) integrated class – this is the native speakers (like myself or Razel or Grace), who focus on "subjects" or "topics" in the immersion style mentioned above
2) analytic class – this is the grammar-translation style that is most traditional in Korean English education, rejected by pedagogy but a reality "on the ground" and we have teachers who teach this way and we might as well support them – some are quite good in many respects
3) foundations class – this is the "daily word test", the memorization words and also the naesin (school term tests) style memorization of speeches, essays and other fragments; this also includes the attendance-keeping and counseling aspects of the "homeroom" teacher job. I hate this memorizaiton stuff, not because I don't think it's helpful – I actually strongly believe that it is helpful – but when overly emphasized, it makes English painful, and that discourages students, and destroys motivation.
Anyway, I laid these ideas out to Curt. He basically said, "that sounds like it's teacher centered." I said, well, but that's OK. If we focus on our teachers' strengths, and develop them, that will benefit the students, in the long run, as our consistency and quality will increase." He asked about how we would decide the curriculum for these new divisions of labor, and I said what he'd once said to me, that it didn't really matter – the focus was improved teaching and good teachers would inevitably choose or develop appropriately good curriculum. He was somewhat scandalized by this notion.
Hence my feeling that the tables had been turned.
I haven't developed a specific thought about this at this point, mostly just recording here for future reference.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
We were working on a listening passage in my TOEFL2 cohort, last Saturday. Here is the last part of the listening, which is kind of a sophomoric imitation of a literature class lecture, I guess. That's the way the TOEFL goes, especially in the dumbed-down "prep" modes.
… One of the earliest genres of literature was tragedy. There are a lot of different defining qualities of a tragedy, but in general there's a heroic character with a tragic flaw, something in the character's personality that makes him or her meet with bad fortune – like Medea. Medea is a play by Euripedes, where the main character, Medea, meets with bad fortune because of her jealousy. Her tragic flaw was her jealousy.
Comedy is another genre. Comedy, these days, usually means something realy funny, but comedies earlier in history were more lighthearted than funny. Generally, strange events happen because of some sort of misunderstanding. Perhaps the most famous comedies come from Shakespeare, whom I'm sure you all know. Shakespeare's comedies usually involve people in love who are tricked or confused through some clever ruse. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a good example. People in that play fall asleep in a forest, where a magical flower makes them fall in love with anyone they see.
At this point, Sihyeon became agitated and interrupted, "No! That's a tragedy!"
"Why?" I asked, laughing already.
"Because right now Seokho is who I see."
Seokho wasn't offended by this. He seemed to feel similarly.
[daily log: walking, 6.5 km]
We are in class, it's about 7 pm.
A student says, "Teacher. Are we going to cancel class?"
"Why would we cancel class?" I ask. I took it for typical teenage "joking."
"Because 북한 [bukhan = North Korea] just shoot missile at Yeoncheon."
Yeoncheon is the county just north of Paju, whose border, in turn, is just a few blocks from our current location. I may even have had students who commute from Yeoncheon, a few times.
"Really?" I ask. I think the students must be inventing something. But Yeongjin shows me the news on his smartphone. It's true. Later, I will read about the details in English, where they are easier to understand.
Anyway, it's believable enough, on a Korean news site. "When did this happen?" I asked.
"About 4 o'clock," one student said.
"Wow," I said. "What should we do?" I guess I meant this collectively, and not necessarily with respect to the current class setting. The students took it more immediately.
"Cancel homework," several said in unison, as if it were the perfectly logical and obvious response to a North Korean attack.
I made a retort: "I think, if North Koreans are attacking, we should study English even more."
"Why?" one boy asked.
"Because you will need English when you have to leave the country." This was excessively grim, and largely facetious. The students didn't really get what I was meaning. I decided it was too dark to explain.
Keep calm and study English.
[daily log: walking, 6.5 km]
Last week we had a rather competitive debate in my HS cohort (HS means "pre-HS", not High School – they are 9th graders, and are in their last year of middle school in the Korean system). I divided them into teams randomly, but neither team was really working well. Instead, each team seemed to be working to sabotage the other members of their own team.
I had place an incentive of reduced homework for the winning team. I couldn't understand why the teams were self-sabotaging. I asked, and even explained the word "sabotage" to them in some detail.
The dynamic in the class is complicated by the fact that the class is divided about evenly between some very diligent, hard-working students who always do their homework, and some more slackish students who often don't. One student said explicitly, that he didn't mind if his team lost, because even if he got homework, it was unlikely he would do it. I commented that that seemed like a realistic but regrettable perspective.
But then I asked, well, why bother anyway, then?
And Jinu said, in much better English than he normally uses in his speeches, "My only aim is for Jihun to do homework."
Jihun is one of the diligent ones. He is so diligent, that he is often the best prepared. As such, he has sometimes won one of my homework exemptions in the past. I guess this had caused resentment on the part of his peers, so they were sacrificing their own chance of avoiding homework simply to see him "go down."
Indeed, Jihun's team lost, and so they got stuck with homework.
The unsurprising thing is, this week – the following week – we met again, and Jihun had done his homework. Indeed, since the other team had won the exemption, and since his own team were mostly slackers, he was the only one who had done homework. He gave his speech, self-satisfiedly. The other students seemed to regret their previous strategy, since my grade sheet filled up with a plethora of zeros, and, of course, as the only one who had done his homework, Jihun won yet another exemption.
I'm not sure if this exemption policy really works the way I want it to. I'm rethinking things, and have temporarily suspended the policy.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
Yesterday, Chris, a child of very little English, ran up to me and breathlessly said, "Teacher, go home." Unfortunately, it was not time for me to go home.
My colleague Grace overheard this and said, "Why is he telling you to go home?"
I said that I wasn't sure. My suspicion is that he was simply so excited to have mastered the (admittedly quite simple) grammar of the expression, he had to try it out.
I was so proud of this idiomatic usage that I decided to disregard the failed pragmatics.
[daily log: walking, 1 km]
I have my "alligator bucks" – play money that I give to my students as rewards for classroom points or for homework, etc.
In most of my classes, I give the students the bucks and they each have their little pouches or pencil cases where they store their money. Some put their dollars inside their smartphone cases, which is also a common place where they "hide" real cash, too.
I have many classes where the students have pooled their cash for specific events (like I will offer to sell a games-playing class event or "pizza party" for some amount) but the kids are always quite meticulous in their accounting for who has contributed what amount to the pool, and the "banker" role is always strictly temporary.
Then there is my Arcturus cohort. These kids set up a "banker," perhaps originally with the same of idea of pooling resources. But the student in charge, who goes by Gina, is a bit of a forceful personality. That's being polite – really, she's a bit of a bully, to be frank, and it's often an effort to keep her domineering ways in check. Anyway, she, of course, appointed herself banker. And now, no matter what, she collects all the cash earned by any student the class.
She keeps meticulous count of how much she has, how much is owed each day, but none of the students, nor her, have any accounting of who has what proportion of the total cash at this point. Thus she is more of a government agency or a feudal lord than a "bank."
I'm not totally happy with this situation at the moment, because a few times I've gotten hints (only hints, no kid will openly admit it) that not all the students want to be a part of this forced communitarian approach to holding alligator dollars. Gina currently holds more than 300 alligator bucks on behalf of her fellow students, and I think I'm going to have to come up with an exorbitantly-priced event of some kind, liquidate the bank, and then cancel the dollar system for a while.
But meanwhile, I see a sort of unintended social experiment unfolding, among 2nd and 3rd graders. I call it the People's Republic of Arcturus.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
Last week I was teaching a writing class to a supposedly intermediate-level group of elementary students, my Newton3반. We did a short reading, and there were some simple comprehension questions afterward. I view these kind of exercises as a warm-up for the process of writing one's own paragraph.
The paragraph in the book we read was on the basic theme of a girl who moved to a new neighborhood a few years ago and why she liked it better than her old neighborhood. I didn't think it was too difficult.
The first comprehension question was:
How long has Cynthia lived in her neighborhood?
I asked the first student.
"3 minutes!" she announced, confidently.
"Um," I said.
I asked the next student the same question.
"Lunchtime," she proposed, tentatively, trying to read my face as to whether I thought it was right or wrong. I deadpanned. I looked around the room.
The first girl attempted a correction of her answer. "2 blocks," she offered. At this, I started to laugh.
A boy's hand shot into the air. So I asked him the same question, yet again, and he said, "Yes." He nodded sagely.
I summarized: "So the question is: How long has Cynthia lived in her neighborhood? We have four choices:
a) 3 minutes
b) Lunchtime
c) 2 blocks
d) Yes
The kids just sat there, looking befuddled. Not a one of them made any additional effort to answer the question. Finally, I announced what seemed the correct answer: "She has lived in the neighborhood for 3 years."
I never did figure out if this was genuine cluelessness or if there was an element of "messing with the teacher."
[daily log: walking, 2 km]
My students did a roleplay called "The Wedding Mice," which seems to be an adaptation of a traditional story of some kind of Asian provenence (maybe Japanese? I can't figure it out). Some of the songs are traditional Western "kid songs," however – "Hokey Pokey," "If You're Happy and You Know It." It's a typical cultural mish-mash.
I think they actually sing pretty well – the video (cross-posted from my work blog) shows them singing along to melody only – there's no "assist" from recorded voices here.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
The monsoon has finally come. The last week has been pretty continuously rainy and grey.
I like this kind of weather. I can feel my mood improving, as contrasted to how I feel when it is hot and sunny, which always just feels oppressive to me.
I'm working hard. My TEPS-M cohort middleschoolers, who normally annoy me greatly, made me laugh yesterday. Somehow we got on the topic of politics. They said we should have a debate about politics. I am actually a bit wary of having debates about politics – the kids are either apathetic or bear the same irreconcilable "culture-war" views as their parents no doubt have, i.e. the evangelicals are Saenuri-dang (Korean Republican analogues) and the rest are Minju-dang (Korean Democrat analogues). Mostly I prefer to focus the debates on specific policies or lifestyle choices.
Somehow they seemed intrigued when I said that a few years back I'd actually had a Korean "presidential debate" in one of my classes. They asked what other topics I'd done. Out of the blue, one student burst out, "Hey kids! Let's have a debate about Park Chung-hee!"
It was in a voice meant to imitate mine.
"Hey kids" is an imitation of the way I speak to them, when I first walk into a classroom. It's a kind of fakey-jokey, super upbeat tone-of-voice phrase that is meant in a vaguely ironic way, that has become part of my classroom "brand," I suppose. Most of my students seem to find it entertaining as it contrasts with my normal tone, and it's quite predictable.
The humor was in combining that cheery introduction with an immediate segue into what could conceivably be a very controversial debate topic – but of the sort of complex, elevated topic material for which I'm probably also known (and dreaded): Korea's notorious dictator, Park Chung-hee.
Anyway, it made me laugh. I hear only silence. Maybe you had to be there?
[daily log: walking in the rain, 6 km]
I have been somewhat neglecting my efforts at meditation practice, probably to the detriment of my mental health. I still tell people I'm "Buddhist" in Korea when they ask me about religion (which is more common than you would think) – mostly because telling them this precludes the standard opening to Christian evangelism that annoys me so much – but in fact it's a bit of a front.
I underscored this recently for myself, with a joke with a student. In my TOEFL2 class, there was a big ugly scary bug working its way across the floor. I didn't really want to kill it, but the students were jumping around and being distracted by it: there seems a certain bug-phobia embedded in Korea's younger generations. So, hesitating only briefly, I walked over and stomped on it, on my way out of the classroom. I turned and said, "I guess I'm not a very good Buddhist, am I?"
This was what you might call a throwaway line – one of those jokes that I make that I don't really expect my students to understand but which I make because when I'm with my students, I make an effort to talk "as much as possible" on the principle of "contextualized input" – it's an actual strategy that's part of how I approach my role as a native-speaking teacher where there are very few native-speaking teachers.
I was actually quite surprised when one of my students, the quite intelligent Sihyeon, burst out laughing at this joke. On the part of the student, it takes both some actual cultural knowledge and some effort to "pay attention" to previous discussion topics for him to have gotten it.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
I had a really horrible day yesterday. Some of my students rebelled, because they felt my homework expectations were too hard and unjust. Yet I think I’m easier than the other teachers – but they see me as low priority (it is sometimes clear that this perception is possibly encouraged by the other teachers, too). Anyway, it didn’t really go well. But it passed.
This morning, I had a better set of classes.
One student sent me his essay with the subject header, “阿異 亥理te 李ding”.
Sometimes (frequently) I get subject headers from students that are pure nonsense, and normally I could have read this as an example of that. But I’m certain that in this case it was a kind of multilingual rebus – because I happened to have briefly discussed the principle of rebus with this student not that long ago.
If you read the Chinese characters (hanja) with their Korean pronunciations, you get “아이 해리(이)te 리ding.” If you transliterate the Korean spelling, you get “a-i hae-i-te ri-ding”, which, phonetically, is clearly “I hate reading.” This is a sentiment frenquently expressed by the student in question.
Have a nice weekend. I want to rest.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
Yesterday, my student Yeongu kept pulling out his smartphone and doing something on it. I know some teachers take the phones away from students, but I have never been a fan of that style. I prefer to try to motivate in the direction of moderating their own impulsive behavior.
I commented to him, "I think you're addicted. What are you doing? Chatting?"
He just smiled and put the phone away, but minutes later it was out again. This went on for a while, and twice more I said, "can you please not pull out your phone like that during class, unless you're using the dictionary" – I allow students to use the dictionaries on their smartphones given my own poor ability to provide clear definitions for difficult vocabulary sometimes, given we are often trying to prepare debates about complex topics. Ironically, today's topic was "self-esteem" and "self-control."
I asked him again what he was doing.
Finally he relented and said, "Teacher, this is important."
"Why, what's important?" I asked.
"I'm buying a new bike," he said – he held up his phone showing the screen of a popular Korean online shopping site (like amazon), with an image of a bike.
Oddly, suddenly, I didn't feel upset at all.
"That's cool," I marvelled, quite sincerely. I guess it hit me, in that moment, that that was a very "futuristic" thing, this idea that a student could be sitting in class and shopping at the same time. "I never could shop while sitting in some boring class, when I was young. You're very lucky."
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
Today started OK. I had a conversation on the phone with my mother that was fairly upbeat, and then I went to the hospital for my scheduled scan.
The hospital was "locked down" because of the MERS panic. There were workers scanning people who wanted in, and asking questions and filling out surveys. It was frustrating because I got held back while they found someone who could ask me questions in English, after I failed to understand a question put to me in Korean.
Once in, I tried to check in for my appointment early (which I always do – I always go early because it makes the appointments go faster, in my experience), and they wouldn't let me. So I had to wait.
The scan was OK, though I had two more frustrating moments with my Korean.
What's wrong with me, anyway, that I still can't speak this language? I felt like a failure.
I went to work, and got there just in time to teach my 6 classes straight on my new Monday schedule.
I got to hear about parents having complained that my classes were too difficult last week. I argued with my boss Helen about whether memorizing words with their translations is really a solution to kids not understanding material in one of my classes. My position is that, well, not really. Then again, given my own lack of success in learning Korean, who am I to talk? I felt gloomy about that.
I wasn't well-prepared because I didn't come early to prepare my classes, having been at the hospital instead.
I left work depressed. Very depressed – with a generally bad feeling about where I'm at and what I'm doing (and/or failing to do).
Tomorrow, I go back to find out my diagnosis (if any). Just at the moment, I feel like my luck's given out, but we shall see.
[daily log: walking, 7.5 km]
I have an oft-mentioned student (or gadfly) named Sophia.
Today she came early, and since she hadn't done her homework, I sat her a computer to compose her essay/speech for me. She is very hyper and unfocused, but over the course of about 40 minutes she managed to produce an essay that vaguely resembled the desired output. I was looking periodically over her shoulder, and she was actually writing the thing.
Then, when I wasn't looking, she turned and said, "I finished."
I looked at the screen, and it was blank. "Where's you're essay?" I asked.
"I didn't save," she shrugged, grinning at me almost proudly.
"What? Really?" I was a little bit surprised – not that she'd lost her essay, but that she seemed to have done it deliberately. So I asked, "Why did you do that?"
"Cause I'm NO HOMEWORK GIRL," she shouted, triumphantly and defiantly. She jumped up and ran out of the room.
A heroine for our age.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
The other day, we were starting book three in the Smart Phonics series in my Alpha1 cohort (elementary 1st and 2nd graders). This is where the kids first meet the obscure and confusing "silent e."
This always makes me think back to PBS's Electric Company show, circa 1970s.
What I'm listening to right now.
Tom Lehrer, "Silent E."
I think I will try to show this to my students.
Lyrics.
Who can turn a can into a cane?
Who can turn a pan into a pane?
It's not too hard to see
It's silent e
Who can turn a cub into a cube?
Who can turn a tub into a tube?
It's elementary
For silent e
He took a pin and turned it into pine
He took a twin and turned him into twine
Who can turn a cap into a cape?
Who can turn a tap into a tape?
A little glob becomes a globe instantly
If you just add silent e
He turned a dam – alikazam! – into a dame
But my friend sam stayed just the same
Who can turn a man into a mane?
Who can turn a van into a vane?
A little hug becomes huge instantly
Don't add w, don't add x, and don't add y or z,
Just add silent e
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
This is crossposted from my work blog.
We did a "humorous" debate on a topic the students selected from a list of suggestions.
Proposition: "This debate is boring."
The debate was special because my relatives were visiting, and my niece Sarah and nephew James participated. It was a rare chance for American students to participate in Korean hagwon life. And although they'd never done this type of debate style before, they held their own as native speakers, with excellently reasoned if somewhat short speeches.
Here are the speeches.
Homework: none.
I'll post additional pictures of James and Sarah's visit to the hagwon later.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
Tristesse d'Été
Sonnet
Le soleil, sur le sable, ô lutteuse endormie,
En l'or de tes cheveux chauffe un bain langoureux,
Et consumant l'encens sur ta joue ennemie,
Il mêle avec les pleurs un breuvage amoureux.
De ce blanc flamboiement l'immuable accalmie
T'a fait dire, attristée, ô mes baisers peureux,
"Nous ne serons jamais une seule momie
Sous l'antique désert et les palmiers heureux !"
Mais ta chevelure est une rivière tiède,
Où noyer sans frissons l'âme qui nous obsède
Et trouver ce Néant que tu ne connais pas !
Je goûterai le fard pleuré par tes paupières,
Pour voir s'il sait donner au cœur que tu frappas
L'insensibilité de l'azur et des pierres.
– Stéphane Mallarmé (French poet, 1842-1898)
It has felt very summery lately.
I was going to post about Wendy and Sarah's visit to Karma yesterday, but I'll save that post for another time as I didn't set aside time this morning to write about it. I will only say I slept in a bit more than usual this morning and had a really bad dream about losing several students (really losing them, as in unable to find them), and everyone laughing at me for my inability to find my students. I think that symbolically reflects stress over the quality of my teaching.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
OK, I don't even particularly like that TV show, "Breaking Bad."
This parody, however, is pure genius. Maybe it's just that I do happen to like Spongebob. I'm weird, right?
I had a another really difficult day yesterday. The capper: I broke my video camera – which, if you watch my work blog, you know I use a great deal in my classroom, on a daily basis. I have to buy a new camera. I guess maybe this weekend.
I will go into Seoul today, to meet my stepmother who happens to be in Korea currently – she's been staying at Yongsan.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
My teaching schedule is slowing down some, now that the middle-schoolers have started test-prep, but I’m still filling in for Grace, and working hard getting caught up on all the work and projects I let fall by the wayside during my busiest time the last few weeks.
I’ve been pretty grumpy at work – I’m not very good at letting go of things that piss me off, in this case the issue of parents complaining about my more laid-back teaching style. I feel this need to “prove” myself – to do extra work to prove that I am, in fact, teaching something despite the more laid-back style. Hence all the work I’m doing in posting videos of my speaking tasks and tests on my work blog, all the work in showing that the kids are actually doing English-learning stuff in my classes.
Meanwhile, alligator meets mouse, drawn the other day.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
Yes indeedy I am quite tired now. I feel a bit grumpy due to unfinished work I might do this weekend against my standard operating philosophy of "never take work home."
Continuing the platypus theme started a few days ago ([broken link! FIXME] here), I was talking on the phone with my mother and sister this morning (sister visiting mother in Australia). My sister said she saw many invisible platypuses.
Those are the most frequent kind, I explained.
I will do nothing now. Enjoying my memorial day.
[daily log: walking, here and there]
This week has been pretty difficult – I have been working a "double schedule" because my coworker Grace had to go home to Canada for two weeks.
Today, Friday, will be the most brutal schedule of all. I actually have more "teaching hours" on my schedule than there are hours on the schedule. This is possible because several times we have cleverly "overlapped" the mis-matched elementary and middle-school schedules, such that I will leave a given elementary class slightly early, or show up slightly late to a given middle school class, and thus I'm actually "officially" in more than one class at the same time, several times.
I will not get any breaks.
I will be tired.
I don't have to work tomorrow, for Korean Memorial Day holiday.
See you later.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
My student sent me this message as the subject line when emailing an essay last week.
용화꼰데 녜이보 쥬도 몰라소 미효니꼴로 보냬욤
This is profoundly badly-spelled Korean. It is so bad, that it’s systematically bad. It took me about 25 minutes of work to figure out what she meant. Thus I theorize that it represents a kind of Korean version of “eye dialect“.
One thing I realized is that it systematically moves vowels around. Where standard Korean spells “어” she spells “오”
Thus 네이버 -> 녜이보 and the verb ending -서 -> -소
This change applies to her name and her friends’ name too:
영화 -> 용화 and 미현-> 미효니
Note in the latter she also doesn’t obey the morphophonological rules for dividing stem from suffix, but sticks to a strictly phonological division.
I don’t quite know what the -꼬- suffix is about, semantically. Something “cute” I suspect.
There is also a certain degree of systematic palatalization:
네 -> 녜 and 내->냬 … I never pronounce these distinctions quite right anyway, they are quite fine, but Korean ears perceive differences in palatalization to a degree I can’t even hear with my English-trained ears.
My ultimate question is why did she do it? In a paranoid moment, I could just imagine it’s a kind of mocking of a “foreign accent” – several of the transformations, like the vowels and the palatalization, represent issues I have with my Korean pronunciation. But in fact I very much doubt it. Basically I think it must be a kind of “eye-spelling,” I’m almost certain, which emphasizes certain trends in Korean as spoken by teenagers – I have definitely heard 어->오 in slangy talk, especially girls. Kind of like the very common addition of the ending -ㅇ/ŋ/ to open syllables in clause final position, of which this text doesn’t have an example – but I frequently hear e.g. “안녕하세용” for “안녕하세요,” even by teachers.
That being the case, however, it’s puzzling that she would select me as a target for this strange spelling – the message was meaningful and specific to communicating the content of her email to me – it relied on me understanding it’s meaning, because what it says is: “Yeonghwa forgot her login password so Mihyeon is sending you her essay.” Thus the only way Yeonghwa gets credit for the attached essay is if I understand the subject line – otherwise Mihyeon gets credit for the essay, as except for the “sent by” field, it’s the only place any names occur.
Did she just “forget” that I wasn’t a native speaker? That’s probable. Or did she do it intentionally as a way to challenge me or be deliberately opaque? That’s possible too. Did she think I’d spend half an hour figuring it out, and then write a linguistic analysis about it on my blog? I doubt it. I tend to write about these things because there is very little on the internet, in English, about non-standard Korean – it’s extremely hard to find.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
Sometimes I find myself saying something where I suddenly feel aware that maybe this is the first time anyone ever needed to say that specific thing. I think of these as some kind of syntactical hapaxes (hapaces?). This awareness harkens back to the linguistic commonplace (due to Chomsky, maybe?) that one of the most remarkable features of human language and syntax is that they allow the creation of utterly novel meanings, on demand.
So yesterday, at work, I looked at the color printer on the desk in the staff room, and I observed: “There is a lego snake in the yellow printer ink.” How likely is it that someone needed to say this before?
You see, lego (the toy) includes a “lego snake” – it comes with some sets that include the lego crocodile (which I prefer to call a legogator). It is small – a single piece, intended for the same scale as the lego minifigures – about 2 cm long and 2 mm thick.
On my desk, there lives a small legogator with his lego snake – generally in the legogator’s mouth.
Meanwhile, the color printer includes a set of external ink containers that are a kind of universal post-retail hack that Koreans have turned into a business, that avoids the need to buy expensive ink cartriges for one’s ink-jet printers. The external ink reservoirs are openable and can be filled manually from bottles of ink, and small tubes snake (ahem) into pseudo-ink cartriges embedded inside the printer. This system is much cheaper and more practical than buying expensive replacement ink cartriges, though clearly not in the best financial interests of the printer-manufacturers, who have always been pretty honest about the fact that they make most of their money on selling refill cartriges rather than the printers themselves. But I have never seen an ink-jet printer in Korea that did NOT include this type of aftermarket add-on.
That’s a technical digression, for those interested. What I saw yesterday was my lego snake floating in the yellow color printer ink reservoir.
I took a picture after making my utterance, because I immediately felt the need to record this syntactical hapax for posterity.
You can see the lego snake clearly, enjoying a swim in yellow ink.
I notified our technical/maintenance guy, Mr Park, and he popped open the ink reservoir (I was afraid to mess with it myself, not knowing the details of the device’s operation). I then used a pair of scissors to fish out Mr Snake, who was now altered from red plastic to a more orangish hue, understandably.
I suspected a young 4th grader named Chaejun of the crime. He spends a lot of time in the staff room, because his mom works at the hagwon. And he’s a little bit mischievous. Mr Park agreed when I suggested that Chaejun was the culprit.
So I asked Chaejun, later, when I saw him. “Did you put a lego snake in the printer ink?”
His English really isn’t that good, but he understood what I was referring to immediately, which was already immediate confirmation that he was the guilty party – what non-native speaker would know what that was about, if they hadn’t engineered the situation in the first place? For that matter, none of my coworkers could wrap their minds around what I’d discovered, even when I tried to explain it to them later: there were too many unexpected, strung-together nominal modifiers: lego + snake, printer + ink.
Anyway, Chaejun didn’t bother denying it. He simply nodded, grinning proudly.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
I thought I would feel happy when the show was over. Instead I felt angry and depressed.
To the extent I was supposedly the show's manager, I felt the project was badly managed. So that's annoying. "No one to blame but myself," and all that. Perhaps the reason I so often resist being pushed into managerial roles is because I am incapable of deriving any sense of accomplishment – instead I pick apart what I've done and find the mistakes. I'm happiest as a worker drone, obviously, where I can feel a sense of accomplishment in surviving the mismanagement of others.
I might go into a more detailed "post mortem" at some point. Or just move on and forget it. I will post some video of it, when it becomes available.
There were no major disasters or failures – just A LOT of things that could have been done better, and a lot of unnecessary stress around all the small mistakes and failures.
I hope the kids had fun. And I hope the parents weren't too annoyed.
Anyway, I was exhausted last night and have to work today.
What I'm listening to right now.
Zeromancer, "Fractured."
Lyrics.
Can't you see my hands are clean
I'm as holy as can be
I will never do you harm
I am fractured
It can't ever be the same
Can't you see my hands
Are clean
Can't you see
I'm as holy as can be
What kind of life is this?
What kind of life is this?
Can't you see my hands are clean
I'm as holy as can be
I will never do you harm again
I am fractured
It can never be the same
What kind of life is this?
What kind of life is this?
I warned you a thousand times
It's like crying to the clouds
Why are you asking the questions
You already know the answer to?
Can't you see
My hands are clean
What kind of life is this?
What kind of life is this?
What kind of life is this?
What kind of life is this?
A good life
What kind of life is this?
What kind of life is this?
A good life
What kind of life is this?
What kind of life is this?
A good life
Is a quiet life
A good life
Is a quiet life
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
Today is our show day for our annual talent show. Unlike last year, when my coworker Ken was the mastermind behind making it successful, this year (since Ken has left Karma) I’ve had to be more managerial and I’m not very happy with the result. I wasn’t preemptive enough with various issues and concerns – I’m worried about the timing, which is important because of the bus-shuttle schedule for the students. And I didn’t memorize my MC lines well, either. I think my students are better-prepared than I am.
Ah well.
Here is a bucolic, summery picture I took walking to work the other day. A bicycle parked in front of a senior citizens’ center in Hugok, with some flowers climbing behind.
[daily log: walking, 7 km]
The last two days have been truly exhausting and chaotic.
Yesterday, especially – we had rehearsal for our talent show next week. We also had a partial power failure at hagwon. I got to teach classes in the dark. It was like a weird dream.
What I'm listening to right now.
Silvio Rodríguez, "La Gaviota."
Letra.
Corrían los días de fines de guerra,
y había un soldado regresando intacto,
intacto del frío mortal de la tierra,
intacto de flores de horror en su cuarto.
Elevó los ojos, respiró profundo,
la palabra cielo se hizo en su boca,
y como si no hubiera más en el mundo,
por el firmamento pasó una gaviota.
Gaviota, gaviota, vals del equilibrio,
cadencia increíble, llamada en el hombro.
Gaviota, gaviota, blancura del lirio,
aire y bailarina, gaviota de asombro.
A dónde te marchas, canción de la brisa,
tan rápida, tan detenida,
disparo en la sien y metralla en la risa,
gaviota que pasa y se lleva la vida?
Corrían los días de fines de guerra,
pasó una gaviota volando, volando
lento, como un tiempo de amor que se cierra,
imperio de ala, de cielo y de cuándo.
Gaviota, gaviota, vals del equilibrio,
cadencia increíble, llamada en el hombro,
gaviota, gaviota, blancura del lirio,
aire y bailarina, gaviota de asombro.
Corrían los días de fines de guerra,
pasó una gaviota volando
y el que anduvo intacto rodó por la tierra,
huérfano, desnudo, herido, sangrando.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
The other day, I was talking with my often mentioned student, Sophia, about her upcoming role as an assistent MC for our talent show.
We were planning a kind of skit for a moment near the beginning of the show. In this context, I suggested she could interrupt me – which she does often enough.
"…but, I can't be rude on purpose," she protested.
I said, "You don't have to be rude. Just be your natural self."
Without pause, she said, "But my natural self is … quite rude." Then she made a funny face, realizing what she'd just admitted.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
Sihyeon said, "Teacher, do you like sociology?" We were doing a listening question in my TOEFL class, with a lecture on a sociology topic.
"Sure. It's interesting, sometimes," I equivocated.
"I don't like sociology," he stated, categorically. Continuing, quite serious-toned, he added, "I like sausages."
In Korean accent, these two words have essentially the same initial sound. Did he think they were related?
For some reason I laughed a little too long at this. The rest of the class time was not used very effectively.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
I was sitting in the staff room last night, busily completing my class logs and doing some essay editing, and Seyeong and Seunghyeon walked by about 20 minutes before the end of the last class.
The two 9th grade girls popped their heads into the staffroom and said goodbye.
"Why are you leaving early?" I asked, surprised. It's not common for one of the middle-school teachers to release kids early.
The girls laughed and said in strange unison, "We are smart."
They ran off.
I puzzled as to what this meant. At first, I interpreted it to mean that they had somehow cleverly escaped their teacher's clutches. If it had been some other student, this would have been the logical answer. But they are diligent students – this seemed unlikely. Instead, I decided they merely meant they had gotten some exceptionally good score on something, and thus the teacher had allowed them to go early.
[daily log: walking, 7 km]
