"If dying in the desert is not a deterrent, I don't see how a threat of time in federal prison is going to be a deterrent." – someone heard speaking on NPR, (didn't catch a name) reflecting on illegal immigration.
Caveat: Cute Monsters, Kimbap, Cake, etc.
Thank you, all, for the happy birthday wishes!
This blog post will be a disorganized miscellany.
1. We made “monsters” in my first-grade afterschool class on Monday. This picture shows some of my favorites.
2. On Tuesday, our “Yeonggwang Study Group” of foreign teachers, that’s been taking shape to try to study some Korean Language together, met at Anelle’s and learned how to make kimbap (a sort of Korean take on what Americans call “California Roll” and often incorrectly identify as sushi, which is something completely different). Kimbap has things like radish, ham, crab, cucumber and carrot rolled together with rice in a sheet of seaweed. Here is a picture of my first-ever kimbap that I made.
3. I have so far received 16 happy-birthday wishes on facebook, as well as several non-facebook induced emails. Not only that, but several of my English-teaching colleagues at Hongnong Chodeung Hakgyo threw a sort of surprise party for me, with a little fruit-topped cake bought from the Yeonggwang Paris Baguette shop. I was deeply flattered and touched. Birthdays are hard for me – they always have been. I have a deeply disharmonious relationship with the passage of time, and birthdays are a notably overt marker of this. But it’s pleasing to be “appreciated” by a little party, especially since it was a genuine surprise – I really wasn’t expecting it.
Caveat: Wednesday’s Child
My mother reports that I was born on a Wednesday. I'm not sure about all the woe. I suppose I've had my share, but can I say I've had exceptional amounts in comparison to my other-day-of-the-week peers, on average? Not necessarily. Or is that just revisionism?
Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for a living,
But the child who is born on the Sabbath Day
Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.
Caveat: 1) 지극한 마음으로 부처님께 귀의합니다
“I turn to the Buddha with all my heart.”
I’m definitely sick. I thought I was feeling better, yesterday morning, but I felt like I had a fever all day. Often, when I know I have a fever, I deliberately don’t take medicine, because my understanding is that a low-grade fever can help the body fight whatever infection it’s fighting – the fever has the function of making the environment hostile to the infection. I have no idea if this really good practice, but it’s always been my way of coping, though it’s uncomfortable. Partly it’s because I just don’t like taking medicine. It always feels like an assault on my existential autonomy, although that’s philosophically inconsistent if not downright ridiculous.
Last night, when I got home, I felt really rotten. I began watching some shoot-em-up action flick on the TV, but it was really annoying. I have limited patience for Bruce Willis. I changed to the Buddhist channel. I sometimes will watch this as sort of background noise, because there’s lots of complex Korean to listen to, it’s culturally interesting, and the wacky-yet-banal informercials can be an entertaining contrast.
I’ve come to realize that every evening around 6 PM, the Buddhist channel runs a sort of day-end prayer, which are in the form of 108 affirmations. Lots of Buddhist ritual comes in sets of 108, which is an important number for Buddhists.
Anyway, the title to this blog entry is affirmation number one:
1. 지극한 마음으로 부처님께 귀의합니다.
Google translate, with typical guileless aplomb, asserts that this means “Buddha mind is extreme ear.” Which might make a good title for a comedy involving a philosophical meditation on the daredevil the body parts of great thinkers. But I think a good translation might be: “I turn to the Buddha with all my heart.” The first word, “지극한” is an adjectivalized form of the descriptive verb “지극하다,” which literally means “extreme” but in this context, I think it can mean “the depths of,” i.e. “all,” modifying “마음” “heart.”
I am not becoming a Buddhist. Not in terms of commitment. I can’t – I’m a dialectical materialist, and deeply committed to an anti-spiritual, anti-transcendent worldview. But I have strong sympathies for Buddhist practices, and I have found a lot of pragmatic “peace of mind” in Buddhist-style meditative practice, specifically (such as Zen and Vipassana). And I have been encouraged by the fact that when I say things like “I’m an atheist” to Buddhists, I don’t get the shocked and alarmed reaction of Christians, who immediately begin to worry over the fate of my soul. Buddhists, on the other hand, generally say things like, “that’s OK,” or “It doesn’t really matter.” Because they express no hostility toward my worldview, I feel no hostility toward theirs. Peace begets peace.
The morning is foggy. One thing I like about the weather in Glory County, Korea, is the prevalence of fog. It takes me back to my childhood, and the Pacific fogs of the Northern California coast.
Caveat: News over. Bye.
Some students in my last hour afterschool class, making imaginary newscasts, last Friday.
Caveat: a-dreamin’ intertextualities
Sometimes I have such strange dreams. I awoke from one, just now.
In the dream, I was reading a children's story. I suppose, given what I've been doing for a living, that that's not so unexpected. But in the dream, the children's story was in a weird mixture of Korean and English (real children's stories tend not to look like that), and had been written by my former LBridge colleague, Jinhee. And it turned out that she'd incorporated me as a character into her story. The story was about a group of Korean kids who go around solving little mysteries and problems in their community, which was a vast, densely populated suburb much like Ilsan. It basically was Ilsan, but was never named as such.
One such mystery they solve is the "mystery of the missing soju" – yes, that's funny. And not that unrealistic, maybe? Hah. They find out that at their school's hoesik (staff get-together dinner) the night before, a bunch of soju had disappeared, and they go about solving where it went. It turned out the vice principal drank it. All with very cute illustrations, and a nice moral at the ending, about maybe one shouldn't drink so much soju at hoesik events.
So strange, to be reading such a vivid and peculiar yet utterly apropos story, in a dream. I've often had "textual" dreams of this sort, but few quite like this.
And the next part of the story has the kids running into their "crazy English teacher Jared" while riding a bus to the mall. In the dream, I feel this mixed feeling of humility and pride at being included in the story by my friend Jinhee. The kids convince the story character, Jared, that he needs to help them solve a mystery involving a missing puppy. For some strange reason, to solve this mystery, the kids have to put together and then perform a drama production for a group of high-powered American business executives – hence the need for their crazy English teacher's help.
So I help them write and perform the drama. We put together a plot that involves a group of inept superheroes (a little bit a la The Incredibles?) who are being asked to work as office temps in a big company, and the superheroes end up saving the day by finding a missing puppy.
Seriously. My dream was becoming an intertextual labyrinth of Cervantine proportions. I'm having a dream in which I'm a character in a story in which that character (who is me) is writing a drama and helping some kids find a missing puppy, and in the drama-in-the-story-in-the-dream, there are some superheroes that are helping to find a missing puppy. Got it?
The drama goes as planned, and induces the American business executive who apparently stole the puppy to come clean and return it to the crying little girl. It's a scooby doo ending. Added twist of irony: the nefarious business executive in the story is a splitting image of my erstwhile nemesis from Aramark Corporation, CIO Bob McCormick. I find myself wondering, in the dream: "How did my friend Jinhee know that that's what evil American business executives looked like?"
But then I notice there's a typo in the story I'm reading: the word "clearly" is written as "claxli" – this is an "impossible" typo… at the least, it's a highly improbable one. What I mean by this, is that in the dream, I'm suddenly struck by the fact that "claxli" is not the sort of typo that happens in the "real world." And somehow this jarring fact causes me to become aware that I'm dreaming. And in the dream, now aware that I'm dreaming, I look up to see my friend Jinhee trying to present me with a copy of the story book she'd written, and I think to myself, I should tell her about the typo, but then I think, "oh, it's just a dream, so it doesn't really matter that much."
So I just thank her for the story, and for including me in it, and then we walk into a hoesik where some kids are doing a performance of the drama from the story for their school administration and staff (including the vice principal of the missing soju). And I think to myself, in the dream, "pues, de veras, la vida es sueño" (a reference to Pedro Calderón de la Barca's famous Spanish Golden Age drama, "Life Is a Dream"), and then I wake up.
It's six AM on the dot, although I'd turned off my alarm, and it hadn't gone off. The window is open, the rain has stopped, and there's an almost-coolness in the air, that seems alien and unnatural after so many months of humid, sweltering heat. It makes me think of Minnesota.
My stomach was feeling very upset yesterday (possibly, in part, stress-induced, from the difficult emotional week I'd endured last week), and it is still feeling unsettled. I'm feeling a bit under the weather, definitely. But what interesting dreams I sometimes have, when sick.
Caveat: Thunderstorms at Dawn
As was probably pretty obvious, I was feeling discouraged, last night. I still am. But I'll get over it.
This morning, it was thundering and pouring, rain, which de-motivated me in my plan to go into Gwangju this morning – I have some shopping I want to do, and I wanted to try to meet my friend Seungbae. But anyway…
There is an immediacy to writing in a blog – you get my feelings of each particular moment. I don't always try to tone down those feelings, or edit out the bad parts. So it will swing back and forth, positive to negative to positive again. Such is life.
I was watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert episodes this morning. I particularly enjoyed Stewart's segment on the show dated Sept 9, by Wyatt Cenac, in which a Staten Island version of the SCOTUS struck down California's prop 8. This gives hope for American values of tolerance, despite everything.
And this: "…the greatest honor this nation can bestow: free tee-shirts." – Stephen Colbert, in a show saluting war veterans.
Caveat: Zero of the most important things
Hard, hard week. I'm pretty frustrated.
The two most important things in my life right now are: 1) improve my teaching; 2) improve my Korean language ability.
I made progress in exactly zero of these two important things, this past week.
With respect to teaching: it was a challenging week, with chaotic, misbehaving children, messed-up lesson plans, a feeling of dullness and lack of dynamism in my interactions with kids.
With respect to trying to improve my Korean: it seemed like every time I tried to say anything in Korean, I was hyper-corrected, laughed at, mocked, or ignored. And the Koreans wonder why we Westerners so often give up on trying to learn the language. When you're told "you're saying that wrong" ten times in one day, when you're laughed at for trying ,when you're stared at incomprehendingly after having spent over five minutes carefully trying to craft a meaningful sentence in your head before giving it utterance, you begin to lose hope.
Caveat: Growing Up as an Anchor Baby in Hibbing
I found an interesting editorial in the LA Times about the concept of "anchor babies," with a Korean angle. I think it's worth reading.
Starting last week, my new schedule included the sixth grade (in place of the fourth graders who I was with in the spring), for the "main curriculum" English classes. And then this week, all sixth grade English classes were cancelled, because the sixth graders got to take a class trip to Jeju.
So I'm finding myself with some time to kill, at work. This, combined with the fact that we have finally begun to settle into our newly remodeled English classroom (pictures coming soon, maybe), meaning that there's an actual computer with actual internet access that doesn't have a line of teachers waiting to use it like the ones in the staff room. Hence my websurfing activities.
Caveat: How Kindness Works
I found this while surfing online. It’s called “The Starfish Story.”
Once upon a time, there was a man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work. One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up. As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean. He came closer still and called out "Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?" The young man paused, looked up, and replied "I’m throwing starfish into the ocean." "I must ask, then… why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?" asked the somewhat startled man. The young man replied, "The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don't throw them in, they'll die." Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, "But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and that there are starfish all along every mile? You can't possibly make a difference!" At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, "It made a difference for that one."
I'm not so good at this, sometimes. But I believe in it.
Caveat: Ham
Somewhat funny.
Parallel Parking from Yum Yum London on Vimeo.
Caveat: “Do you like dolphins?” – Castro Comes Clean
There has been an interesting series of articles / interviews with Fidel Castro, by Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic. Among other thoughts: Ahmadinejad needs to mellow out, and Cuba's communist model has failed.
My favorite part of Goldberg's interview experience – a glimpse of banal humanity behind the old dictator:
"Do you like dolphins?" Fidel asked me.
"I like dolphins a lot," I said.
I've always had a deep fascination for the "repentant dictator." Perhaps this grew out of my time in Chile, and the weirdly dysfunctional relationship that the people of that country had with their erstwhile savior and/or tormentor, Pinochet. Yesterday, I blog-mentioned Chun Doo-hwan, who was dictator of South Korea in the 1980's. What would it be like to talk to him, now, about what Korea is like, now? I would be fascinated.
Caveat: About 23 Years
I have been reading (re-reading?) parts of Michael Breen's "The Koreans." Living here, day-to-day, it's easy to forget that South Korean democracy (such as it is) is about 23 years old. That 's not very old. The dictator Chun Doo-hwan only allowed for direct presidential elections in 1987, and those elections were flawed because the state-run media (and the state pork machine) helped ensure that his hand-chosen successor, Roh Tae-woo, would be elected (although the opposition didn't help itself by splitting the opposition vote).
So in fact, although the constitutional changes 23 years ago could be said to represent the beginning of South Korean democracy, in fact, the first "normal" presidential elections weren't held until 1992. South Korean democracy is still imperfect – but I view North American democracy as rather imperfect, too. Still, those traditions, at least, have many generations of consistency and relatively smooth alternations of power. South Korea is still quite fragile, I think.
It's interesting to realize that for anyone in South Korea who is approaching middle-age, these events were formative experiences of their youth and college years. Most of us English-speaking foreigners who work and live in Korea these days are teachers. Consider the fact that all of those cryptic, middle-aged teachers and administrators you work with have vivid memories of riots, police repression, surreptitious jailings and beatings, disappearances. Your vice principal may have been throwing flaming molotov cocktails, while in university, at his principal, who was a youthful riot-police captain, ordering his men to shoot tear gas and beat the students with clubs. Or vice-versa. Perhaps some of the puzzling things we see Koreans doing could be better understood if we take these things into account.
Caveat: Insight into the electoral college
"Our marriage is like the electoral college – it works better if you don't think about it." – Garrison Keillor in a skit about Norwegian Calvinism.
Caveat: The Wilderness Downtown
"The Wilderness Downtown" is an experimental music "video" written using HTML5 by googloids. It's pretty cool – you need Chrome to view it. You put in your home address, and it uses footage from Google Earth and Street View to incorporate your actual house into the video, dynamically. I can't decide if this is creepy or awesome. Call it crawesome.
I put in my childhood home, in Arcata, and saw the very recognizable dead-end street with Peggy and Latif's cars in the driveway (Peggy and Latif being the current residents of the house where I grew up). And there were some animated trees marching up 11th street. Very strange.
The music is by Arcade Fire. Not too bad. The technical implementation of the video – which calls up large numbers of windows in a rather random way – is deficient in that it fails to deal very well with the small, non-standard-size screen of my Asus netbook computer. The windows all hide each other and you can't see more than half of the ones it calls up. The code would have to somehow do better at reading the display size and used scaled-down, lower resolution windows depending on what it found, maybe.
Caveat: How to get out of South Korea
Actually, as is often the case, the caveat above is a bit misleading. I've been thinking about Afghanistan, after reading some fragments of blog posts that included a discussion of the issues entitled: "How to get out of Afghanistan." And I immediately thought about South Korea.
Now that our (by "our" I mean US) significant military presence in South Korea is in its 60th year, why does no one take seriously the idea that we need to "get out" of South Korea? Because the mission is viewed as a "success" – we have a long-standing, almost unquestionable partnership with the South Koreans.
So why is the only way to conceptualize "success" in Afghanistan couched in terms of "getting out"? I think a real, genuine geopolitical success could just as easily be conceptualized as getting to the point where conditions "on the ground" for US troops in Afghanistan are just as boring and routine as the conditions for US troops in South Korea.
I'm not saying that's the only option. But I think people who insist that "leaving Afghanistan" is the only possible way to be successful are deeply misunderstanding what the role of "enlightened military superpower" is supposed to be. Not that I agree with the idea that the US must necessarily be an enlightened military superpower – but you can't have it both ways: choosing to operate on those terms in a place like South Korea, because it's convenient and relatively painless, and then failing to operate on those same terms in a place like Afghanistan, because it's painful and inconvenient.
It seems consistency is important not just in parenting and teaching children, but in geopolitics, too.
Caveat: 대둔산
우리는 울산에 갈 수 없지만 대둔산에 등산을 하고 갔습니다. 재미있었습니다.
산봉우리에서 도착한 때 좀 막걸리를 마셨습니다.
이 식당에서 맛있는 청국장을 먹었습니다. 친절한 사람입니다.
Caveat: Somewhere Else, It’s Fall
Not here. Hot and muggy, per usual, when it's not actually raining. But on Minnesota Public Radio, I hear that it's 57 degrees F on the State Fairgrounds in Saint Paul, at 4 in the afternoon. I love how fall comes so early in Minnesota. It's possibly the single thing I miss most about "home."
Here in Korea… summer-like weather will persist well into October, although Koreans will obstinately call it fall. Seasons are defined solely by the calendar, here, and not by actual experiential conditions. And, in general, I would say weather in Korea is more predictable on a calendar basis than in the midwest of US.
Caveat: It’s really cute
What do you suppose that above quote is referring to? A coworker said "it's really cute." What was she talking about? Lo and behold: she was referring to the way that I sound when I try to speak Korean. This is so much more positive and pleasant than the occasional mockings and put-downs that I have to tolerate in my efforts to learn the language.
I won't go so far as to read anything into it except just that it probably does sound quite novel and entertaining to hear a foreigner trying to speak the language – it's something even more rare, in most Koreans' day-to-day experiences, than hearing English or seeing foreigners at all. In any event, the semantic range of "cute" (귀엽다) is much wider in Korean, and generally speaking less ironic and/or flirtatious in the way it's deployed by adults.
Anyway, a little bit of positive (or at least non-negative) feedback can go a long way, in my soul (or whatever it is that I have that passes for a soul). I'm feeling pretty happy about my language-learning efforts, for once.
We'll see how things go, over the weekend – I'm committed to spending the whole weekend with Mr Kim, in a little odyssey to Ulsan. I may not be updating my blog until Monday morning.
Caveat: Phone Phun
OK, I got a new phone. My colleague Haewon helped me with translating what the guy in the phone store needed to say to me. I'm still trying to figure out how to use it. If you have interacted with me on the phone in the past, please, please call or text me, because I've lost all my numbers from my old phone – it died a terrible and tragic death. And next week was its 3rd birthday! Happy birthday, old phone! Sorry you've left us.
Caveat: Typhoon Kompasu
I get a lot of little notes and messages about the typhoon. "Are you OK?" I'm fine.
Typhoon. Sounds exotic and dangerous. Really, just a hurricane, but rebranded for Asian audiences. Both are names for a big, windy rain storms, which are primarily dangerous if you like hanging out or living near large bodies of water.
Last night, I didn't sleep well, though. The wind was causing the doors in my building to go "clank clank" as they fought against their latches in the rapidly shifting air pressure. The building isn't tightly sealed enough to prevent this.
Lots of wind and heavy rain. It's annoying, if it happens to be when I need to walk between my apartment and the bus terminal – that's a 20 minute walk, and there really is no alternative – I suppose I could get a taxi, but getting a taxi when it's raining hard is not an effective use of time, since that's the idea many, many other people have too.
So, I get wet. An umbrella is useless, when it's raining sideways and the water on the sidewalk is ankle-deep. This happened yesterday, walking home from work. During the rainy season, I carry plastic bags in my backpack, and use them to seal all the things I'm carrying inside the bag in rainproof containers.
But is the storm dangerous? Do I feel at risk. Not really. It's got the same feel as an intense California winter storm. Wind. Rain. But risk of life and limb? No. There may be flooding. Korea has had bad floods, sometimes – the hazards of being a country made up entirely of mountains and river valleys between them. But my apartment, and my place of work, are on high ground.
Caveat: 14..14…14…
I was walking past the mental hospital the other day, and a group of patients were outside in an enclosed yard, shouting, '13….13….13'
The fence was too high to see over, but I saw a little gap in the planks and so I looked through, to see what was going on.. Some dude poked me in the eye with a stick.
Then they all started shouting '14….14….14'…
Caveat: My cellphone appears to be broken
… so if anyone has been trying to call me or text me in the last 24 hours, there may be a good reason I haven't responded. I will have to go interact with someone at the phone store…
Caveat: The English Teacher K
Yes, another Kafka reference.
I go to work yesterday, only to find out I don’t need to be there. The groundskeeper asks me “오늘 수업 있어요?” (“have class today?”) and I say I don’t – I knew that. But I thought I still had to be there. I’m not quite sure how to phrase that, in Korean. Then he asks me why I’m there. No one else is around. I go to the classroom I’d been using for my summer classes, just as a place to hang out and a computer to sit down at. I text some coworkers, and await their response.
Finally, they text back that, indeed, I didn’t need to be there. I contemplate feeling angry, but decide that “showing up for work when you don’t need to be there is better than NOT showing up for work when you DO need to be there.” Hmm, what to do?
I walk back down through the courtyard. There are some children, hanging out. “Hi kids,” I say. “Why are you here?”
Big googly eyes, showing utter non-English. Yeah… how would you feel, if some guy spoke English to you, after a wonderful, month-long summer vacation? I recognize the little girl from a fourth grade class, from the end of July. So I ask, “학교에 왜 왔어요?” (“to school why came?”)
“그냥,” (“just whatever”) she answers. Big, pleased-looking smile. Kids do this, in Korea. They come to school when it’s not in session, just to hang out. That’s especially interesting, when the school’s been transformed into a giant construction zone – two workmen carrying bags of cement trundle past us.
I poke my head in the teacher’s workroom, one last time. My colleague Mr Lee is there. Look of utter surprise. In Korean, he begins something to the effect of “why are you here?”
“오늘 일하야 하지 않아요… 잘 몰랐어요.” I know this is bad, awkward Korean, but he tilts his head and grins in understanding – its message makes it across the barrier. (“today work not have to… didn’t know”)
I leave the school. I have a free day. Completely unexpected. Well, not completely. I remember thinking on Friday… I’d thought, what are the chances I show up on Monday, and it turns out I don’t have to be there? But when I’d asked a coworker on Friday, they’d said, “no kids Monday, but yes we have to work.”
I decide to take the bus to Gwangju. Maybe hang out in a Starbucks or something. I do that sometimes. Got to support that Starbucks stock in my 401K, right?
I study Korean for a few hours – mostly vocabulary – something I haven’t done in such a focused manner in quite a while. Then I think, really, I should go find the immigration office. I have this pending bit of bureaucracy that needs finishing: I need to get a “multiple re-entry” stamp to go with my visa, for the event that I decide to travel outside of Korea – so far, I haven’t felt like traveling outside of Korea, and the soonest plan to do so would be next February, but having a free day during the work-week, in Gwangju, is pretty rare, so I might as well try to take care of it, right?
I log onto the internet using free wi-fi, and go to maps on naver.com, to find the immigration office. It’s not where I thought it was – good thing I looked. I walk around downtown Gwangju, then take the single-line subway out to Hwajeong station, and walk through this very much under construction neighborhood to the immigration office. As I arrive, it begins to rain. Why is it that every time I arrive at an immigration office in Korea, it begins to rain? I’m serious, I’ve been here 3 years, and this always seems to happen.
When I get into the immigration office, the place is more internationally chaotic than a Los Angeles branch of the California DMV. There are at least 50 dispirited-looking people in queue (taking little numbers) ahead of me, playing with ballpoint pens and forms. Sitting in chairs and standing around, enjoying the airconditioned office, away from the stunning humidity outside.
I hear vietnamese, tagolog, russian, english, chinese, some-other-language. Ah… nevermind. Maybe I’ll try to figure out how to do this online? Or come back some other day, when half the foreign population of Jeollanamdo hasn’t got business at the immigration office.
I go to E-mart (Wal-mart, since Wal-mart abandoned the Korean market some years back, the local partners re-branded as E-mart, but it’s still basically Korean Wal-mart). The sky is beautiful, as I walk. Clouds scudding.
I find some good Australian cheddar cheese for sale, there, unexpectedly. I buy a new shirt. I go to the bus terminal, nearby, and have a “toseuteu” (“toast,” which really means a grilled egg sandwich). I go back home.
Strange, directionless day, yesterday.
Oh… I just had a strange, strange thought. What if you sat down to read Kafka’s The Castle, but you were given one bit of information before you started: “The Land Surveyor K is a bodhisattva.” Wouldn’t that utterly change the meaning of the book?
Caveat: Let People Live In Your Heart
I want to be a better teacher. Often, I feel like I drop the ball on this immense project. Sometimes, I lose sight of the objective, or else, I get frustrated, and stand still, for a long time.
Sometimes, one finds unexpected inspiration. Many of my fellow foreign teachers are my “friends” in facebook, and I occasionally take the time to survey the messy world of facebook postings, to see what’s going on. This morning I found some unexpected inspiration, in something someone posted a link to. So I’ll add it here.
I don’t know if this is possible in American public schools. It should be. Certainly, although not common, it’s at least not inconceivable in a Korean classroom, at least in my limited experience. It’s an example of what I’ve seen translated as “moral education,” which is an integrated part of the Korean classroom curriculum, as in Japan. My feeling is that although the teacher in the video is still an outlier (on the “good” end of the scale), he’s less of one in the Asian spectrum than in the Western one.
I haven’t finished watching all five parts on youtube. Much of it isn’t per se relevant to working as a foreign language teacher (as opposed to, say, a local-native-language homeroom teacher) – empathy can be hard to convey when the kids only understand a small percentage of what one is saying to them.
But I’ve never found the concept of “moral education” offensive, the way that many Westerners react to this Asian classroom universality, and which this teacher in this video has integrated so deeply into his classroom. Certainly, done badly, it can be full of nonsense and propaganda. But done well, it’s the absolute main purpose of putting children into collective groups and “educating” them – much more important than math, reading, writing, etc.
I often end up on the losing side of arguments with Westerners (and even with Koreans) over whether the Korean education system is “broken” – I believe it is much less “broken” than our American system, at least at the elementary level. And in part, it’s because I think that the sort of “moral education” being exemplified in the video is at least not impossible here, if nevertheless rare. Whereas it’s become my impression that such a classroom experience would simply be out of the question in the US. Maybe it is, and I’m just out of touch with how education works in my home country. But that’s my impression. And the fact is, if I had kids right now, I’d rather them going to school in Korea or Japan than in the US or Canada.
Caveat: Arcoiris en Bulgapsan
Mi amigo Seungbae recien ha conseguido nuevo empleo en Gwangju. En consecuencia, voy a poder verle más frecuentemente que cuando estaba en Suwon. Ayer me llamó, y vino a visitarme en Yeonggwang por unas horas. Como tiene vehículo, fácilmente fuimos a Bulgapsan, la montaña al sur del pueblo donde se ubica un templo algo famoso, y que no he podido visitar hasta el momento: hay autobuses locales que corren regularmente, solo he faltado de motivación para poder hacerlo.
Llovía bastante fuerte a ratos, en el parque alrededor del templo, pero fuimos caminando y hablando. Debía haber traído mi cámera, porque el templo fue muy bello e interesante, incluso un puerto en forma circular, construcción tradicional, muchas figuras pintadas con los colores tradicionales de Corea. Debo regresar con mi cámera.
Caminando de regreso al estacionamiento, vimos un gran arcoiris sobre el valle.
Caveat: The View From Your Window
Andrew Sullivan has a feature on his blog (at The Atlantic magazine’s website) called “The View From Your Window,” where he invites people to send unstaged photos of views from their windows, and he publishes them in his blog. He’s even compiled these photos and put them into a book.
A few months back, I emailed a photo I had taken from the window in my classroom at Hongnong. I had posted the photo on my blog, on June 17. I didn’t really expect the photo to be published in Sullivan’s blog. But he did. Now I can say that my photography has been published on The Atlantic‘s website.
[UPDATE 2024-04-18: Of course, in the fullness of time, The Atlantic’s link rotted. Mine did too, actually, but I was able to fix mine. Anyway, you can’t see that view from my window on Sullyblog, anymore. Sully long moved on and became right-wingier and irrelevant.]
Caveat: Goodbye, Town
Today was the last day of my “summer camp” classes. I was so pleased with how much my sixth-grade class (which actually included not just sixth graders but at least one fifth grader, one fourth grader, and a third grader, too) seemed to like the project. We made a town, on the bulletin board, using construction paper, with scissors and crayons and pens. And using dice, we played a game, running businesses, having disasters, earning money, buying and selling land. We even had a stock market.
It was a small class. All the regulars showed up for the last day. We liquified assets, and I sold them “real world” stickers and candy. $200 bought a miniature chocolate bar, and $300 got a small sheet of smileyface stickers. We disassembled the town.
Here is a video I made, this morning, before that end. The girls’ ability-levels are highly varied, but they all understood the main ideas, and got into the project.
Caveat: Not A Single Charming Feature
That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I realized that since the whole apartment fiasco that my school put me through during my first two months, I never took the time to post any pictures of my new apartment. On the inside, it’s quite similar to my apartment in Ilsan, although it’s a bit smaller. At least it’s fairly new and in good condition, and the existence of a working airconditioner is definitely a redeeming feature. But it’s not charming, per se.
On the outside, it looks like a low-end Korean love motel, with the added bonus of being situated in the back parking lot of a gas station, and a 20 minute walk down a vaguely rural highway from the bus station. Here’s an outside view. My apartment is on the sixth floor (actually fifth, since “fourth” is skipped due to bad luck – much the way 13th floors are skipped in American buildings, sometimes), behind the false gable, second window from the left end.
Caveat: I want money ~ please
I found this on my bulletin-board town (which the students named “Washington, SK”) today.
Actually, the student who wrote this is the richest in the town. So I guess that’s the power of affirmational thinking.
Some other close-ups.
Caveat: “Seu-naeng-naep” Part I – Konglish Challenge Quiz
When the Korean Language borrows words from English, those words undergo very regular and scientifically predictable sound changes (by the "science" of linguistics, specifically the sub-field of phonology). It is inappropriate (and intellectually lazy) when foreigners (i.e. foreigners in Korea, meaning non-native-Korean speakers) refuse to understand this and make fun of it, or attribute "konglish" pronunciation to laziness or ineptitude on the part of Koreans attempting to use English vocabulary.
But it nevertheless can be challenging to figure out what is meant, or even to realize that one is hearing an English word at all. I like the example above, "seu-naeng-naep." I won't write it in Hangeul, because that might give it away to the more savvy and/or to the vaguely bilingual among my readers. I was only able to figure it out because of the context in which I heard it, combined with above-referenced access to Korean phonological rules.
The Konglish Challenge Quiz question is: what English word for a product advertised on TV, is being named by the term "seu-naeng-naep" (revised romanization; IPA [sɯnɛŋnɛp])?
In "Part II" I'll give the answer.
Caveat: Are We On Zanzibar?
John Brunner's novel Stand On Zanzibar is a new wave science fiction novel written in the 60's and meant to be taking place in 2010. The novel made a very profound impression on me, when I read it while still in high school – in fact, all of my college entrance essays referenced the book, if I recall.
Since it was set in 2010, it might be interesting to re-read it now. I think it had a darker vision of the future than what has actually come about – I recall a sort of constant-state-of-war, a la Orwell's 1984, but with a McLuhanesque flavor.
I wonder if I could get a copy here in Korea.
Caveat: 제목: 공룡액자
I don’t know why exactly, but I love this picture that my first-grade student Eun-ji made for me. She wrote 제목: 공룡액자 in upper left and bottom center. It means “Title: Dinosaur Picture,” roughly. She wrote my name, 왜제렏 (my own prefered transliteration), but then appeared to have second thoughts and crossed it out (or else maybe she experienced the vandalism of one of her peers?), and wrote 선생님께 (to teacher) instead.
And here is a picture of the sixth grade town-building class. These are five girls who refuse to leave – the picture was taken 20 minutes after the end of class, and they’re still messing around with arranging things in the town, discussing things they want to do, decorating their houses and businesses, etc.
