Caveat: Three lullabies in an ancient tongue

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Not My Poetry / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Quotable

For parts of tonight's content, I am indebted to various posts at the Sullyblog. But not these first parts. I was reading some excerpts about Emma Goldman on some libertarian sites. Two quotes:

"The individual is the true reality in life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called “society,” or the “nation,” which is only a collection of individuals. Man, the individual, has always been and necessarily is the sole source and motive power of evolution and progress. Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against “society,” that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship." – Emma Goldman

"'What I believe' is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect." – Emma Goldman

Not sure how this connects, but I had an insight about cosmopolitanism. It's really the main thing. Cosmopolitanism is the sense that we are all citizens of the world as a whole. When we have this sense, we are able to participate intelligently in the modern world. If we don't, there are going to be problems.

What I'm listening to right now.

King Crimson, "The Court of the Crimson King." I remember listening to King Crimson a lot a very long time ago.

Lyrics:

The dance of the puppets
The rusted chains of prison moons
Are shattered by the sun.
I walk a road, horizons change
The tournament's begun.
The purple piper plays his tune,
The choir softly sing;
Three lullabies in an ancient tongue,
For the court of the crimson king.

The keeper of the city keys
Put shutters on the dreams.
I wait outside the pilgrim's door
With insufficient schemes.
The black queen chants
The funeral march,
The cracked brass bells will ring;
To summon back the fire witch
To the court of the crimson king.

The gardener plants an evergreen
Whilst trampling on a flower.
I chase the wind of a prism ship
To taste the sweet and sour.
The pattern juggler lifts his hand;
The orchestra begin.
As slowly turns the grinding wheel
In the court of the crimson king.

On soft gray mornings widows cry
The wise men share a joke;
I run to grasp divining signs
To satisfy the hoax.
The yellow jester does not play
But gentle pulls the strings
And smiles as the puppets dance
In the court of the crimson king.

16 "And when you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 17 But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, 18 that your fasting may not be seen by men but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you." – Matthew 6:16-18 (RSV translation)

Caveat: bottle+God

Kids / Quotable / The Wonders of Work

As I was correcting some student journals last Friday, I found the following page-o-doodles inside the back cover. Given this is a fourth grader, I was duly impressed.

picture

Many of these little vignettes are quite fascinating. There’s quite a lot going on.

I was particularly intrigued by the “병신 bottle+God” in the upper left. 병신 [byeong-sin] is a word that means things like “crippled”, “deformed”, “retard”, “fool”, “idiot”. It’s standard schoolyard insult vocabulary, in other words.

But here in her picture, the individual morphemes have been (mis-)translated into “bottle god”. Is this a common inter-lingual pun in the 4th grade set? Did she come up with it herself? What about the fact we’ve been reading Aladdin in class – is this “bottle god” the Genie? Was she thinking of that? Or is she recalling some passage from The Little Prince (see other doodles)? Or was she thinking about her drunk father? (I shouldn’t say that, but I, uh, happen to know… there was an incident, this one time at the hagwon…)

Then again, there seems to be a video game character of some kind called “bottle god” which may be an actual intentional or accidental inter-lingual pun on the part of the game developers (recalling that South Korea has a huge native games industry and is not above inserting bizarre bad English and also intentional puns into their products).

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Caveat: Post-3000

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling

My friend Peter has adopted a convention of titling each of the posts of his new blog with the post number (e.g. “Post-1: A blog”). It’s similar to my own stupid convention of prefixing each post with the word “Caveat” (e.g. “Caveat: Dumptruck“) – as if that ever even made sense except in the rarest of instances (e.g. Caveat: Emptor).

I like Peter’s convention better than I like my own, but he thought of it and I didn’t. He’s doing well with his new blog, I think.

My blog…. well, looky there: this is the 3000th post according to the blog administrator thingy. I started the blog in August of 2004, but in the first 3 years I probably made about 50 posts, total (most of which were during a 2005 trip to Europe), so that number of 3000 has been built largely since the summer of 2007.

I think it was only in late 2010 that I made a sort of “commitment” to posting at least once-a-day, and I’m pretty sure I’ve averaged two posts a day for more than a year now.

My friends and family were visiting my blog a lot during the era when the blog was automatically cross-posting to facebookland, but a technical problem a few months ago ended that temporarily, and my general, philosophical disillusionment with the facebook has meant that I haven’t worked very hard to fix it. I suppose there might be an element of passive-aggressiveness to this “cutting off,” too – perhaps testing to see who’s really interested in what I’m doing, as opposed to the mindless link-following encouraged by the facebook’s format. It’s not unlike how I bury these little fragments of snark behind a wall of digressive prose.

Regardless, my visitor counts have been declining. This doesn’t, actually, bother me that much. My real-life visitor counts (i.e. social interactions outside-of-work) have been declining lately, too – I’ve been in an antisocial phase, as I’ve already remarked elsewhere.

What I’m listening to right now.

Radiohead, “All I Need.”

Caveat: 감동을 주는 학생 관리의 전문가가 되십시오

Banalities & Journaling / Teaching & Methodology / The Wonders of Work / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean) / 한국어 속담 (Aphorisms & Proverbs)

This is the fifth question (section heading) from the handout entitled “초등부 강사로서의 나의 역량 자가 진단” (roughly, “self-diagnostic of my abilities as an elementary teacher”) which we discussed in a meeting a few weeks back – I discussed the first, second, third and fourth questions prior.

감동을          주는           학생     관리의

impression-OBJ give-PASTPART student management-GEN

전문가가            되십시오

professional-SUBJ become-DEF-FORMAL-IMPER

Become an impressive student management professional.

Actually, it’s not a question, like the others. It’s an imperative. Do it!

This really seems to be a reference to the 상담 (“counseling”) role that I happen to have discussed at length in my exact previous post. In that sense, it doesn’t really apply to me, since my interaction with parents is quite minimal, mostly due to linguistic causes (i.e. my poor Korean) rather than a desire on my part to avoid it.

Nevertheless, I would also take it to mean issues of what we might call “classroom management.” In that sense, it’s important. Classroom management is hard. I have been having a lot of incidences of my lesson plan coming up “short” recently – I finish what I intended to do and still have 5 or 10 minutes of class left. When that happens, I will often just “chat” with the students for a while, or tell a story or play a game, but it does feel like a classroom management failure at some level, and it’s been happening enough that students are starting to expect it, and I’m not sure that’s a good idea. This is what you might call the time-management aspect of classroom management.

In the area of handling disruptive students, I’m more confident. I feel like over all I handle these situations well, and without too often invoking “higher authorities” (i.e. the dreaded “If you do that again I’m going to take you out for a visit with the 실장님” [front desk lady] and then having to live up to that threat).

In the area of record keeping, I think in fact I exceed my fellow teachers, yet I’m actually not very happy with how I do. I would love to have it all in a database, but the raw fact is that I’m too lazy to build such a database, and certainly management is too lazy to provide such a database except in the most rudimentary sort.

Overall, in the area of “Impressive student management professional” I would give myself a B-.

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Caveat: IIRTHW Part II – The Business Environment

Life in Korea / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Teaching & Methodology

[In the form of various unstructured entries with fairly random thoughts, I’ve been working on this project for several years, and it’s come to have the name “If I Ran The Hagwon” (abbreviated as IIRTHW). This topic seems to be evolving into my first effort at something resembling long-form journalism on my blog. Here is Part II. I posted Part I last month. Additional parts (number to be determined) will follow.]
[Part I]
Part II – The Business Environment.
To understand what would make a better English language hagwon, it’s important to get some broad understanding of the business and cultural context in which a typical hagwon has to operate these days.
There are many aspects that make the hagwon environment “alien” to people from Western countries (and even, to some extent, perhaps other non-Western countries too). I’d like to talk about these aspects. In fact, they all derive from a single overarching fact: the hagwon “system” as it currently exists in South Korea is an example of unbridled capitalism in the field of education. This basic fact leads to a whole bunch of concomitant issues that come to our attention once we understand it.
Since I believe that ultimately, the key to success in business is customer loyalty, regardless of the business in question, I will try to connect each of these observations to the concept of customer loyalty. This will provide a sort of unifying theme for this exercise.
1. Alienation and workplace regimentation.
A core fact of capitalism is that it leads to alienation. South Korea’s capitalist economy doesn’t just generate alienation, but requires alienated, conforming workers as a precondition to function efficiently. This being the case, one of the purposes of South Korean education is to create appropriately alienated workers out of whole human cloth. Because of this, just like the military (another alienation-making-machine), Korean schools and hagwon have as a key non-explicit mission the alienation of students.
It’s hard to explain how important this is to the ultimate character of the hagwon business environment. Setting aside complex questions of what teaching methodologies actually work and what ones actually don’t work in a wider, theoretical context, in South Korea, specifically, there isn’t a lot of cultural space for what we might think of as empowering styles of teaching.
Korean students tend to be fairly passive, and require a fairly high level of supervision and extrinsic motivation. Efforts at cultivating intrinsic motivation will create discomfort and even suspicion among not just students but, more importantly, among parents and fellow teachers, who will ask questions such as, “why are you letting this child have fun at school? How is that going to help little Haneul for her next test?”
I might state, just as an observation for future reference: suspicious customers are not loyal customers.
2. Parents-as-consumers, children-as-products.
One thing that even the Korean hagwon owners rarely seem willing to admit is that on this capitalistic model, the children are not our customers. They are not paying the bills. The children are essentially products. I don’t mean this in a necessarily bad way – it’s just the reality and it’s better to have a firm grip on the reality. To be more precise, the students’ hopefully improved test scores are a service being provided. In light of this, a bad test score is emblematic of a defective service, and will lead very quickly to lost customer loyalty.
Nevertheless, within this conceptual frame there is still a lot of room for variation. Different parents have different opinions as to how they want their kids’ scores improved, and they may have various rigid or not-so-rigid views as to what methods should be used. They may be sophisticated consumers of education or naive; they may be traditionalists or innovationists.
Identifying and catering to these different types of parents (i.e. customers) is the key to acquiring and retaining their loyalty.
3. Market fragmentation and niches.
Given that some 80% or 90% of Korean students attend some form of hagwon, the market is huge. Although Korea is not an ethnically diverse country, it is an ideologically and culturally diverse one, with parents running the gamut from communards to vaguely Randian libertarians, from atheistic hippies to Pentecostals to Buddhists.
Education is (has been, will always be) an area where ideologies and subcultures play a major role, and capitalism is a system that encourages market fragmentation. The consequence of this is that there is a nearly infinite number of possible market niches out there. Not all of these market niches are viable, but I think this insight underscores one very important point: a given hagwon – especially a non-chain, “mom and pop” style, single-location hagwon – can occupy one or more of any number of possible market niches, providing anything from “fun English” to “hardcore pass-the-test cram English.”
4. The importance of “counseling” (상담).
The Korean word is 상담 [sangdam]. It means, roughly, “counseling.” In a customer-oriented business (e.g. telecoms) the work the people who talk to you on the phone trying to sell you stuff or solve your problems is called 상담. In the context of running a hagwon business, too, I would argue that is, in essence, a sales position. Rather, it is not just sales, but the after-the-sale “account manager” position common in large, service-oriented businesses.
Hagwon counseling includes mostly telephone “counseling” but also plenty of face-time with parents, too. If counseling is so critical, why do so many hagwon force the teachers into this critical, customer-facing position? Let’s take note of something: good teachers are not necessarily the best sales people. And good sales people are not necessarily the best teachers.
Obviously, in many people, there is some overlap – the skill sets are not, in fact, dissimilar. Conceding that fact, however, if I was running a small business I would work very hard to make sure that anyone who dealt with parents in this counseling role had lots of innate talent and lots of training (training in that account manager style counseling as opposed to just training as teachers) and that those counseling-based, customer-retention statistics (as compared to statistics linked to things like quality-of-teaching or student test
score outcomes) were tracked and documented.
In a small hagwon, this counseling role can be consolidated into a single person’s role. It can be that person’s sole job in a slightly larger institution, and in a large, successful hagwon, I can imagine a whole cubicle farm of “customer account managers” whose sole job is keeping parents satisfied.
This leads to a certain complication, however: if the sales people (the account managers) aren’t the same ones teaching the kids, there needs to be very clear lines of communication – a centralized database of student progress, teacher observations, parent requests, etc. I’ve never seen anything resembling this in the hagwon business.
This is where providing some reliable means of communication between teachers (service people) and counselors (sales people) is critical.
Just remember what this really boils down to: marketing is king.
5. The purpose and deployment of technology.
Technology is popular in Korean classrooms – more so in public schools than in hagwon, but certainly in hagwon too. I think it’s critical to understand one core fact – for a hagwon, where costs are critical and methodologies trend toward the traditional, technology is 95% marketing, and at best only 5% pedagogy. In other businesses I’ve been a part of in the U.S., in the past, technology is what is sometimes called “the bells and whistles.”
Perhaps it doesn’t help that I, personally, have always been severely skeptical of the genuine usefulness of technology in pedagogy. I think you can create a world-class school with chalkboards and dirt floors, and you can create content-free educational pap with computers, video conferencing, etc. There are definitely some things of great value. I love using a video camera to put the pressure on my students, to evaluate them, and later to review our progress. But I view it as unnecessary and irrelevant from a pedagogical standpoint. It’s “bells and whistles.”
Customers, on the other hand – the parents – have great interest in these bells and whistles. It’s smart to try to leverage our technology in ways that make customers feel like they’re getting something extra, something personalized, something valuable. Building and leveraging social web tools is critical, probably. My only point here is that we must never lose sight of the core fact: it’s about marketing.
Marketing is king.
6. Do all customers have the same value?
As mentioned above, the market is fragmented. That being the case, it’s critical for hagwon to identify and occupy specific market niches. Most of them do, but they often do so rather naively – which is to say, they occupy the niche without a clear understanding that that’s what they’re doing.
To get a leg up on the competition, explicitly identifying and pursuing specific market niches is indispensable. There should be a lot time spent figuring out what niche to pursue, and in recognizing that not all customers are the same. Different parents have different expectations, and different children have different needs. We
shouldn’t try to be all things to all people.
This idea leads to a corollary: sometimes it’s OK to tell a customer we don’t want them. Some customers are not “worth the trouble.” I like to think of Steve Jobs, who famously didn’t give a damn about customers who didn’t like his product. He would typically say something to the effect of: “Let them buy someone else’s product, if they don’t like mine.”
Likewise, the pursuit of customers just for customers’ sake is a really bad idea. I have seen hagwon management investing far too much energy and time and teacher goodwill in trying to satisfy parents or teach children where it’s clearly not in the hagwon’s interest to do this. Let bad customers go. Identify the good customers and work hard for them and earn their loyalty, but acknowledge that not all customers are the same, and some customers can’t be pleased.
We should be efficient. We should measure just how much effort a customer is requiring of us, and have a “cut line” whereupon we have to say, “I’m sorry, but I think this relationship isn’t working out.” Big companies do this very well – that super friendly and helpful customer service rep you spend so much time with is being kept track of, and there will be a point when his or her boss will tell him, “let that customer go.”
7. Reliable curriculum vs innovative curriculum.
The purpose of having a reliable curriculum is pedagogical. By reliable, I mean that it produces consistent and predictable results, which, in the hagwon context, of course, means rising test scores and satisfied parents. The fields of EFL pedagogy and teaching methodology may or may not have a great deal to offer on this front, but what I want to address here is something else.
A lot of hagwon try to convince themselves or their customers that they are providing innovative curriculum. This does not serve a pedagogical purpose – it’s a sales gimmick. In this way, innovation in the area of curriculum mostly serves a purpose similar to that identified with respect to technology, above: curricular innovation is a component of marketing and niche-building.
Innovation is perhaps required if a current curriculum isn’t producing hoped-for results, but in the long run, if a curriculum is producing results, innovation is a bad thing, not a good thing. Innovation makes loyal customers uncomfortable and more often than not fails to impress new customers. It’s better for a business to find what’s working and stick with it, and most successful hagwon seem to operate this way.
8. The demographic problem.
South Korea has a demographic time-bomb ticking. The fertility rate has dropped far below replacement rate, immigration is still low relative to most OECD countries, and furthermore structural and social problems mean that despite this, youth unemployment is quite high.
That’s not what I want specifically to talk about here. What’s critical for someone wanting to run a hagwon business in Korea right now is the understanding that, beyond what I just mentioned, education is a shrinking market – and there’s absolutely nothing that can be done about it.
I made the graph below using data from Wikipedia (sourced, in turn, from a Korean government agency).
picture
This graph makes very clear two things. First of all, explains why the elementary hagwon business was booming when I first arrived in Korea, in 2007. The 1990’s bulge on the left of the graph was just passing through the elementary system. Secondly, though, it explains why that boom was utterly unsustainable, moving forward, and why hagwon are struggling to find new elementary students to teach. Quite simply put, there are fewer students entering the system. The number of births suffered a precipitous decline of more than 20% in a single decade, and has stabilized at a new, much lower level. The number of hagwon in business in the 2000’s is unsustainable in the 2010’s.
This being the case, it underscores the importance of two things I’ve already mentioned. Customer loyalty is crucial. But also, in identifying a niche in which to operate, the focus should be on quality rather than quantity. The so-called upmarket niche is the only one sustainable or growable given current demographics. We can’t be churning out PC clones, we have to be making the Macs or Sparc workstations of the hagwon business.
Conclusions.
The preceding has been my effort to make a list of some of the issues that face the hagwon business in South Korea, as I have experienced them. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list, and it may in fact have substantial lacunae. It’s only things as I have seen them, with an emphasis on the things that seemed most notable to me.
But I think they provide some idea as to the business and cultural context in which a successful hagwon must operate.
In my next part, I want to go on to the original purpose of this essay: what makes a good hagwon? How can I make one? What would I do if I could make one as I wanted?
[Part III]

Caveat: Loop and Delay: A Song About People And Sasquatches

Background Noise / Found Online / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

I've never been that much into the "beatboxing" phenomenon, but this guy, Reggie Watts, takes it to a whole new level. I'm blown away.

He's a comedian too, with a remarkably wide repertoire. Here he is doing TED, with a mix of his "loop and delay" beatboxing bits and some really bizarre, essentially dadaist comedy – it includes, for example, "a song about people and sasquatches and french science stuff." He does these weird mashup riffs of made-up languages, too. I see him as half hip-hop beatboxer working at a high-tech startup company, half Borges on psilocybin.

From another one of his routines, he says, "At one point, innovation didn't exist." His point: someone had to come up with it. How did that work?

On thinking outside of the box: "As children know, sometimes boxes are very hard to get out of."

What I'm listening to right now.

Reggie Watts, "NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert." Note that his first improv in this bit is a tribute to NPR – at least the acronym and coffee sippers.

Caveat: Why Debate at Karma

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Teaching & Methodology / The Wonders of Work

It’s been taking longer than I intended to write the Part II of my IIRTHW article I began with Part I three weeks ago, now. My intention is to finish it this weekend, and get to work on Part III, which was my original intent all along.

Meanwhile, I thought I would share something I wrote for work. It’s a draft of what’s supposed to be a concise description of the debate program I designed, initiated and have subsequently developed at Karma. Like most of my writing, it ends up being distressingly non-concise, and I don’t envy the poor coworker who ends up trying to translate it into Korean – the document is intended to go into a Karma catalog (a sort of extensive sales brochure) that will go to parents. But it does manage to cover the parameters set out for me (why, what, how – all in less than a page).


Rhetoric is the name, in English, for the art of effective or persuasive speaking and writing. It is a very old concept, which comes to Western European culture from the Greeks and Romans more than 2000 years ago. Aristotle and Plato, for example, each wrote about methods of rhetoric and argued its role in leadership. Thus rhetoric is a foundational element of Western education and civilization, and even now with a good understanding of rhetoric a student has the essential intellectual tools to be successful among the elites of Western education.
Our KarmaPlus debate curriculum teaches classical, Western-style rhetoric in a way that engages students’ interest and imagination while providing opportunities to practice and develop all four language skills: reading, listening, writing and speaking.
Debate is frequently used in government and to talk about public policy decisions. In many countries, there are also academic debate competitions which function similarly to sports competitions. Most major Korean universities have English debate teams that participate in national and international competitions, and our debate curriculum is intended to introduce students to that style of debate.
A student who has mastered the essential skills as taught in our debate curriculum will have an advantage on any test that requires rapid, long-form speaking: iBT (TOEFL) and TEPS Speaking are the best known examples, but many foreign and elite high schools conduct interview tests for applicants where a basis in debate is valuable. Later in life, debating skills can be useful in business or career environments such as job interviews or product presentations.
Each debate class follows a simple, repeating pattern over a series of four or five class-hours. On the first day, we do a reading on the topic we will be debating and discuss answers to questions about meaning and opinions. This provides exposure to relevant vocabulary and concepts. Next we present a  “Proposition” which is the idea to be debated. The teacher gives a detailed hour-long lecture on the background and possible PRO and CON ideas on this topic. For homework, the students write an essay (or several essays) about the topic, and the next class
they form teams for a practice debate, using their own opinions as well as opinions suggested by the teacher. Lastly, they memorize a speech and present it as a “debate speech test” which is recorded on video and scored by a detailed rubric covering many details: intonation, speed of voice, grammar, ideas, organization, research, etc. This is their test score and monthly grade. In this course structure, over four or five class hours we cover reading, listening, writing and speaking.

Caveat: 짱!!

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

When I was in middle school (or as I knew it in those dark days, “Junior High”) I was most definitely not popular. I was nerdy and shy and even more antisocial than I am now (which is saying a lot).

So I suppose there is some redemption in being sufficiently popular among a clique of 8th graders at my hagwon to find this written on the whiteboard when I walked into the classroom this evening.

picture

It says, inside the blue border, “제라드 샘 짱!!” 제라드 [je-ra-deu] is a misspelling of my name, perpetuated not by my students but by my fellow teachers. It’s forgivable. 샘 [saem] means “teacher” (cf Japanese sensei), and 짱 [jjang] is a student slang term that means “the best”.
So you get, “Jared teacher [is] the best!!” That’s gratifying.

Under that it says “Chicken fight.” This is an inside joke with this group of students. I might explain it in a later post – I have some additional materials that require translating first.

Under that it says “판타스틱한데?” [pan-ta-seu-tik-han-de] “Are you fantastic?” Then it says 오잉 [o-ing] with some additional circles thrown in. I think it’s a sort of “ya.” Finally in the lower right it says 이힣힣… [i-hih-hih…] which is just a sound effect of some kind – perhaps laughter.

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Caveat: This Debate Is Boring

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Teaching & Methodology / The Wonders of Work

With respect to my great “absurd debate” lesson I came up with last week, here is one of the most excellent results, from Wednesday night.

Proposition: “This debate is boring.”

Even the PRO team told me afterward that the topic was fun. So in fact, the PRO team lost. These 7th and 8th are doing self-referentiality. Now I can feel like all those years with Cervantes are finally paying off.

Caveat: Sinking

Found Online

This is a funny video I ran across, that resonates with because of my role as an EFL teacher.

Caveat: Грин Кард США

Found Online / Internet & Blogging

Sometimes, on US-centric websites, I get to see some pretty amusingly inappropriate targeted banner advertisements, because of my Korean IP address. Sometimes they get it right, like this one.

picture

But other times they miss, and get it wrong. Very wrong. I’ve seen Chinese and Japanese ads, but this is the first one I’ve seen in Russian.

picture

It’s asking if I want to get a US Green Card. How many people, sitting in Korea, surfing a US-based website, would click that link? Maybe 1? I mean, of the entire possible population? It looks like maximal targeted ad fail.

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Caveat: 원숭이 세척 자주 좀

Banalities & Journaling / Kids / The Wonders of Work

In my previous post, I mentioned a student survey that I’d recently seen some results from. This survey was only among the elementary students, which is a fairly small group for me since my schedule is more weighted toward the middle-schoolers these days. I actually only have about 20 elementary kids, currently, scattered in half a dozen quite small classes. This survey represents 14 of them.

picture

I might talk about the numerical results at a later point. The two things that jumped out at me were a) my highest scores were for having a “fun / interesting” class (second row), and b) there are 2 students who, apparently, would definitely not recommend me as a teacher to their friends (last row, far right box).
What I wanted to focus on here were the 5 free-form comments at the bottom. These are mostly amusing – there is, in fact, only one comment that is serious, and from its content I already know which student wrote it: she is complaining that I don’t return graded essays for the advanced TOEFL writing class in a timely manner. In that, I’m guilty as charged.
Here is a close-up of the comments.

picture

Here is my transcription, with rough translations.
숙제 내주지 마세요.
Please don’t give homework.
한국어로 말해주세요.
Please speak in Korean.
원숭이 세척 자주 좀
clean the monkey a little
좀스피킹 좀 재미있게 해요. 그리고 Writing 검사를 제대로 해주세요.
Speaking is a little bit fun. But please check writing more thoroughly.
원숭이를 깨끗하게 써주세요.
Please administer cleaning to the monkey.

pictureTwo of the five comments received were that my monkey needed to be cleaned. My “monkey” is the Minneapolitan Rainbow Monkey (who goes by the name “Dinner” which is a reference to his relationship with the alligator), which has been mentioned previously in this blog. I took him home last weekend and let him go on a ride in the washing machine, so he’s cleaner now. But I perhaps should make that a weekly custom – he lands on the floor a lot.

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Caveat: 수업분위기는 어떻게 유도하십니까?

Teaching & Methodology / The Wonders of Work / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

This is the fourth question (section heading) from the handout entitled “초등부 강사로서의 나의 역량 자가 진단” (roughly, “self-diagnostic of my abilities as an elementary teacher”) which we discussed in a meeting a few weeks back – I discussed the first, second and third questions prior.

수업분위기는             어떻게    유도하십니까?

class-atmosphere-TOPIC how-ADV induce-DEF-FORMAL-QUESTION

What kind of atmosphere do you create for your classes?

I know that I’m a fun teacher. I recently saw the results of a survey to elementary students wherein my highest rating (and my only non-disappointing rating, frankly) was for having a fun and interesting atmosphere in my class. I’ll post more about that survey later.

I think I would have already guessed that this is not a weak area for me. I think I conduct a class with a good atmosphere, most of the time.

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Caveat: Diving giraffes and other miscellany

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Life in Korea / Quotable

A. Have you seen the famous French diving giraffes?

I believe they are computer-generated.

B. Unrelatedly… over the weekend, there were fireworks at Lake Park (호수공원) a few blocks from my apartment – because of the Childrens Day festivities. I knew what they were, but I also thought: that's what it would sound like if North Korea attacked.

Then, yesterday, as I stepped out my apartment to walk to work, the civil defense sirens sounded. "Ah, right," I thought. "It's exactly 2 pm, first Tuesday of the month." That's a typical time for a civil defense siren, although they seem to move around a bit within that general coneptual frame. But normally I'm either already at work or still sitting at home when the 2pm sirens go off. I think I witnessed one once before, some years ago, although they happen every month.

Everyone stopped driving. People in yellow vests went out into the street and stopped cars and even pedestrians. So I was standing on the corner of Junang-no and Gangseon-no for 15 minutes until the drill was over, thinking once again about North Korea. I took out my phone and looked at the Korean-language news site, to pass the time. The first article I read (er, tried to read) was about the USS Nimitz (nuclear aircraft carrier) visiting the South Korean city of Busan [美항모 니미츠호 11∼13일 부산항 입항(종합)]. Is there a pattern here?

In fact, the Norks seem to be behaving better lately. Or else they got what they wanted: South Korea gave them some money recently. Extortion works.

C. Lastly, another bit of miscellany:

"You
should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day, unless you're too busy;
then you should sit for an hour" – old zen saying (or just someone on
the internet).

Caveat: hasta donde debemos practicar las verdades

Background Noise / Español Aleatorio (Random Spanish)

Lo que estoy escuchando en este momento.

Silvio Rodríguez, "Playa Girón." Una de la canciones que más me gusta de la música latinoamericana.

Letra:

compañeros poetas
tomando en cuenta
los últimos sucesos
en la poesía
quisiera preguntar
me urge
que tipo de adjetivos
se deben usar para hacer
el poema de un barco
sin que se haga sentimental
fuera de la vanguardia o
evidente panfleto
si debo usar palabras,como
flota cubana de pesca
y playa girón

compañeros de música,
tomando en cuenta esas
politonales y audaces canciones
quisiera preguntar
me urge
que tipo de armonía
se debe usar para hacer
la canción de este barco
con hombres de poca niñez
hombres y solamente
hombres sobre cubierta
hombres negros y rojos
y azules los hombres
que pueblan
el playa girón

compañeros de historia
tomando en cuanta lo implacable
que debe ser la verdad
quisiera preguntar
me urge tanto
que debiera decir
que fronteras debo respetar?
si alguien roba comida
y después da la vida que hacer?
hasta donde debemos
practicar las verdades
hasta donde sabemos
que escriban pues la historia
su historia los hombres del
playa girón

que escriban pues la historia
su gistoria los hombres dl
playa girón

Caveat: Units of Canadas

Found Online

This was extremely interesting and funny.

picture

I’d like to see the same done for other countries. Especially of note – although South Korea is about the same size as that sticky-down part of Canada southwest of Toronto (I guess it’s called southern Ontario?), South Korea has 1.5 times the population. Combined with North Korea, it’s about 2 units of Canadas. And then, let’s visualize a map of China or India done in units of Canadas. (Thanks to tumblr I Love Charts for pointer to this.)

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Caveat: 수업준비는 완벽하게 하고 계십니까?

Teaching & Methodology / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean) / 한국어 속담 (Aphorisms & Proverbs)

This is the third question (section heading) from the handout entitled “초등부 강사로서의 나의 역량 자가 진단” (roughly, “self-diagnostic of my abilities as an elementary teacher”) which we discussed in a meeting a few weeks back – I discussed the first and second question prior.

수업준비는            완벽하게          하고    계십니까?

class-prepare-TOPIC be-thorough-ADV do-PROG have-DEF-FORMAL-QUESTION

Are you thoroughly prepared for class?

This is pretty easy to understand – maybe with less ambiguity or semantic complication than the first two questions. There’s not much here, from a linguistic standpoint,  to comment on. But it’s depressing, because my answer is quite simply: “없어요” [no I’m not].

I would say, though, that class prep is one of my weakest areas, as a teacher. I procrastinate too much and then I am inadequately prepared and forced too often to “wing it.” I find class prep to be stultifying and stressful, although I’ve always felt that was at least in part due to the Korean way of packing all the teachers into a too-small, too-cramped, too-noisy staffroom and not giving the breathing room needed to adequately prepare for classes. I seem to recall being better at prepping when teaching in the US, where I could sit in a silent classroom (my own classroom) during a free period and get things done without interruptions or distractions. Even then, procrastination was bane.

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Caveat: Sons and Daughters

A Daily Poem / Banalities & Journaling / Book 1 / Life is a Dream / My Poetry & Fiction

I tried to write a poem back on April 22. I didn’t really finish it, but I decided to put it here as-is.
(Poem #8 on new numbering scheme)

Sons and Daughters
The ephemerality of the world is just a stone wall.
There are blossoms on the trees along Gangseon-no.
The suburban pavement exhales.
The air reeks of density,
of garbage
of sand
of springtime
of buses.
There are little square patterns of bricks paving the sidewalk.
I see a discarded umbrella, broken,
its ribs jutting among some weeds.
My students exist in a dream.
I have a couple hundred children,
my alternately charming or obstinate sons and daughters
who then each disappear after a year or two.
My sons and daughters almost never say good-bye.
One day they are in class with me.
One day they are not.
No beginning.
No ceremony.
A month.
A year.
An infinite specificity lies behind this mystery.

picture

Caveat: What was left was like a field

Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

What is Poetry

The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

The mistress we desire? Now they
Will have to believe it

As we believed it. In school
All the thought got combed out:

What was left was like a field.
Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

Now open them on a thin vertical path.
It might give us–what?–some flowers soon?

– John Ashbery, 1998

Caveat: Antisocial In The Age of Social Apps

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / My Drawings & Paintings / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

There are some – ahem, philosophical? political? – reasons why I don’t do the facebook much, these days. There’s a great write-up on The Atlantic, by Alexis Madrigal, who is a pretty lucid commentator on technology and internet-related issues. His article is worth reading in its entirety, but consider this quote he gives from someone named Mike Monteiro (context… facebook has been comparing itself in its advertising to a utility object – like a chair):

A well-designed chair not only feels good to sit in, it also entices your ass towards it. So this is nothing new to Facebook. Where it gets interesting to me is when you start asking to what end you are designing. The big why. In the chair example, the relationship is clear. If I can design a chair that entices your ass, then you will buy it. I’ve traded money for ass happiness (and back happiness, but that’s less sexy). But it’s clear who the vendor and who the customer is in that case.

Where I have issues with Facebook is that they’re dishonest about who the customer is. They’ve built an enticing chair, and  they let me sit in it for free, but they’re selling my farts to the highest bidder.

This is important. The facebook has, indeed, been a phenomenal utility for me personally. It has allowed me to get in touch with people I haven’t seen in 20 and 30 years, and stay in touch with people I wouldn’t otherwise stay in touch with. But the sort of market-driven dishonesty alluded to in the quote above has always been something I’ve been aware of, above and beyond knowing the extent to which the facebook tracks everything we do online – even on sites unrelated to facebook. If you’re logged on to facebook, they know what you’re doing. Period. And my discomfort with it is higher when I go into these antisocial phases.

You see, I’ve been in a deeply antisocial phase, lately. Enough so, that I need to put out an apology to my friends, aquaintances and relatives who take the time to reach out to me. I’ve got issues – I always have. People who know me, know this. I go into a sort of jibbering withdrawal, sometimes.

My job is my sanity. My job is profoundly social. I spend 5 or 7 hours every day (minus Sundays) interacting continuously with children and adolescents. Mostly, that goes pretty well – on the whole, it goes much better than my interactions with fellow adults. I really don’t get along well with adults, sometimes. This is dysfunctional, probably. But it keeps me sane.

One consequence of this, however, is that when I get into one of my antisocial phases (like recently), I am utterly burned out on interacting with people beyond that daily 5 to 7 hour window. That’s why I only log on to facebook once a week, and why I turn off my cell phone when I get home.

Please, friends, don’t take this personally. I just… need my space, sometimes.

I drew this doodle earlier today.

picture

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Caveat: 학생에 대한 열정과 진정한 사랑을 갖고 있습니까?

Teaching & Methodology / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean) / 한국어 속담 (Aphorisms & Proverbs)

This is the second question (section heading) from the handout entitled “초등부 강사로서의 나의 역량 자가 진단” (roughly, “self-diagnostic of my abilities as an elementary teacher”) which we discussed in a meeting a few weeks back – I discussed the first question before.

학생에      대한    열정과

student-AT toward passion-AND

진정한             사랑을   갖고       있습니까?

sincere-PASTPART love-OBJ hold-PROG have-FORMAL-QUESTION

Do you have passion and sincere love toward your students?

The verb form 갖- is a contraction of 가지다. Other than that, this was pretty easy to figure out, although I had to recall that idiom -에 대한 “toward”. The most interesting aspect of this sentence is the semantics.

The Korean word 사랑 (“love”) doesn’t really have the same semantic valences as the word “love” in English. In reference to things, it cannot apply – you can’t “love” pizza in Korean, as you can in English. You can’t even love teaching, or literature. On the other hand, in the realm of human interactions, Korean “love” is much more widely applied. We would hesitate to tell anyone but closest family or a romantic interest that we “love” them in English. But as I’ve mentioned in this blog before, Koreans will say “I love you” (사랑해) to people in their day-to-day lives at the drop of a dime. I have students who say it to me, both in Korean and translated into English (without the awareness of the different valences in English), and I’ve heard teachers say it to students. I’ve even heard store clerks say it to regular customers (generally younger customers i.e. children). Just yesterday, an 8th grade boy taller and heavier than I am said “I love you, teacher,” without any compunction or awkwardness. I have a Westerner’s reticence to return the compliment, but I’m trying to get past it.

So asking me if I, as a teacher, feel passion and sincere love for my students doesn’t have any of the sniggering awkwardness that arises in contemplating the English translation, where we can easily understand what is meant, but where we would hesitate, in a professional setting, to phrase it that way.
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Caveat: Absurd Debate Topics

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

Sometimes I come up with a "filler" lesson plan that's so successful that I end up applying across most of my classes. Recently, because of the end of the test-prep period, I had some mixed ability middle-school classes that weren't part of my regular curriculum. In these contexts, I get asked to put together a one-up lesson plan for a "speaking class." "Just teach them some speaking," my boss says.

In earlier times I would get stressed about these one-up classes, but no longer. I view them as a laboratory and as a chance to try things out. I have a little folder of ideas that I can pull something out of.

One idea I had was to do some "absurd" debates. I've done these before, but always very detailed and well-developed over several classes, in the style of my regular debate curriculum. This idea was a little different: get the ideas out there, brainstorm for maybe 15 minutes, and put the kids to debating right away.

This idea only works if you've already got most of the students (if not all) fully familiar with the basic debate format. Now that I've been doing this a while, I could be confident of this – most of the students, if they've had "Jared teacher" before, have done debate at some style or level.

With this prerequisite out of the way, this "absurd" debate lesson was wildly successful. I never saw so many normally bored or disengaged or struggling students begin to laugh at the propositions and giggle at the prospect of defending one side or the other of these strange propostions. A few students took a while to "get" the exercise, but once they did, they too were fully on board.

Here is a list of the absurd debate propositions I came up with.

"Santa Claus is a criminal."
"Black is the best color."
"Aliens make the best friends."
"Unicorns are better than zebras."
"A smartphone is smarter than a dog."
"The moon is made of green cheese."
"The earth is flat."
"The teacher is a ghost."
"This debate is boring."

I've done a few of these before, and may have mentioned them, but never all together like this. I need to come up with more – this has been one of the most successful speaking debate classes I've ever done. I never have had so many students muttering to themselves phrases such as, "재미있구나" [jaemiittguna = this is interesting]. It's very gratifying to hear this, as a teacher.

Caveat: Can’t. Wake. Up.

Banalities & Journaling / Life is a Dream

The dream was a nightmare.

I don't have nightmares
often, but when I do, the worst ones are the ones I call "trapped in the
dream" nightmares. They are a sort of lucid dreaming, I suppose, where I
become aware that I'm dreaming, inside my dream, but then I am unable
to wake up, despite wanting to or trying to. 

This nightmare was exceptional in that not only was it
this sort of dream, but that it was "nested." There was sleeping and
dreaming within the dream, and then I was trapped in that dream and then
I woke up into another dream that I became aware was a dream and tried
to wake up from in turn. It was like the movie Inception, except I
didn't like that movie very much, although my dislike of it was more in
that it elided over the philosophically interesting parts in favor of
incoherent violence. So perhaps the philosophically interesting part got
embedded in my brain anyway, to express itself later in this nightmare.

In the dream, I was camping and hiking with my friend Bob along with a group of my current elementary students.

The area we were hiking through resembled northern Minnesota at first, but as the sun ramped down in the sky, the children were complaining and the land began to look desolate and empty, full of rocks and spindly trees. Everything became brown and gray. We came to a stream that was clogged with algae and autumnal-looking swamp grass at the bottom of a slight incline, and Bob proposed setting up camp.

As we set up camp, the children discovered a skeleton. And, then, another. Soon we realized the entire area was littered with the bones and skeletons of humans and animals, but the sun was setting, so we couldn't really move camp at this point. We made a fire and cooked something bad tasting. Some of the children complained but several were having swordfights with femurs.

I stared around at a desolate plain of bones.

Finally it was late at night and the moon was full. I found a place to put my tent but the air was warm, so I decided to sleep outside. I lay down and fell quickly asleep. It's always very strange to fall asleep in a dream. But it's much stranger to then be inside a dream inside that dream, and thinking, "I'm dreaming."

I couldn't wake up. I had this notion that the stream had risen while I slept, and I needed to wake up. I felt like I was lying in water. I couldn't wake up. I struggled, trying to move a muscle or twitch or blink, trying to wake up. I couldn't. I could feel the water rising.

Then bang, I was awake. My eyes popped open, and I knew instantly I was in another "layer" of my dream. I was in my apartment, but there was water raining down from the apartment above me, through the ceiling. It was logical enough – I'd been dreaming I was wet by the stream because of the water flooding into my apartment. I got up and realized that several Korean workmen had already entered my apartment to try to figure out what to do about the leak, but the were utterly ignoring me. It didn't strike me as odd they'd entered my apartment while I slept, but I was disturbed that they weren't talking to me.

"Am I a ghost?" I pondered. "Or just an ignorable foreigner?" I tried to move some of my possessions, that were getting wet from the flood. They were heavy, and the water was everywhere. Then I noticed a doorway, with an open door, in one wall of apartment. "Now where did that come from?" I wondered.

I went through the doorway to find a closed, musty room, full of junk. Like my father's living room – it smelled of too many books and the arid, oppressive atmosphere of Los Angeles in late summer. But it was dry, I reasoned. So I'll move my things in here, away from the flood.

I started to carry things but everything was very heavy. The workmen, after bashing a hole in another wall and my ceiling, had mostly staunched the flow of water but everything was damp and there was trash and rubble everywhere. They were crouched around a portable gas stove in the center of my apartment's floor cooking ramen and doing shots of soju and yelling at one another cordially. They continued to ignore me, and I felt very conscious that I was somehow "broken."

So I went into the musty room and lay down on my damp bedding which I'd unfurled onto the floor, and fell asleep. "This time, I can wake up for real," I said to myself, reassuringly.

But I couldn't wake up. I pushed against the cobwebs of sleep and couldn't push through. I clawed and cried out and spun my head on the pillow.

"Can't. Wake. Up." It was the sort of nightmare where you just know you're screaming, or moaning, or moving around.

Finally, I awoke. I'd planted my face against the heating cabinet – had I hit myself on it?

It was morning and my apartment was bright. I have to go to work early today – it's Saturday. Full schedule.

What I'm listening to right now.



Trauma Pet, "1."

Caveat: Debate Methodology

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

My main debate classes are for the middle-school students, these days. But when I worked at LBridge, we had a full elementary debate curriculum for the speaking component of the EFL curriculum, and I remain a strong believe that debate is great way to teach EFL speaking, especially in Korea where getting kids to do spontaneous conversation is sometimes quite challenging.

I further believe it needn't be reserved for high-level students only. I've been experimenting with teaching debate to my intermediate elementary students exactly the same way I teach to my middle schoolers, in the BISP1-M 반 (cohort).

The lesson follows a 3 or 4 class period pattern. First class introduces the topic and proposition, which follows a debate topic given in a really badly made "teaching newspaper" such as are popular here. The topic in April was "South Korean schools should adopt a 'free semester' system."

A 'free semester' system sounds like a big deal, but it really isn't. The suggestion is that Korean students spend too much time preparing for tests, with a mid-term and then a final each semester. A 'free semester' would be a semester with only one test instead of two. Yay, freedom! Sort of. The idea is that some given semester in middle school would be liberated from a mid-term, and time would be devoted to exposing students to career-planning type activities instead. This is middle-schoolers we're talking about… that said, I think what's being proposed has some parallels in some European models of education, in particular in Germany.

We did some discussion, and found that the students seemed to have a pretty good grasp of the issues.

For the second class they complete an essay either supporting (PRO) or opposing (CON) the proposition. I read the essays and return them with minimal correction (to keep things moving along fast). Then the students have a "panel" debate, where sides and positions are mostly up to them or sometimes chosen randomly.

Here is the panel debate with these BISP1-M kids, which we did on April 10. (Turn the volume down – when I made the video the sound got cranked).

The next class, they are to present memorized 2 minute speeches on the same topic, either PRO or CON (their choice if I'm in a good mood, randomly if I'm not – my mood being contingent on how well they've been doing on other homework and suchlike).

This is what I call the debate speech test, and I use a scoring rubric to give a test score which is their monthly grade. The scoring rubric weights effort and presentation style heavily – it's possible to get an A on the test merely parroting ideas from my own lectures or from the newpaper. This is because I don't see debate class as being primarily about critical thinking or problem solving, but about building confidence and fluency. So in this way, the students often memorize and assemble points from my talking or from each other, too.  I think that's OK.

Here are debate speech tests for this same class, which we did on April 17. (Turn the volume down – when I made the video the sound got cranked).

Caveat: The Cookie Business

Background Noise / Found Online / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Quotable

"Now I got 99 problems and Jay-Z's one of them." – Barack Obama, about Jay-Z's recent trip to Cuba with Beyonce (referencing Jay-Z's popular song "99 Problems").

Unrelatedly…

What I'm listening to right now.



"Cookiewaits" [a Tom Waits / Cookie Monster mashup] – "God's Away On Business."

The lyrics (my own transcription, mostly):


I'd sell your heart to the junkman baby
For a buck, for a buck
If you're looking for someone
To pull you out of that ditch
You're outta luck, you're outta luck

The ship is sinking
The ship is sinking
The ship is sinking
There's leak, there's leak,
In the boiler room
The poor, the lame, the blind
Who are the ones that we kept in charge?
Killers, thieves, and lawyers
God's away, God's away,
God's away on Business.
Business.
God's away, God's away,
God's away on Business.
Business.

Digging up the dead with
A shovel and a pick
It's a job, it's a job
Bloody moon rising with
A plague and a flood
Join the mob, join the mob

It's all over
It's all over
It's all over
There's a leak, there's a leak,
In the boiler room
The poor, the lame, the blind
Who are the ones that we kept in charge?
Killers, thieves, and lawyers
God's away, God's away,
God's away on Business.
Business.
God's away, God's away,
God's away on Business.
Business.

[Instrumental Break]

God damn there's always such
A big temptation
To be good, To be good
There's always free cheddar
In the mousetrap, baby
It's a deal, it's a deal

The ship is sinking
The ship is sinking
The ship is sinking
There's leak, there's leak,
In the boiler room
The poor, the lame, the blind
Who are the ones that we kept in charge?
Killers, thieves, and lawyers
God's away, God's away,
God's away on Business.
Business.
God's away, God's away,
God's away on Business.
Business.

I narrow my eyes like a coin slot baby,
Let her ring, let her ring

It's all over
It's all over
It's all over
There's a leak, there's a leak,
In the boiler room
The poor, the lame, the blind
Who are the ones that we kept in charge?
Killers, thieves, and lawyers
God's away, God's away,
God's away on Business.
God's away, God's away,
God's away on Business.
Business.

Caveat: Things Keep NOT Happening

Found Online

pictureThe graph at left really made me laugh. I have long suspected that a lot of things weren’t happening, and finally I have some real data to back up my intuition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Caveat: Ozone &c.

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling

I love to walk home in a cool rain, just as it's beginning or slackening. In the dark, wet streets, buses or bicycles go zipping past. My perception is that Spring is arriving late but fast this year. Spring always seems to come fast, I suppose: one day, the trees are bare, then another day, there are blossoms, then another day and all is bright greening.

Today the air smelled of ozone – is that Chinese yellow pollution dust, or something local? Or is it the way we get here on rare occasions, when the rain comes from the west and smells of the desert out somewhere near Mongolia?

What I'm listening to right now.

Trauma Pet, "Yearning."

Caveat: 강사로서의 자부심을 느끼고 있습니까?

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

This isn’t an aphorism or proverb, but rather a section heading of a handout from a staff-meeting a week or two ago, which was entitled “초등부 강사로서의 나의 역량 자가 진단” (roughly, “self-diagnostic of my abilities as an elementary teacher”).

I bring these Korean language handouts home and over time I study them, if I get the motivation. It’s rough going, but occasionally they offer insights into how my boss is thinking, or at least, how he feels he should be thinking.

The first section heading of this “self-diagnostic” is “강사로서의 자부심을 느끼고 있습니까?” (“do I feel pride / self-confidence as a teacher?”). The problem is that “pride” and “self-confidence” are both offered as translations of 자부심, but I’m not sure they are the same thing.

Does the term mean both? Do these concepts of “pride” or “self-confidence,” in particular, work differently in Western psychology? I would feel comfortable saying I have pride in my teaching, but I couldn’t never fully agree that I have self-confidence in my teaching. Excessive self-confidence in teaching leads to close-mindedness, which is the bane of effective teaching in my opinion. For me, feigned self-confidence is crucial in the classroom, but true self-confidence elusive – and I don’t view this dichotomy as a bad thing.

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Caveat: Canuckistan Rising

Found Online / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I guess there are enough Punjabis in Canada (and especially Vancouver) to make Punjabi hockey-fan music a thing. This is a bhangra-ized paean to the Vancouver Canucks sung in Punjabi.

Actually I think it's pretty cool – not that I was ever a hockey fan.

Caveat: Wingdings

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Kids / The Wonders of Work

An advanced-level elementary student was writing an essay for me in the computer lab the other day. She printed her essay and came running to me in either feigned or real panic. She showed me the printout, below. Obviously, something was amiss.

"Teacher! What's wrong. The printer is broken," she complained.

I went and looked at her screen and then again at the document.

"The printer isn't broken," I sighed. "You need to stop playing around with font choices in Microsoft Word and spend more time writing your essay."

Wingding 002

What is this font you speak of, O master?

I have been in a very strange mood, lately. I feel like an old man in a rest home for the mentally deranged. Just a feeling…

What I'm listening to right now.

Harry Nilsson, "Without You."

Caveat: 백문이 불여일견

Language & Linguistics / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean) / 한국어 속담 (Aphorisms & Proverbs)

백문이              불여일견
百聞이              不如一見
hundred-hear-SUBJ not-same-one-see
Hearing it a hundred times is not the same as seeing it.
“Seeing is believing” or “A picture is worth a thousand words” or “The proof is in the pudding.”
I chose this proverb because I thought it would be easy, not realizing it was another one of those Chinese-masquerading-as-Korean linguistic fossils. Still, I’ve gotten a little bit competent using the online dictionary, flashing back and forth between the 영어 / 국어 / 한자 [English / Korean / Chinese] tabs, so I figured it out in record time. It was trivial to find the proverbial meaning, since that meaning is the only one conveyed in the Korean-English dictionary. What takes time is sorting out the individual syllables – and you don’t get to lean on Korean syntax in sorting it out, because it’s not really Korean, it’s Chinese, with its rather gnomic and aggressively un-analytical rules.
I wonder sometimes if the South Koreans’ current obsession with English (both as a language of “globalization” to be learned wholesale in schools and academies, as well as a never-ending source for neologisms for their own language) isn’t just a continuation of their two-millenia-long, one-sided love affair with Chinese. They just changed the object of their attention. Regardless, the language seems remarkably open to a certain style of lexical borrowing.
In this light, note, especially, that little Korean particle (이 =- subject marker) inserted into the above proverb. If Chinese is good, then Chinese with some handy disambiguating particles must be better.
 

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