빈 수레가 요란하다
empty cart-SUBJ is-loud
An empty cart is loud.
“He who speaks most knows least,” roughly.
Maybe I should shut up.
What I’m listening to right now.
Washed Out, “Amor Fati.”
빈 수레가 요란하다
empty cart-SUBJ is-loud
An empty cart is loud.
“He who speaks most knows least,” roughly.
Maybe I should shut up.
What I’m listening to right now.
TVFACI MAPU MEW MOGELEY WAGBEN
Tvfaci mapu mew mogeley wagvben
Tvfaci kajfv wenu mew vlkantuley
ta ko pu rakiduwam
Doy fvta ka mapu tañi mvlen ta komv
xipalu ko mew ka pvjv mew
pewmakeiñmu tayiñ pu fvcakece yem
Apon kvyeh fey tañi am -pigekey
Ni hegvmkvleci piwke fewvla ñvkvfvy.
– Elicura Chihuailaf N. (poeta Mapuche de Chile)
En este suelo habitan las estrellasEn este cielo canta el aguade la imaginaciónMás allá de las nubes que surgende estas aguas y estos suelosnos sueñan los antepasadosSu espíritu -dicen- es la luna llenaEl silencio su corazón que late.
A certain student of mine drew this picture of me.
Frankly, I look like a South Park character. That’s not so bad, I guess. I think the “this is warm” under my foot – which I initially took to be a pile of poop – is actually meant to be a “worm,” but misspelled as “warm.”
Who is the certain student? The boss’s daughter. What might this mean?
Siempre me ha interesado literatura para niños. Por pura casualidad encontré este poema que me acuerdo haber visto (o algo parecido) en algún contexto hace tiempo.
La pobre jirafa
se muere de frío,
pues llegó el invierno
y no tiene abrigo,
ni tiene bufanda,
por eso se arrima
tanto al oso panda.
¡Qué suave que estás!
¡Qué calorcito me das!La mamá jirafa
llama a su vecina,
que es la oveja Fina.
¿No podrías darme
un poco de lana?
Pues te la daré…
si me da la gana.
¡Anda, Fina!
¡Por algo eres mi vecina!
Arráncame tú un mechón
pero con mucho cuidado,
no me hagas un chichón.Y ahora ¿quién podrá ayudarme
a hacer una bufanda tan grande?
Buscaré a la araña, que sabe tejer
con las manos y los pies.Y así, con ayuda
y con mucha calma,
la mamá jirafa
hizo la bufanda,
y a su hijita, con cariño,
se la regaló
y no puedes imaginarte
la alegría que le dio.¡Ay, que calorcito
que siento en mi cuello!
Y se fue a dormir
Porque le entró sueño.
– Marisol Perales
What I’m listening to right now.
Cake, “Motorcade of Generosity.” I guess it’s a little bit wild to have this song shuffle around entirely randomly on my mp3 player (from my 6000+ collection of songs that I rotate randomly on and off of the mp3 player). To have the song intoning “I bombed Korea” while walking to work in Korea. Well, you know. Weird.
It’s about the Korean War, obviously. Cake is a pretty cool musical group, too.
Here are the lyrics.
I bombed Korea every night.
My engine sang into the salty sky.
I didn’t know if I would live or die.
I bombed Korea every night.I bombed Korea every night.
I bombed Korea every night.
Red flowers bursting down below us.
Those people didn’t even know us.
We didn’t know if we would live or die.
We didn’t know if it was wrong or right.
I bombed Korea every night.And so I sit here at this bar.
I’m not a hero.
I’m not a movie star.
I’ve got my beer.
I’ve got my stories to tell,
But they won’t tell you what it’s like in hell.Red flowers bursting down below us.
Those people didn’t even know us.
We didn’t know if we would live or die.
We didn’t know if it was wrong or right.
We didn’t know if we would live or die.
I bombed Korea every night.
This is very cool. I love typewriters. If I had a fixed abode (as opposed to a storage unit and moving once or twice a year for the last decade), I would collect them, I think. And I like to think about “alternative” methods of painting and doing art, too. This is definitely a conceptual piece but it has a strange practicality. A chromatic typewriter by Tyree Callahan.
As an update to my previous post, I followed up with a co-worker regarding my confusion as to how "If there are a lot of boatmen, the boat goes up the mountain," can mean the same thing as "too many cooks spoil the broth."
I had been visualizing a group of men working together to get a boat up a mountain, which would, naturally, be a difficult thing, and therefore a positive accomplishment, unlike spoiling broth. Hence my confusion. But, in fact, it turns out taking a boat up a mountain isn't perceived as useful.
I'm going to offer a slightly altered translation that, I think, makes this more negative connotation more clear in English: "If there are a lot of boatmen, the boat ends up far from water."
This removes the seemingly positive implicatures of getting the boat "up" a mountain, which apparently aren't present in the Korean – that's because the "going up" thing is inherently viewed as positive in English, but there's no "upness" involved in the Korean – it's that "lative" case ending I was preoccupied with, in fact: it means "into the mountain" meaning nothing more than "inland" (since all of the "inland" in Korea is mountain, this makes sense.
OK. So that explains it.
boatman+SUBJ many+IF boat+SUBJ mountain+LAT goes-up
If there are many boatmen the boat goes up the mountain.
I spent a long time trying to figure out what to call the -으로 [-euro = +LAT] ending. By my abbreviation, you can see that I’ve decided to call it a “Lative” case marker (q.v.), which I’ve never seen in any grammar of Korean. I’m just being an obstreperous and idiosyncratic avocational linguist, right? The ending indicates “direction toward” or “direction through” but also “manner” or “means,” and, as far as I can figure out, in colloquial usage it can be a “destination.” It is very common.
This wasn’t that hard to figure out, as far as semantics. But when I saw what the proverb was supposed to be equivalent to, I became puzzled. It’s said to be equivalent to: “Too many cooks spoil the broth.” Frankly, that seems to be exactly the opposite of its meaning, which is to say, with enough people (boatmen), anything is possible (getting a boat up a mountain).
I’m going to have to ponder this. I wonder if the important idea is that of the “boatman” in opposition to, maybe passengers (who aren’t as useful in getting the boat anywhere?).
Personally, I have no idea how to get from A (If there are many boatmen the boat goes up the mountain) to B (Too many cooks spoil the broth). Perhaps I need more boatmen?
Actually, I started thinking about Fitzcarraldo. Seriously – it’s exactly the same.
If you own an electronic gadget made in China, I think you should listen to this recent episode of “This American Life.”
[UPDATE 2012-03-17 It turns out this radio show has some scandal associated with it. Given that, I probably should retract my recommendation to listen to it. Most of the commentary below stands, however.]
Normally, I don’t have a lot of patience for Ira Glass’s brand of vaguely sanctimonious hipsterism, but this show hit home for me. It’s somewhat directed at Apple, which is a mark in its favor in my anti-apple worldview… but I’m well aware that Apple Corp is far from the only – or anywhere close to the worst – offenders in the realm of worker exploitation in China. I would, in fact, wager that my cheapo Jooyontech desktop was made in China without anything even resembling a passing nod to workers’ rights such as Apple presumably tries for (apparently without much success, but still, at least they pay lip service to it, right?).
Despite everything said in the above-mentioned program (which I will reiterate, I hope you listen to), I still don’t think Paul Krugman is wrong in his quote at the end – this is just another country (albeit, in China’s case, a historically unprecedentedly huge country) working its way up the “value chain” in the process of modernizing and industrializing. The US, Europe, Japan, South Korea – all these countries passed through phases where things like child labor and complete union illegalization were nearly universal, and perhaps, as a good marxist, I should accept that this is just a sort of “mode of production” that every country must pass through.
All the same, it’s sobering and depressing to think that it is somehow inevitable, even sitting in a country such as South Korea that is only now beginning to emerge from the far end of this agonizing socio-economic process.
OK. Nothing to add to that. Just listen to the show. Think about it, the next time you play with your iPad or log onto the internet on your cheap, convenient computer, or whatever.
Here’s a question: “What is stuff for?”
Meanwhile, what I’m listening to right now.
Metric, “Sick Muse.”
I’ve written before about how frustrated I’ve become trying to find Korean television dramas with English subtitles that I can watch on my computer. It really does help me learn Korean to watch, but I’m just not able to really get enough of what’s going on to watch without subtitles, yet.
I’ve had a couple of false starts, where I find a program and watch a few episodes, but then I can’t get the rest of the episodes with subtitles, so I’ve taken to finding shows and downloading all the episodes before watching them. What I end up finding becomes somewhat random – i.e. I’m not really watching shows because they appeal to me but rather because they’re the ones I can find.
One show I started watching recently because I’d gotten all the episodes is called “마녀유희” [ma-nyeo yu-hui = “Witch Yoo-hui” in official translation]. It’s a romantic comedy series (or really, mini-series in US parlance) from 2007. A too-young female business executive (heir to some rich family presumably) has a bad personality and this ne’er-do-well medical-school dropout (and wannabe French chef) does a pygmalion on her.
That should be enough to get the gist of the story. You can read an atrociously written summary at the wikithing. The whole connection to an actual witch-based fairy tale is tenuous at best (mostly played up in the intro to each episode). I had been hoping for something brilliantly conceived like the Hansel and Gretel meta-tale movie I liked so much a few years back.
But, so… I’ve been watching that. It’s entertaining, anyway.
When I was 17 and 18, the coolest musical groups in the world were Talking Heads and David Bowie. I was a weird kid, right?
I heard on the radio that David Bowie is turning 65 today. He’s kind of retired, apparently.
What I’m listening to right now.
David Bowie, “Ziggy Stardust.” Lyrics:
Oh
Oooh yeah
AhZiggy played guitar, jamming good with Weird and Gilly,
and the spiders from Mars. He played it left hand
But made it too far
Became the special man, then we were Ziggy’s bandnow Ziggy really sang, screwed up eyes and screwed down hairdo
Like some cat from Japan, aww he could lick ’em by smiling
He could leave ’em to hang
‘came on so loaded man, well hung and snow white tan.So where were the spiders, while the fly tried to break our balls
With just the beer light to guide us,
So we bitched about his fans and should we crush his sweet hands?Oh
Ooh ohZiggy played for time, jiving us that we were voodoo
The kid was just crass, he was the nazz
With God given ass
aww He took it all too far but boy could he play guitarMaking love with his ego Ziggy sucked up into his mind
Like a leper messiah
When the kids had killed the man I had to break up the band.Oh yeah
Ooooooo
Ziggy playyyyed guitaarrrrrr
Canada proposes an intervention – and its own “Canadacy” in our upcoming elections – because they’ve noticed we’re hurting.
This video is funny on so many levels. I hope it works out.
This only means, “The radiance (luster) [of] a good apricot.” 빛 [bit = light, radiance, luster] 좋은 [joheun = good] 개살구 [gaesalgu = apricot].
This is one of those proverbs where knowing its (semantic) meaning tells you nothing about its (pragmatic) meaning. Pragmatics is not semantics.
So I just went ahead and looked it up. It’s used the way we use: “All that glitters is not gold.”
Good to know. Dried apricots are generally available at local grocery stores. I often buy them.
Jinmo, a first grader, made a somewhat incoherent story, along with illustration, with a poignant ending (below), such as only a first-grader can invent.
It is so characteristically first-grader literature, because of the predominance in the tale of things like boogers and poo (which in Korean is 똥 [ttong], and so I allow them to use the relatively inoffensive false cognate, the similarly-sounding English word “dung”). The story also included the Lion King, a ghost, and a booger fly.
The “rainbow dung” in the lower right is compellingly rendered, doncha think?
Sometimes one student can ruin a class. Or a day. And there's nothing to be done about it – just bluster through. Sometimes parents make boneheaded requests, and there's nothing to be done about that, either – just bluster through.
So I was already having a grumpy day. And then…
Recently, some random strangers (trolls) posted utterly non-useful comments on one of the youtube videos I posted of my teaching (it was an effort to show how I tried to teach "debate" to a very low-level 3/4/5 grade class, and felt it went better than I'd ever dreamed. The substance of the comments: "control your class!"
<rant>
I saw the comments, and I watched the offending video – frankly, it's not that uncontrolled. It's from a few years ago – it is, in fact, from my last day at LBridge, at the end of August, 2009 – so over 3 years ago, now.
There's the one kid, John, who was always vaguely ADHD and so I tolerated a kind of restlessness in him. Excepting him, and his special circumstances, none of the other kids show a great deal of uncontrolled-ness. To provide additional context, this was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a regular class. There was the fact that it was my last day – the kids were aware of this. There was the fact they'd just attended an assembly where they'd received special packages of goodies – that's what a number of them, notably John, are obsessively fiddling around with. Finally, I'd decided to deviate utterly from the expected curriculum, without preparing them for this fact. I'd "wrongfooted" them. So there's the fact that they don't really know what I've planned for them. And finally, we cannot forget that the presence of a video camera, in and of itself, will tend to make kids act out and do strange things – they don't get the "just act normal" dictum that older kids or adults can understand.
Considering that, I'd urge my anonymous commenters to realize that context in these things is important. Further, it doesn't appear either of these creepy commenters went on to watch the subsequent parts of the same video – they only watched the first video, and therefore they didn't, in fact, see that the kids actually managed to present their "debate" – pretty low-level, admittedly.
But obviously, I've taken these anonymous, troll-comments personally. Because, when you get right down to it, I do feel some insecurity about my ability to control a class. Like on bad days. Like today.
But I'd like to set aside that insecurity, for a moment, acknowledging it for what it is – an expression of insecurity about my teaching ability, and not something grounded in sound pedagogical theory or child-development psychology.
Kids do not, in fact, need to be "controlled." "Controlling" kids has nothing to do with providing them with a good education. Kids need to be engaged. There are only two reasons kids need to be "controlled" in a classroom: 1) their safety, 2) because they make the adults uncomfortable. Only the first reason is legitimate. The second reason is just about people nursing secret fascisms in their blasted, grown-up souls. "Controlled" kids are bored kids, depressed kids, turned-off-to-learning kids. Kids should be positively engaged, and to the extent a teacher is successful, they will then control themselves.
Really, watching that video, after seeing those comments, I was expecting to see kids jumping around or bouncing off walls, and in fact, I saw no such thing. I saw a few kids fiddling with things, OCD style. I saw a few kids looking around at other kids, or making side-comments in the their native Korean, a few times, even, to clarify what I was saying in English (I rely on and encourage this – it's called "leveraging peer-teaching" between those with stronger English skills and those with lower-level ability).
And if one goes on to watch the subsequent parts, you will see that without any violence on my part (meaning not physical violence, but authoritarian verbal coercion a la the "traditional classroom"), I get 100% participation in my little experiment to teach debate to high-beginning elementary English learners.
</rant>
Sigh. I deleted the trolls. And I posted a link to this rant at that video. Not that it makes a difference – I have 0% expectation that the offending trolls would read this rant or, that, if they did, would understand my points. Nevertheless… I had to get the thoughts off my chest.
Here's a book I want to read: The Atheist's Guide to Reality, by Alex Rosenberg. In a review at 3AM Magazine, Richard Marshall summarizes,
Rosenberg is a fearless naturalist, whose ‘nice nihilism’ doesn’t imply that we can become nihilists. He disturbs the comfy domestication of the naturalistic world view. Evolutionism and physics gives us a nihilist universe, purposeless, meaningless, ultimately devoid of everything we think is important. But it has constructed us as having evolutionary reflexes that grant us illusions of freewill and purpose we cannot but believe.
Even the review makes for very dense reading. I haven't been doing very well at dense reading, lately – but I hope I can find Rosenberg's book at Kyobo or somewhere like that.
Today is perihelion. I hope you have a good day, so close to the sun.
It seemed very cold outside. That’s because perihelion has nothing much to do with climate.
My little ones (first graders) where so hyper today. I came out of the class, and went back into the staff room, and I said, “It’s like teaching popcorn.” Unfortunately, it was a metaphor that had to be explained, which seemed to lessen its effectiveness substantially.
What I’m listening to right now.
Madness, “Blue Skinned Beast.”
My students alleged that I resemble pop star 임재범 [im-jae-beom, which he himself prefers to romanize as Yim Jae Beum (which is, in my opinion, a truly misleading and horrible way to romanize it, but, well, with names there’s a lot of freedom on this matter in Korea)].
In researching it (i.e. typing his name into a Korean search engine and seeing what pops up), I think it must just be the glasses and the haircut, more than anything else. Perhaps the rather exaggerated way he changes his facial expressions as he sings – I do that a little bit during my classroom antics. I certainly don’t sing like him, though.
A student asked me, the other day, "Teacher! Why haraboji hairstyle?"
"Haraboji" means "grandpa." So he was referring to the fact that, as I have allowed my hair to grow out a little bit in the last several months, the gray shows more, as well as the fact that it continues its thinning, apace, up top. I guess as my hair grows longer, I end up looking older.
I should observe, as I have before, that I have NEVER had a conversation with an adult Korean (male or female) about my appearance where the question "why don't you dye your hair" DIDN'T come up. They seem to find the fact that I don't do this astounding. I have almost succumbed to the pressure, but it has always been something that repelled me as being somehow vain. I would sooner begin shaving my head, to be honest.
Well, anyway. Was I offended? No – not by the student. But I may return to the shorter hairstyle – I'm not so utterly free of vanity as all that. I'm not a grandpa yet. "Ajik" I said to the student. "Not yet."
I’ve been fishing around for some new activity to replace my year-long effort to translate the 108 Buddhist aphorisms. The 108 were the right level of difficulty – they were quite hard in some ways, but because I was somewhat familiar with the subject matter (i.e. Buddhism) and they were predictable (they followed patterns) I could manage them.
I’ve been looking at various lists of Korean proverbs and aphorisms. Every time I try to understand one (without looking at the translation), I don’t do very well. But I’m still tempted to mess with it, because I like proverbs and aphorisms, and they give a lot of insight into culture.
Here’s a proverb from one of those lists.
맨끝에 정든다
only-end-AT attachment-begins
“Only at the end does one grow attached.”
I take the verb to based on the root 들다 which would mean it’s irregular in a way I didn’t realize (dropping -ㄹ)
I think the 정 [jeong] here is the same 정 (情) [sentiment, attachment, love] I’ve discussed previously.
I didn’t select this proverb because it seemed particularly relevant to any of my current life events – I only selected it because it popped out of the list as something I might be able to figure out in a reasonable amount of time.
Maybe I’ll try to do a more-or-less randomly selected proverb a couple times a week. We’ll see how that develops.
Walking home from work, the night air sparkled with a sprinkling of snow, the air cold and clean-tasting. Work is hard these days. I’m trying hard to improve my teaching, and there’s a lot of pressure and discomfort at work because we’ve been losing students, too. This is partly just because hagwon business is cyclical, and parents always pull their kids out of hagwon in January, when public schools are in vacation and parents find other things to do with their kids. I can never understand how Korean managers – ever relatively good ones such as my current boss – seem to take these cycle-driven losses of enrollment so personally, and assume there’s some mistake being made by teachers as opposed to just being the vagaries of the market.
Well, anyway. So work is hard, these days. I have a tight, dense schedule, too. But I felt OK about it, today, walking home in the dark in the cold in the snow in my dreams.
I found this really interesting image online at a site called love all this – it’s supposedly Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s resolutions.
I really, really like the resolution that goes: “19. Keep hoping machine running.” It appears he doodled a picture of it, too. I like the idea of a “hoping machine.” I’m doing some repairs on mine, currently.
What I’m listening to right now.
Neutral Milk Hotel, “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.”
I’ve been reading Wallace Stevens – one of the greatest poets, in my opinion. He has a poem called “Description Without Place” – it’s quite long – and there’s a part about Nietzsche and Lenin that fascinates me. Here is a frequently quoted part about Lenin:
Lenin on a bench beside a lake disturbed
The swans. He was not the man for swans.The slouch of his body and his look were not
In suavest keeping. The shoes, the clothes, the hatSuited the decadence of those silences,
In which he sat. All chariots were drowned. The swansMoved on the buried water where they lay.
Lenin took bread from his pocket, scattered it–The swans fled outward to remoter reaches,
As if they knew of distant beaches; and wereDissolved. The distances of space and time
Were one and swans far off were swans to come.The eye of Lenin kept the far-off shapes.
His mind raised up, down-drowned, the chariots.And reaches, beaches, tomorrow’s regions became
One thinking of apocalyptic legions.
So what are the swans? Utopian dreams? Revolution?
I was quite amazed today in my RN1 class when my student Taeu said he'd done his homework. He'd indeed done most of it. I made a big show of congratulating him. "Wow," I said. "That's the first time in six months that you did your homework."
He got a hurt look on his face. "Teacher," he complained. "Second."
What I'm listening to right now.
Absurd Minds, "The Question."
I’m not really very well-informed on this, but I’ve formed an opinion anyway. North Korea remains more-or-less stable for two reasons: 1) the state leverages traditional Korean communitarianism to get buy-in from groups that would otherwise resist (mostly the “bureaucratic class” and/or the low and mid-ranking military); 2) the economy is much more pre-industrial (i.e. feudal) than people have been thinking – many (if not an outright majority of) North Koreans are existing in an essentially pre-industrial society based on subsistence agriculture.
I have formed these opinions partly just through reflection – I read articles about NK often, but I can’t really point to specific articles that caused me to develop the above view. If I run across something specific in the future, I’ll try to remember to add them to this post or some future related one.
The below graph (from Brad Plumer at Wapo’s Wonkblog) is an interesting summary (and never forget that before about 1960, North Korea was more industrialized than the South – a legacy of Japan’s colonial industrialization policies for the peninsula and the fact that the North had at least some coal).
Mientras tanto… what I’m listening to right now.
Dënver, “Olas gigantes.”
This is a Chilean music group. I think the diaeresis (or “umlaut”) on the “e” is just a playful bit of typography, as opposed to symbolizing anything, although there are some native languages of Chile that use the double-dotted diacritic on certain vowels to indicate laxness or centralization in their orthographical systems, and the word “dënver” has a certain Mapudunguny look to it (I studied the native language Mapudungun at Univ. Austral de Chile in 1994) – but Mapudungun itself doesn’t use “ë”. I don’t know if the group’s name has something to do with the American city of Denver, either.
Letra
Dijiste vamos a nadar,
nunca he visto olas tan gigantes,
dijiste qué nos va a pasar.
Y que todo va en bracear,
y hacías con los brazos
de manera circular.
Entonces nos lanzamos a nadar
y las olas explotaban
como si nos odiaran,
y nos golpeaban sin piedad,
y yo braceaba y braceaba,
no servía de nada, daba igual.
Es que yo en ti confiaba más,
yo sólo seguía sin más
tu físico espectacular.
Así que simplemente me dejé llevar
y ahí vi como pasabas,
toda doblada tu espalda
y no vi más.
Proyecto Uno es un grupo musical estilo merengue-house – consta de dominicanos de Nueva York. Lo encontré en el contexto de vivir en Filadelfia en los 90. Aquella ciudad, con su gran población caribeña, tiene su propia cultura latina, distinta a la cultura mexicanizada de la gran parte de los EEUU. En general, resulta en que las radiodifusoras de la costa atlántica de los EEUU tienen un índole distinto de lo de las de la pacífica o del interior del país.
What I’m listening to right now.
Te dejaron flat
Primera noche, recibí una llamada, aha
Fue mi exnovia, sorpresa en mi cara, aha
Ella me llamó pa decirme, negrito me haces falta, aha
Yo la quiero sacar a bailar pero yo no tengo plata, a.
So whats up baby, echa pa acá y yo cocino, aha
Es una mentira, sin embargo es mi estilo, aha
Ella dijo sí, en una hora estoy ahí, aha
Me quedé esperando hasta que me dormí (you tell me)
Uh, ya tú sae, oh, te dejaron flat
Uh, embarcao, he, plantao
Say word, (word…) oh, te dejaron flat
Uh, embarcao, he, bajo ya
Que lo que, que lo que sube
Que lo que, que lo que sube
Que lo que, que lo que sube
Que lo que, que lo que sube
Segunda noche, ella me llamó pa tras, aha
Pero como Robelto Durán, yo dije no más, aha
Ella lloró y me dijo discúlpame por favor, aha
Si vienes a casa te demostraré amor, aha.
Me tardé pero arranqué y yo llegué, aha
Pa la casa de la chama, le toque y timbré, aha
Ella contestó con una cara asustada, aha
Dijo que su novio vino sin decirle nada (damn!)
Uh, ya tú sae, oh, te dejaron flat
Uh, embarcao, he, plantao
Say word, (word…) oh te dejaron flat
Uh, ya tú sae, hey
Eo, eo, eeo, eeo, eieio, eieio
Eo, eo, eeo, eeo, eiooo, eiooo
Sigue
Think you gonna play me out this time? (this time)
Think you gonna leave me stinkin?
Think you gonna hurt me?
Think I had what you been drinkin?
Hey mami no te cruces porque no soy tu jueguito
No me llames por teléfono si tú no quieres dar
Con mala fama y yo te lo confirmo
No quiero problema, tú así conmigo
No vale la pena, ay negra, ay negra
Por qué me trata así, no me digas que me quieres
Si yo sé que tú no tienes tiempo para mí (you tell me)
Mami menéalo, mami menea, nea
Mami menéalo, mami menea, nea
Dale pa bajo baby, dale pa bajo así
Dale pa bajo baby (pick it up, pick it up, pick it up)
… con Proyecto… Uno!
Y la gente dice
Uh, ya tú sae, oh, te dejaron flat
Uh, embarcao, he, plantao
Say word, (word…) oh, te dejaron flat
Uh, embarcao, he… (break it down)
Así, así, así, así, así, así
Así, así, así
Que lo que, que lo que sube
Que lo que, que lo que sube
Que lo que, que lo que sube
Que lo que, que lo que sube
I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. Or rather, I don’t share them – I’m superstitious that in sharing them, I would either jinx their eventual success or else set myself up for disappointment in the event that they don’t work out.
I was listening to NPR and someone said that in Portugal they avoid this problem by making New Year’s wishes instead of resolutions. Wishes are less work than resolutions, too. And that way, I can share them.
So my wishes:
To all my friends who put up with my periodic anti-socialism (and abstract socialisms, for that matter), who reach out to me to say hi and see what I’m doing beyond the slightly directionless blog, THANKS. Love.
2011, that is. Ending.
2011 went by really fast for me. That was after 2010, which was one of the longest, most stretched-out years of my life. The difference? There was a lot of instability and uncertainty in my life, in 2010. Whereas 2011 went pretty smoothly… mostly according to plan.
2010 started with me NOT getting a job in Korea. I lived in a hostel and took language classes for two months, before finding a job. Then the job turned out to have… well, let’s call them complications. Most notably, the Hongnong Elementary School had a tendency to make me move from apartment to apartment, and not ever tell me what was coming next, work-wise. Much worse than hagwon experiences I’ve had. OK. So that was 2010.
2011, in contrast, was easy. Predicatable. I finished the Hongnong contract, came back to Ilsan to work for Karma, and suddenly… it’s 8 months later. Life, it seems, goes on.
Interestingly, this happens to be the 1900th post to this here blog thingy. How ’bout them apples?
Walking home from work, late afternoon, the sun hung low in the sky and was like a pat of butter in mashed potatoes. I tried to capture this with my camera. Below picture was taken about a block north of my apartment building, along Gangseonno [강선로].
Um.
Happy New Year. 새해복 많이 받으세요~~. ¡Feliz año nuevo!
What I’m listening to right now.
Phaeleh, “In the Twilight.”
A blogger named doctorzamalek who runs a blog called Object Oriented Philosophy (yes, I'm a bit of an avocational philosophy nerd) writes on the current US political scene, in a way that I feel like quoting (and leading to several layers of embedded quotes, as he cites NYT who cites Romney).
Romney may be saying this just for campaigning purposes, but it’s still worth talking about it:
“It is a moral imperative for America to stop spending more money than we take in,” Mr. Romney says in the ad, which will be running when he arrives in Iowa on Tuesday for a bus tour and an orchestrated blitz of appearances by surrogates leading up to the caucuses on Jan. 3.
No. There is nothing “immoral” about spending more than you take in. This practice has a name: investment. Did I spend more than I took in while studying for my various degrees? Of course I did. And it might actually have been “immoral” not to do that, since my entire future depended on it.
There's not much I feel I need to add to that.
I travel to Australia to visit my mom in January for a week, and then make a week-long touristic trip to New Zealand that is mildly pleasant but erely reminds me that I don’t really enjoy travelling as much as I used to – at least not travelling alone. I let my contract at Hongnong Elementary School run out. With some sadness, I said good-bye to Yeonggwang County and returned to Ilsan. I started to work at Karma Academy, for my former LinguaForum Academy boss (from 2008). I have a more stable housing situation (like!). I have fewer elementary students (not like!).
[This entry is part of a timeline I am making using this blog. I am writing a single entry for each year of my life, which when viewed together in order will provide a sort of timeline. This entry wasn’t written in 2011 – it was written in the future.]
One of my coworkers brought take-out cafe mochas (from one of the Starbucks clones that abound in South Korea) and distributed them to all of us, today, in the staff room. I like cafe mocha, but I haven’t had one in a long, long time. They are addictive and unhealthy.
The taste and smell was weirdly evocative – I thought of studying late at night at Espresso Royale in Dinkytown (Southeast Minneapolis) in the 1980’s, or at the now disappeared Bucks County Coffee joint on Locust Street at 40th just west of the U Penn campus in the 1990’s. I thought, in short, of studying.
I wondered if I would someday return to school.
Why are smells and tastes so evocative? And sounds…
What I’m listening to right now.
Bob Dylan, “Hurricane.”
There is a really interesting article about Finnish education at The Atlantic. I wrote before about the possibility that standardized testing neither helps nor harms quality of education, and speculated that the fact that countries as divergent in education policy as South Korea and Finland both score so high on comparative level-of-education surveys must have cultural roots.
The article, by a Finn working in the US, gives me a clue as to what that cultural aspect might be. I’ve always though it has to do with some qualitative valuation of education by, e.g. parents or educators, but the author points out a different possibility: collectivism and/or cooperation-based social models.
Korea, for all its competitiveness and inequality, shares with Finland a cultural valuation of cooperation and social cohesion over explicit dog-eat-dog social Darwinism. It seems that when Finns set out to reform their education system, they thought about how to encourage less of the latter in favor of the former.
Korea may have a lot of competition, but what I saw in the public school where I worked was constant reference back to cultural values of teamwork and collective achievement of goals. This means that even as Koreans are winnowing out low achievers with their never-ending tests, they are inculcating everyone with the importance of a kind of “everyone’s in this together” social philosophy. It’s cognitively dissonant, but it might point to a kind of counterbalance to the competition that ensures that scores rise across the board.
I’m not sure I have a point to make. But I highly recommend the article if you’re interested in education, “education reform,” and such issues. One stunning take-away: Finland achieves highest-in-the-world education rankings with no private schools. None. Wow.
Let’s not forget that the Soviets, and Cuba even today, achieve remarkable education standards with extremely low investment through focus on equity and equal access, too. I think the US would be wise to think about this. Market approaches will never raise achievement across the board – market approaches to education will do what markets do: there will be some winners and lots of losers. That drives inequality, not high standards across the board.
My TP2 cohort shrunk even further – two of the remaining three students are on vacation trips with their families, leaving me with one student left. Rather than try to continue following my debate curriculum (go ahead, try to have a debate class with one Korean middle-schooler – try!), I decided to just have a kind of conversation class.
I have these little cards from a "Kids' Chat Game" that I bought once at the Minneapolis airport. They have goofy or sometimes thoughtful little questions – conversation starters. We went through them, low-pressure, just finding ways to talk about things. One question was: "If you could invite anyone in the world to your school to talk, who would it be?"
The answer the student formulated and expressed surprised me: "I would invite my English teacher, Jared. He knows about everything in the world."
Talk about feeling complimented! I didn't even think this student liked me. I often berate him, in my mild-mannered way, for not doing homework or being laconic in class. I was rendered speechless, momentarily.
Do I know about everything in the world? Not really. But I have a way of speaking, in my more advanced classes, rambling from topic to topic, telling little stories and snippets of news and autobiography, that must seem rather wide-ranging to these kids.
Well, anyway. I'm not reporting this except to say, it was nice to know a student seems to think well of me. One doesn't often get direct, clear, positive feedback in the field of teaching.
El libro es fuerza, es valor
es poder, es alimento;
antorcha del pensamiento
y manantial del amor.
– Rubén Darío
Continuando mi meditación sobre libros, emprendido por el sueño de ayer.