The Seoul Patch

Innumeracy in the News

2012-01-26T13:44:00.000+09:00

Several news sources, probably beginning with Yonhap, the Korean News Service, have reported that Seoul's bus and subway fares are going to rise by 150 won next month.

That translates to about 13 cents US money, or a 17% rise. That's significant to some, especially those who use the system on a daily basis.

But wait. The story goes on to say:

The city government has come up with a proposal to raise bus and subway fares from 900 won to 1,150 won (traffic card fares for adult) next month, while freezing prices for students and children, officials said.

See the problem? An increase from 900 to 1,150 W is actually 250 W, or a 28 percent increase.

The same error is repeated by Korea Times, and Arirang. The Chosun Ilbo gets the numbers right, and adds a piece of information:

If the committee accepts the proposal, city bus and subway fares will rise from W900 to W1,050 and those for red commuter buses from W1,700 to W1,850 when using traffic cards.

Frankly, it's still a bargain, and is the only way to go anyhow, at least for me, who can't afford a car and wouldn't dare ride a motorbike in Seoul.

Book Report: Seollal 2012

2012-01-25T02:08:00.000+09:00

Operation Spider-Web by MH Sargent - Sargent has created an interesting team of CIA operatives who work, at least in this tale, third in the series, within Military Intelligence. Gonz, Heisman, McKay and Peterson seem to work together well, and I suspect their backstory is covered in a previous tome, but that doesn't matter so much compared to the current plot. And on that topic, I'm not sure I buy the initial story that gets the team involved in the operation that forms the focus of the book; but once they are in it, it is a gripping and realistic series of events. A fun, easy read for those who lkke battlefield action and intel subterfuge. It's an independent brought out on Amazon, Kindle-only.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami - Slow-moving but carefully drawn and totally genuine characters, I would believe this is exactly what happened to Murakami in his youth except he emphatically denies it. It is a sad pair (or maybe even trio) of love stories told from the boy's POV in the Tokyo and environs of the late sixties. The student upheavals of those times form a sort of background, though no one in the action is a revolutonary--if anything, the action and drama is a counterpoint to their inability to act and move. Nonetheless, Murakami is able to paint a dynamic still life of four real people with Beatles music in the background.
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart - This is without a doubt the strangest book I have read in quite some time. First off, it is set in an indeterminate near-future where people are largely known by their buying power (LNWI = scum = low net worth individuals), and their personal data is easily read on their apparati, personal information devices. The US as we know it no longer exists, it is the ARA or American Recovery Admininistration, and the Chinese National Bank is about to lower our credit rating. In this crazy world, Lenny Abramov falls in love with Eunhee (Eunice) Park, a slim, self-centered Korean girl whose father beats her and whose mother and sister tend to rely on Geejush to save them. Lenny is a flabby, thirty-nine year old of Ashkenazi stock who works for the megacorp that runs things, despite it being in a little-known branch whose job is indefinite life extension. If the author had replaced "True" in the title with "Weird" it would sell a million, at least in yuan-pegged dollars. Seriously, I would not miss this book if I were you!
The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink - Like The Big Chill, except the subject of the weekend together for old friends is still alive--he didn't die (as played by Kevin Costner in his most life-like role), but got released from prison. Jorg is a German terrorist who was convicted of the murder of four people nearly thirty years earlier, spending his first weekend of freedom at his older sister's country estate ; it's very talky, and even at that doesn't manage to explore the key issues to my satisfaction. As with The Reader, I started to like it better as it went on, but I was still left wanting, though I must say the sparks between Henner and Margarete pleased me.

설날, or Seollal

2012-01-24T16:50:00.002+09:00

Seollal is the Lunar New Year, Korea's first or second most important holiday, and its main harbinger is the appearance of domi girls in brightly-colored hanbok at your local E-Mart.

They are there to hawk gift boxes of various goods, as Korean tradition dictates that you don't return to your hometown empty-handed, apparently even if it means bringing socks:

Other popular gifts include towels, hair care products and especially Spam:

Here are a few other items:

The prices of Seollal gifts can vary immensely, from a few thousand won for dried fish to a hundred bucks or more for mushrooms and 500,000 W for the package of three ginseng roots below:

I lopped the price off the ginseng, so you'll have to trust me that it was 500,000 W--I'm not 100% with my new camera, and assumed the data bar along the bottom was just covering the bottom part of the picture. Live and learn.

Meeting a North Korean

2012-01-18T01:25:00.000+09:00

Talk to enough South Koreans, and eventually you meet North Koreans. Our little street in Bongcheon (see the previous post) is populated by ethnic North Koreans who came here through China a generation ago. At my school, I have mentioned we have a boy from North Korea, whose family arrived here in March or April 2011. He came to our school about two weeks after second semester began, in September 2011.

His English was non-existent, and his Korean, at least of the variety spoken in the South, nearly so. Over the course of a semester, he improved considerably, and even semed to understand me a few times. But mostly, as my co-teacher told me, he was overwhelmed and nonplussed by what was happening around him--he has not had much schooling. We have worried about whether he will ever fit in.

Tonight, I met a young man who went through a similar process back in 2001, at about the same age. Ten years later, he is in university here, and was able to speak to me in English quite adequately.

He left NK with his family--his father, his sister and himself--after years of hardship after being sent to a cold, remote area near the Russian border. They were being punished for some error his grandfather had made as a cadre many years before, apparently in the time of Kim Il-sung. What did the grandfather do? He doesn't know. Even his father doesn't know.

Why did they escape? Unrelenting poverty and starvation. How did they escape? They bribed the guards with some food and simply walked across the Tumen River to China. We know there was spate of refugees around this time due to the late 1990s famine.

After about two years in China, they felt endangered and made their way to Mongolia--to the capital, Ulan Bator, and flew to South Korea. How did you get the money for this flight? He wasn't sure, but his father was able to work in China, and it was probably that.

What happened to your mother, why didn't she come with you? "It's a lie," he told me. Huh? "They lied to us," he insisted. The said she had a disease, he couldn't explain it in English.

At this point, his more fluent friend stepped in and showed me in his cellphone dic that it was tuberculosis. The saddest part of the story is that he still does not believe this tale: if his mother died of TB and he doesn't believe it, that's sad. If she hasn't died (or doesn't even have TB), he'll probably never know, and that's just as sad, really.

By the time he came to South Korea, after two years in China and Mongolia, assimilating was not as difficult a time for him as my student has had. What do you miss from North Korea? Nothing. What was the hardest change about living in the South? His father finding work. He is a journalist and writer, but it is still difficult.

Was my chain being pulled? I doubt it, partly because there's no advantage for this young man to lie to me, and secondly because of his tale's internal and external consistency.

So, should we hope his Mom is still alive in NK, probably in a "re-education camp" or a backwards hospital, or should we hope she has passed beyond the tortures of the family member left behind? Cf., Morton's fork.

Happy Happy in Bongcheon

2012-01-15T15:10:00.000+09:00

The festivities are about to begin! A stack of thirty lamb skewers and some cold, crisp lager are the key ingredients to a delicious meal in the Chinatown street of Bongcheon with friend Kevin (seen here with the 서장님):

This delicacy is a Chinese/Mongolian favorite (most Koreans don't much care for lamb meat) but we're in Seoul, so it's served Korean style, cooked at the table. When the meat is grilled, it's stored on the rack above until you dip it in the seasoning:

The other main attraction of Bongcheon is our favorite country-style makkeoli 집 where the best in the city is still 1,000 won per cup.

After filling up on lamb just a half-block away, I was not hungry, but Korean culture requires that you have food whenever you drink alcohol, so Kevin selected the dubu kimchi, which isn't a bad choice at all:

I know I have posted about lamb and makkeoli in Bongcheon before, but I am testing out my new camera before vacation. It's a Nikon D5100 with the kit lens which is a Nikkor AF-s 18 to 55 mm with VR. I'm playing with the presets, so the food photos were taken with "food" and outdoor shots with "night landscape". Tell me what you think.

Anyang 1 번가

2012-01-09T21:35:00.000+09:00

Is the main "eating street" in Anyang, a short walk from the subway station. Here, Nick contemplates the myriad eating choices:

While this was a nice street, it was not particularly massive, or even terribly busy, on this Saturday night in January after a hockey game.

We passed by one samgyupsal restaurant, and went in the second one, careful to ask if smoking is okay. The ajumma assured us it was. As soon as we sat down and placed an order for two servings of meat and two bottles of beer, the young waiter tells me smoking is not allowed. He checks with the ajumma, then comes back and says only "a little smoking" is allowed. I assure him I will only smoke one at a time.

The food is good:

... but after repeated hassling despite assurances that a little smoking is okay, and only one bottle of beer provided, we cut our losses and backtrack to the other samgyupsal jib.

Here the pork was just as good, and also less expensive. Plus it was sprinkled with chopped green herbs:

Sated, we ventured back onto the street to find a bar, and Nick spied a place labeled "World Beer". But once inside, the name was something else:

맥주광, maekju gwang, which could translate as either Beer Storehouse, or Beer Fanatic. Either one would do. I have seen this business model before, introduced by Kevin, and love it as much as The Stumbler, who dedicated a post to it. A few dozen varieties of foreign and domestic beers are stored in a bank of upright coolers along the wall, which are self-service. That is, you walk up to the coolers, browse a bit, then snag a cold bottle of something tasty--the beers are arranged by price, which is clearly marked on the door. The prices are quite reasonable. When you check out, someone tallies all your bottles and you pay up.

Both Beer Caps and Beer Fan offer only simple anju (beer snacks) like dried squid, peanuts, etc., but you can bring your own food in or order it delivered. Wow! Both are also franchises, and both seem to be doing a pretty good trade. The Beer Caps (맥주뚜껑) we know is in Sinjeongnegeori, but there are several locations, including Omokgyo and out near Gyesan

In sum, these places are quite like WaBar or JS Texas Bar, but more informal and much less pricey. On the other hand, the electronic dart games, loud customers and pulsating music make them harder on my old ears.

Asian Hockey League in Anyang

2012-01-08T17:15:00.001+09:00

A little ways south of Seoul on Line 1, you will find the suburb of Anyang.

A five or six grand taxi ride from the station will take you to the Anyang Halla Ice Hockey Arena, where two-time Asia Hockey League Champions Anyang Halla play their home games.

I made the trek down there with my friend Nick just to do something new--why not? The Halla are the Bears, and here I am doing the ever-popular photo-op with two iterations of the mascot, each more disinterested than the other:

We figured we'd probably see about twelve ice hockey fans, but the arena was packed to the rafters, about 1,200 people. A consult of Wiki tells me Korea had a professional ice hockey league that folded in 2003, and the team now in Anyang are the only survivors (they were originally in Mok-dong, and were the Mondo Winia); they became a founding member of the Asia Hockey League, now in its ninth year, which consists of two Korean teams, four Japanese teams and the cellar-dwelling Shanghai team, China Dragon. Here's the home team, currently league leaders, taking the ice:

The opening face-off, followed by a couple of action shots. Halla beat the visitors, the Oji Eagles, in this first game of a three-game series by a score of 4 - 1, though two of their goals came in the last six or seven minutes to an open net.

Neither Nick nor I is what you might call a hockey afficionado, but the game was fast-moving, had plenty of action including one and a half fights, and took place about six rows away from us. The enjoyment was perhaps enhanced by the three large bottles of home-brew Nick brought along, one of which was kind of blah and bland, two of which were rather tasty, and all of which had over 5% alcohol. I would do this again.

Next post: what to do Anyang after a hockey game.

December Book Report

2011-12-31T15:19:00.000+09:00

Well, I haven't been blogging, but I have been reading, my standard book or so per week. Here are my usual snapshot reviews.

Worth Dying For by Lee Child - Jack Reacher is Child's franchise character, ex-military, massive, super-smart, with cat-quick reflexes, and an encyclopedic knowledge of anatomy that instantly informs his hand-to-hand combat moves. Moves he needs quite often, at least in the nondescript Nebraska town he finds himself in in this novel. While hitching his way east, Reacher gets entangled in a nefarious family and their stranglehold on the small farming community. He has to kick a fair amount of Cornhusker ass in order to untangle things, which he does with unbelievable alacrity. Still you know he's putting it to really bad guys so you don't mind too much. The problem with the book is that all Reacher's foes are so easily overcome by him it's hard to feel much menace in what should be menacing situations.
Red Inferno: 1945 by Robert Conroy - This is an interesting alternate history novel based on the premise that Russians did not stop in Berlin as WWII concluded in Europe, but instead pressed on to attempt the capture of all Germany, thus reneging on the Yalta pacts. What ensues, in this version, is a massive land war once more consuming western Europe, this time with the US, Britain and France (and some of the vanquished Germans) fighting Russia. The book unfurls its events with good pacing through several POV, interesting characters on both sides of the battle lines.
Blood Street Punx by Joseph Flynn - Not at all what you might expect of a book whose title suggests it's a novel of Chicago gangstas seen at street level. In fact, the Punx are a group of well-heeled boys from the near North Side who are talented artists. However, most of their parents want them to pursue family careers in law, real estate, etc, so they decide to make a big splash on the art scene--painting giant murals as the gang of the book's title. They seem oblivious to the fact that they are "tagging" territory owned by some of the city's most vicious gangs, and pissing of the mayor and police, as well. They wanted attention, just not the kind of attention they were getting. Interesting premise, well-drawn characters (mostly), a quick read with a satisfying ending. Surprisingly good.
Skylar by Gregory McDonald - Teen-age beauty queen Mary Lou Simes has been brutally nurdered, her body found a quarter-mile from The Holler, an illegal dive in the forested area of rural Greendowns County. Sheriff "Pepp" Culpepper and his deputies have a built-in suspect in the person of Skylar Whitfield, the boy who always escorted Mary Lou in her pageants. Skylar is a smart but happy-go-lucky recent high school grad, with no college acceptances but lots of offers from the local females. Meanwhile, his cousin from Boston is spending the summer to recover from mono, and the two don't seem to be getting along. Sheriff Pepp and his wife aren't getting along either, and when another body turns up, the heat is turned up both on Skylar and the Sheriff who is pursuing him. Good story up to the end, but I'm just not sure I can believe the final solution to the murders.

Christmas Cake 2011

2011-12-31T15:12:00.000+09:00

Happy Holidays to my Dear Readers, and my apologies for my laxity in posting of late--one of my New Year's Resolutions will be to blog more regularly in the coming year.

Anyway, this year I got two Christmas cakes: one for an early Christmas dinner shared with a couple of good friends, a tasty chocolate mocha affair they called "Opera Cake" at Tous les Jours; the second was the only chocolate one they had left on Christmas Day, populated with the popular children's cartoon figures of Pororo and friends:

Tuttle [hic] Update

2011-12-18T18:40:00.001+09:00

Not much happening around these parts, except we started year-end exams on Thursday, which will continue through Wednesday.

On Thursday, I was invited to 회식, hwe shik, a work lunch, with the Development Department of the school, even though I am not a member. In what I would term quite a coincidence, we had lamb skewers at the same restaurant at Sinjeongnegeori where I had dined with Kevin and The Stumbler just two nights earlier.

The head of the Development Dept, Mr Lee, took a liking to me early on, and I was invited so he could tell me how sad he is to have heard I may be leaving the school. Then liberal doses of Tsingtao and soju were applied, and then a bottle of Hennessey cognac came out, and then blue bottle of some clear Chinese hooch was produced.

At about three or so, several of us were whisked via taxi to meet English Dept head Mr Wright in a local hof, where lots of beer was consumed, followed by noraebang, or singing room.

It is a disconcerting feeling to be swimmingly drunk and back on the street from the noraebang while it's still broad daylight. We went to another hof and had chicken and beer. I texted some of my trivia compatriots that it looked like I would not be in attendance, but was informed I was needed.

Somehow, I got to Itaewon just as the quiz began and kind of sobered up under the influence of only three more beers and some heavily salted French fries. We tied for first with only 37 out of 50, which meant more beer.

Somewhere in there, 필름끊겼다, fillum kkeungyeotda, my film was cut but I woke up in my bed when the alarm went off Friday morning.

And that's how you do a hwe shik.

The Moon and the Seasons

2011-12-11T23:08:00.000+09:00

As my pal The Stumbler reminded me, last night was a total lunar eclipse, an event that occurs at a full moon phase, when the earth lies directly between the sun and the moon. They are relatively rare, and though the last one was earlier this year (June) the next one will not occur until 2014.

It's not much, taken with my iPhone, but that's the scene about an hour before totality. I went to the roof of my fifteen-storey building about four times through the course of the event, and each time there was someone different up there having a look-see--or in one case, just seemingly smoking a cigarette. One guy had a really nice camera and tripod, snapping away. A young couple who spoke decent English were up there with thier five-month-old daughter.

Wrapped warmly. Because it was cold. At least a few degrees below freezing. Looking at my blog posts, I admit I have a tendency to whine a bit during winter about how cold it is. That's mainly because it gets really cold here, much colder than anywhere else I've ever lived, except Chicago.

But this winter, not so much. Have I finally steeled myself to the ravages of Seoul's harsh snow season? Broken down and started wearing thermals? Insulated myself with the constant companionship of a hip flask of brandy? No. It just hasn't been that cold. Until now. A week into December, we've had a few days of sustained freezing weather in the morning and evening, but not yet to the point where I have put on my heaviest coat.

Last winter, the temp. never rose above 0 C during December and January, and much of February--there was still frozen snowy muck on the ground into March. Will this be a mild winter? Or just delayed in its arrival? Only Mother Nature knows for sure.

But one thing of which you can be sure, I'll whine about it if and when it comes.

Education News

2011-12-04T20:39:00.000+09:00

First out of the blocks, a chance for sharp-eyed English-speakers to earn some money: the Korean Tourism Organization is offering a reward to photogs who submit signs in muddled, Konglishy English found at "tourist spots". No precise definition of tourist spot, and road signs, restaurant menus and guidebooks are not eligible, as KTO doesn't have jurisdiction over them. Still, an interesting concept, and a chance to get a W50,000 debit card for your efforts. Click here for more.

The Chosun Ilbo carried a report last week of a study done by SMOE (my employer) analyzing the results of a survey "conducted among 28,761 students, 11,980 parents, 2,406 Korean English teachers, and 595 native English-speaking teaching assistants at 1,282 primary and secondary schools in Seoul."

The survey found that Koreans are still quite conflicted about having native speaking teachers run their English classrooms: less than one-third of parents and students "preferred" native speakers to Korean teachers with good English skills, though about 60% are "more satisfied" with the teaching job being done by foreign teachers. IOW, yes, you do a better job, but we still don't want you here--aka, having our cake and eating it too.

Speaking of which, English success not cake, the CSAT or suneung results have been published, and some 17,000 of the exam's 648,946 takers aced the English section.

The Korea Institute of Curriculum and Evaluation (KICE), announcing the scores of the 2012 CSAT [Wednesday], said that 171 people this year received perfect scores on the exam’s three core subjects - Korean language, mathematics and English - compared to 11 last year.

Post-exam bellyaching is an annual sport here, as people complain the exam was too hard if there aren't enough perfect scorers, or that it's too easy if there are too many. The testing authority aims for 1%, but never seems to hit that mark.

As if to make a point, the JoongAng printed elsewhere this story: Student’s perfect CSAT is all his own, about Baek Ju-hong, who aced the suneung without the benefit of hagwons, thus proving the effectiveness of public education.

...Or the inteligence, inquisitiveness and hard work of an individual student:

An avid reader, Baek said, “In the countryside, where there is not a single college prep hagwon, the only way to develop logical thinking skills was by reading many different books.”
Baek said he also had a head start with his parents, who were avid readers themselves.

November Reading List

2011-11-28T16:15:00.000+09:00

Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin - The autor is Provost of the Field Museum and anatomy professor at the University of Chicago. He is also a paleontologist, who discovered an important transitional fish called Tiktaalik, an intermediate between water- and land-dwelling creatures. This book is an eloquent elucidation of the central tenet in modern biology, that of the origin of species by descent with modification. He examines human anatomy to explore our evolutionary links to reptiles, sharks, and even bacteria, and does so with wit, clarity and joy.
The Bangkok Sporting Club by David A Berger - I didn't particularly like this book, at least not for the characters--one insane, one manipulative and dirty, and one naive and boorish--or for the story; I did like the settig, which is that pearl of the Orient, Bangkok, and the author was accurate in his treatment of it. Anyway, Phoenix Systems has a front-end contract to set up a new computer system in the US Embassy, and Phoenix's programming guru has disappeared with the job half-done; so underling Eddie reluctantly comes to Bangkok to finish the job. Meanwhile, there are occasional hints, snippets of conversation the author decides to let us hear without any apparent rhyme or reason, to suggest that not all is as it seems...
Angel Time by Anne Rice - I have always been a serious fan of Anne Rice, but her last few offerings have been wanting. This tome is the story of a twenty-eight year old professional assassin who ruminates to the point of tedium about religious belief and his lack of it; at his point of moral crisis, he meets an angel who takes him back in time to use his "special skills" to save some medieval Jews from an angry mob. At no point do the protagonist's special skills come into play, the climax and denoument are telegraphed well in advance, and there's not even a good plot twist at the end, like one could once count on in an Anne Rice novel (there is a plot twist, it's just not all that good).

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros - Prose poetry about a Hispanic girl named Esperanza growing up somewhere on Chicago's south side. In brief vignette's we meet her friends and neighbors, and slowly get know her and her inner life. Imanginative yet truthful, lyrical but streetwise, this book was a pleasure to read, and I wish it had gone on much longer--it's only 109 pages.
And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life by Charles J Shields - I used to say that Kurt Vonnegut was the greatest living American writer, but he died in 2007, so I don't say that anymore. I was very sad when I heard of his death--but not as sad he was to have lived so long, according this book, the first pure Vonnegut bio to make it to market. He was old, and tired, and in failing health for about ten years after completing what he promised to be his last novel, Timequake in 1997. When a critic asked why he brought out another book (A Man Without A Country) he answered that he had expected to be dead by now. Death, suicide, gallows humor, were major themes in his work, and it is clear he was ambivalent about living, much less living to 85. I for one am grateful he decided to stick out as long as he did. Anyway, this book is a bit uneven, and since it tells the Vonnegut story as truthfully as possible it is at times a hard read, for he had troubles--wife troubles, children troubles, friendship, health troubles ... it was usually the case that the instant something went well in his writing career, something would go to hell in his personal life. And his writing career was for many long years a trouble of its own, especially in the critical world, where he is seen even today as a writer for "the young". But his works need no defending by me. Here are the words his character Mr Rosewater prepares for the neighbors' twins' baptism:
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—-God damn it, you've got to be kind.

2011 KidPower Toy Con

2011-11-27T16:42:00.001+09:00

Last week, just in time for the Christmas shopping season, my classroom became the exhibit hall of the KidPower Toy Convention (third annual). This is one of my favorite lessons, but I have to admit it got rather wearying by the end of the week.

It is an information gap interview activity, where 10 better English-speakers man the booths of toy manufacturers and try to convince the other thirty or so students/store buyers to stock their newest product on the store shelves.

The buyers, however, have a specific type of toy they're looking for, within a certain age and price range, etc. They represent store chains like HomeNever, 6-Twelve, or Baiso, and their worksheets have all the information they need to share with the booth operators, and spaces to fill in the product details as they go.

You can well imagine the ages and ages it took to put this lesson together, but this year it was simple--no new toys to find or materials to create, just an hour or so to set up the classroom last Friday.

The toys are all non-competitive, non-violent, don't use batteries (thus, kid power), no movie tie-ins or pop culture references. They're also hands-on, though the kids in charge are warned to take care of them.

This is a successful lesson at least insofar as students actually want to come in and take their turns speaking and listening, as you can see from the guys waiting their turn:

One of my co-teachers asked me after class one day this week, "Do you ever think about that you are making conversation class with forty students? It is almost impossible." Turns out, this was a compliment, that I was succeeding in holding classes where forty students were actually conversing/comunicating. In his previous school, the native teachers were frustrated and never seemed to find lessons that worked.

i know the feeling. After three years now, though, I have largely fixed or eliminated lessons that don't work; of course, it must be said, some things don't work with all classes, and nothing works for all students.

Politics is Inevitable, and Sometimes Graphic

2011-11-22T23:52:00.066+09:00

Okay, for the past month exactly, I have been collecting images, photoshops (is that even a noun? Now it is), graphics, etc, shared by my peeps on FB.

As long as they had a political slant. And were amusing. Well, actually, the ones toward the end are not amusing one damn bit.

Remember to click on the image to enlarge if you can't read it.

Comments?

Cold Snap

2011-11-21T21:19:00.001+09:00

I hauled out my winter stuff a few weeks ago, but really have had no need for anything but the lightest of windbreakers--until this weekend. Saturday's high was in the mid/high teens (in Celcius) but Seoulites woke up to a -1 C morning temp on Sunday.

Today, it was -3 C and I don't think it got above 6. According to the Korea Times:

Although this was the first time for the temperature to fall below zero, it was 25 days later than in an average year, the KMA [Korean Meteorological Administration] said.

In other news, FC Seoul (3rd place) lost to Ulsan Hyundai (6th place) 1 - 3, while Suwon beat Busan I'Park one to nil this weekend in the first round of the K-League championship.

Lights! Camera! Action!

2011-11-20T01:51:00.001+09:00

For the last several weeks, first grade classes (remember, this is high school's first grade) have been doing a conversation unit about movies. After learning and reinforcing a lot of key movie terminology (based on the good work of our friends at Lanternfish: www.bogglesworldesl.com), we started applying it.

For example, in lesson three, half the sudents watched a Mr Bean vignette, then have to describe it to the other half, who had been sent out of the room. I provided vocabulary on the board, stopping and starting the video to make the plot and ideas clear; then, the co-teacher and I go around asking a few pointed questions of the ones who did not watch: What was the setting? What's the first thing that happened? What was the climax? Why didn't Mr Bean just walk back down from the high diving board? (Mr Bean at the Swimming Pool) Why was Mr Bean popping paper bags anyway? (Mr Bean on the Airplane), etc.

This week, lesson five, begins with a fifteen minute review of the movie terms, using a new methodology I found quite effective and will use again. To wit: I previously prepared a set of questions on little chits cut out from a Word doc, and put them in a container. The co-teacher walks around the room and randomly (more or less) selects a students to stand up, pull a question, and read it aloud. If the student reads it loudly and clearly, there will no repeating. I then pull a student ID number from my magic English cup for the student who answers.

If the student answers correctly, we all cheer and move on to the next question. If he doesn't know (or wasn't paying attention), the student remains standing, and will get a chance to answer another question later on. This was extremely effective in getting the question-askers to be loud and clear, and getting the rest of the class to shut the fuck up and listen carefully!

Plus, it can be used for lots of types of interactions: complete the sentence, vocab review, grammar points, etc. The key is not to allow your co or yourself to repeat or rephrase, as we so often do. How it took me so long to reach this formulation, I don't know, but I'll be using it regularly!

The main activity of this, the final lesson of the movie unit, is "Create Your Own DVD", an idea I stole from Eat Your Kimchi and modified to suit. One big difference is that my DVD template is actual size; anyway, the idea is pretty clear: students will design and execute a DVD cover for a favorte movie or a movie they'd like to make or see. I set up certain requirements of what it should consist of, requiring application of the things we've learned in the unit, like plot, genre, critic's reviews, stars, setting, etc. I show a couple of real samples, pointing out the features I'm talking about, then let them get to it.

The results range from the ridiculous (click to see full size):

... to the sublime:

And a few more examples, for posterity:

These projects are not, however, representative, in one main way: the majority of students spend all their time on the front cover, the graphic in particular, and hardly do anything on the back, which is mostly about writing in English. That is, after all, the pedagogic function of the activity.

I don't know the solution to this, since one justification is that it allows the weaker English student a chance to be expressive in class, a class in which they usually understand about one tenth of what's going on. I get that.

What I don't get is how they managed to make it into high school English without one iota of actual English.

Suneung Follow-up, and Tuttle News Wrap

2011-11-15T22:44:00.000+09:00

First of all, our friends at the JoongAng Daily have a pair of stories concerning the aftermath of the suneung or Korean SAT which took place last Thursday. No, no suicides--the results won't be released for two more weeks. (Wow, that was crude and ugly! Here's hoping this absurdity changes before more lives are lost ...)

Mother of all tests easier this year, declares the headline. Last year's SAT was "brutal", so this year's version was "more forgiving":

“We made efforts to have about 1 to 1.5 percent of students with perfect scores in each subject,” said Lee Heung-su, director of CSAT writers, in a press briefing yesterday.
Last year, only 0.06 percent of students received perfect scores in the Korean language portion, 0.02 percent in the math portion and 0.21 percent in the English language portion.
“Taking into consideration that last year’s CSAT was harder despite the fact that a high percentage of questions came from workbook lessons published by EBS, we tried not to make too many modifications this time,” said Lee.

On the downside, an easier exam makes it more difficult to be a stand-out at the top of the heap, just as the college application process enters the final turn. Sez the article:

According to college admission experts, the easier the test is, the more strategic test takers should be about their college applications, as the fate of test takers with similar CSAT scores rests on how well each of them do in the application process.

Seventy percent of applicants to the better universities (like SKY) are admitted through the regular application process--i.e., consideration of SAT scores; however, many other fine institutions will consider the scores along with high school grades, extracurricular activities and admissions interviews.

Good luck to all!

Meanwhile, in Tuttle news: 1) I had no classes, as today was a national criterion-referenced scholastic testing day for HS first and second grade. No one had told me, even though I went over the November-Decemder calendar with my handler just two weeks ago.

2) Today was 민방공 min bang gong, literally people's defense from the air, or air raid drill. It didn't affect me personally, as I was inside at 2:00 when the sirens went off. When I came to Korea, these drills did not happen, but for the last year or so, they have been held most every month, usually on the fifteenth. I think the timing of their resurgence coincides with the Cheonan incident, but I can't say for sure.

In the US of the fifties and even into my dimly-remembered 1960s, schoolchildren periodically crouched under their desks, or were herded into schoolhouse basements, in civil defense drills. I remember that when I worked in the Math/Physics building at WGC, we were an official fallout shelter, with the signs:

The Korean version, which began popping up around subway station exits, looks like this:

While I was inside today, and I guess "safe" from potential harm from the air, I did get caught in one of these drills last spring. Civil defense officials, wearing the customary yellow beauty-pageant sashes of Korean officaldom, take over all intersections and make the cars sit idle for fifteen minutes. They herd pedestrians into the confines, or at least the general area, of the nearest fallout shelter aka subway exit, where they cool their heels for fifteen minutes, until the all-clear blows.

Busy ajumma wait five minutes or so, then cluck and growl at said officials and continue on their way with their two-wheel shopping carts trailing behind. (Note to self: I so need one of those wheelie carts.)

3) Next week is the Kid Power Toy Convention at Young-il HS, I'm getting all excited! Partly because it's a really fun lesson, and partly because it means Christmas is near.

School Trip Weekend

2011-11-14T00:15:00.002+09:00

I went to France this weekend--or rather Petite France (or rather 쁘띠 프랑스)--as part of the first school-type trip I've taken since coming to Korea. This was part of my Saturday Public Speaking class, and our twenty kids were combined with the same number from the Critical Reading and Writing class and the Mathematics class.

We left Saturday morning at 9 AM and returned Sunday, a half-hour late, at 5:30 PM. The weekend divided into three parts, so that's how I'll describe it. We drove northeast from Seoul into Gyeonggi-do, and spent most of Saturday at the Institute for Mathematics Culture, basically an interactive math interpretive center:

The morning was basically a lecture (in Korean) for the students, then we went to lunch at a tofu restaurant about a ten-minute drive away. The afternoon had lecture, but also hands-on activities for the students:

... as well as the teachers (my native teacher counterparts in the critical writing course, Lauren and Derek, learning about the 'catenary'):

We spent the overnight at SMOE's retreat center in the town of Namyangju-si, styled a bit like a Swiss chalet, but with few of the amenities. As the weekend was chilly, the ondol floor-heating was welcome, but the sleeping on the floor was not. Shortly after arrival, there was a welcome speech, then we played a game of Jeopardy we had prepared, with the kids in the PS and CRW classes divided into four teams. Later in the evening, the facility staff led the kids in a series of recreational games in the "program hall" before 11:00 PM bedtime.

Say what you will about the isolation of the location, the notable absense of elevators in a five-storey building and the lack of bedroom furnishings, the food was quite good!

In the morning, the students were supposed to wake early for an exercise regimen, but no one we talked to did; after breakfast, we packed up and left for France--you know, the smaller one (webpage here).

Petite France appears to be a combination tourist resort (there are guest houses for rent, and loads of sightseeing families and romatic couples) and educational center (vis, our visit, the SMOE logo prominently placed outside, and its other title as Gosong Youth Development Center). It has also been used for filming numerous Korean dramas.

Period French table hockey

One of my students as participant in the mime artist's half-hour routine

If it is supposed to recreate France, the site is an unmitigated failure--not to knock the art, architecture or artifacts, but the fact is that everything is in the Korean language, and what is not is in English. Oh, there is the occasional 'Le' in front of a noun--Le Gallery, Le Shop--but I heard not one iota of French spoken. You might as well save your money and go to Paris Baguette or Tous les Jours.

Okay, that's going a bit far; there were things to see and enjoy, enough to occupy an hour, perhaps. But then I found the "Saint-Exupery Memorial Hall, dedicated to the creator of Le Petit Prince:

Most of the exhibit was in Korean and contained reproduction photos from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's life. Ho-hum. But the top floor was the jackpot--two dozen or so original drawings and sketches, a sampling:

There you go, dear reader, my first school trip, and my first trip into the Gyeonggi-do countryside outside Seoul. The sites we went to were all well-done: professionally managed, more-or-less interesting for the students. However, we spent far too much time on the buses, and the week-end was just far too long and drawn-out.

However, my real complaints are dry and pedagogical: 1) while the extra class program per se is based on exclusively English-language instruction, not a single portion of any of the sights, site or activities was done in English (the only exception is our Jeopardy game); 2) none of it had anything at all to do with public speaking.

From a curricular perspective, this weekend was a waste of time for my students--hopefully they benefitted in other ways, not least by some informal social time with members of the opposite sex. The students were well-behaved, upbeat and positive, and seemed to enjoy themselves--more than I did, at least.

수능달인

2011-11-09T16:57:00.000+09:00

... You, too, can be a 수능달인, suneung dalin or Korean SAT expert. Just eat our glutinous rice cakes!

For a mere W 20,000, you are sure to get the university acceptance letter you desire, with this collection of lucky baked goods from Tous les Jours.

E-Mart seems to specialize in chocolate products to improve one's suneung score, from Dr. Yoo to Hershey's to Ferrero Rocher. The Ferrero Rocher display is all about the "Golden Bell", a TV quiz show. According to this article, other products you can buy to boost your suneung expertise include a math-formula cushion to enhance your bedtime studies, portable oxygen tanks, and a suneung watch which makes no disruptive ticking sound--and also indicates when test-takers should move on to the next section.

The "D-1" on the Golden Bell display, by the way, is the countdown of days left before the big exam. Yes, it's tomorrow!

The suneung exam is a spectacularly big deal in Korea; the second Thursday in Novemember is the one time the university entrance exam is offered, and it is therefore the one day to which every high school student's whole academic career has been building.

Students and their families and their schools try to obtain every possible advantage, naturally. Special study mats, yeot and beef-octopus porridge might not help, but they might, so why risk it?

My high school only met during first period today, for two reasons: 1) underclassmen need to clean up the school, since SAT-takers will be arriving for the exam tomorrow; and, 2) so they can then go set up cheering groups at the school where the seniors will go to take their exam (somewhere in Yeongdeungpo-gu).

Tomorrow is a school holiday, except for the unfortunate seniors, and most businesses will open late to decrease traffic congestion, in order to make sure seniors can get to their testing site on time.

That's another reason the school day is so short today: seniors have to go scope out their testing site to make sure there is no confusion tomorrow. So in addition to seeing wandering, out-of-place students, you see signs like these, at least in the subway:

At the entrance to the school was posted this board, being examined by one of our students. It indicates where they are to go for their exam tomorrow, and also maps out the locations for students coming to Young-il as their testing site.

Good luck! Eat your omega-3s tonight, and get to sleep early--preferably on your math-formula pillow!

This Week in Korean Education

2011-11-07T00:27:00.002+09:00

I count four stories of interest in the week's online editions of the main rags. First up, do politics and education make good bedfellows?

Here's a great quote from a university student Choi, a law student who declined to give his full name to the Korea Herald for its story:

“One of my professors focuses too much on his political activities. Thus, his students, including myself, feel he has been negligent of his duty to teach and do research,” he said.
“Fortunately, his political views were quite similar to mine, so I was not offended. But many others with different views might have been annoyed when he expressed his views during his class.”

I imagine they might be, yes. The article, or thinly-disguised editorial by one of the right-leaningest paps, decries the involvement of popular professors, or "polifessors" [ugh] in the Seoul mayoral election to replace Oh Se-hoon.

One wonders if the story would have hit the presses had not Park Won-soon gotten the nod of the electorate, and pushed the poltical landscape a little further to the left than the KH editorial board likes. Park was an independent candidate, but with decidedly leftist tendencies.

In America, by comparison, Fox News and other right-leaning media don't utter a peep when, say, Georgia State University professor Newt Gingrich attempts to wield influence, but let a Barack Obama run for office, it's all effete intellectual professors of law trying to destroy the country...

So what do Korean university bosses think or say about this? Any policies guiding politics in the classroom? Apparently not, as:

Some critics also pointed out that as most professors joining politics and public service take a long leave of absence from their schools, young scholars cannot find permanent positions despite the vacancies.
Universities appear to be reluctant to take them off their payrolls as their activities in high-profile public positions help promote their schools.

Second, a weird story from Gwangju in Jeollanam-do, regarding a parent that injured himself in front of a group of teachers while complaining about treatment his daughter had received while being reprimanded by a teacher at the school.

According to the KT report, he had picked up a chair as if to attack the teacher during a meeting, then decided to use a tape dispenser, with which he cut himself. The father later apologized, and no charges were filed.

I am unclear about who the charges would be filed by in this, but in America, it's altogether possible the father would sue the school for having dangerous weapons like tape dispensers at hand.

Joong-Ang Daily had the only story I found on the Bureau of Audit and Inspection's report on university finances. Which is odd, because it's a blockbuster that should play into the hands of those who want to stymie the power of the education elites here. In essence, top managers at numerous schools have defrauded them of monies ranging from thousands to over ten million US dollars!

Not surprisingly, some universities take umbrage with the "interim report", complaining among other things that it's none of the government's business what they do with non-government money.

To be fair, academic independence is critical to a democracy, but that independence precludes both government and other power-brokers from excessive fiduciary entanglements. Also, when faculty members subvert the application process in favor of faculty children, that's particularly appalling here, where the application process is such a gauntlet. Speaking of which ...

The Suneung 수능 exam will take place this Thursday; it is the Korean SAT, offered once a year, and the only chance for most high school seniors to get into university.

It is not the only way, however, as some top students can get in via the "admission officer" system devised by the current administration to recognise superior students; and the early admissions system, which is much the same, and consists of a series of high-stress interviews with admissions officers.

I have been helping one of my students prepare for this exam process during periodic lunch breaks and free periods in the last few months: I give him a topic, a question and five minutes; he gives a five to seven minute response, including follow-up questions; then we debrief his answers.

He is an extremely bright kid with outstanding English skills, and while he got a lot better during this process, I can't take much credit. At the end of last week, he informed me that he got admission into his first choice, the Underwood International College of Yonsei--among the most prestigious placements in all of Korea.

Anyway, I mention this to bring you up to speed on the following story, about a kid with "sixth-grade scores" meaning "bottom forty percent of his school" who got into Hanyang University, one of the top schools, which requires "first-grade" scores. (My student 외수 earned "first-grade" scores at Young-il.)

Lee Kyu-hyeok used the admissions officer system to by-pass the suneung. Bribes? Powerful family? Blackmail? Creating an innovative software program that improves the performance of smartphones?

“When I was a senior at middle school, I bought the Blackjack Samsung smartphone. But it was too slow and sometimes stopped operating. I began work to repair it and made Kyuhyeok Rom. I thought it would be useful for other people, I distributed the software via the Internet blog, http://kyuhyuk.kr,” Lee said.

I'm not sure how well this guy will do in college, but I'm glad to see any signs that the suneung is losing its vice-like grip on the Korean educational system. Perhaps someday, English classes will teach students to actually speak English rather than to prepare for a nitpicky hour of grammar questions that are unrelated to English usage.

Lesson Plan: Quidditch Rules

2011-11-05T00:10:00.001+09:00

"Very funny, Teacha!" was the typical assessment of this new lesson plan (and "funny", it should be noted, is Konglish for "fun, or enjoyable"). And if my goal is to hear students speaking English, which it is, then this lesson worked well.

I teach at an all-boys high school in Seoul. Two generalizations about my boys: 1) they love sports; and 2) they like the Harry Potter movies. Combine those two, and one thing emerges: a lesson on Quidditch, the sport played by wizards at Hogwarts School.

This is an information gap activity in two parts, enlivened by some videos. Class begins with a YouTube mash-up I found of flying scenes from the movies with Lenny Kravitz's "Fly Away": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrTjaknIgPo.

Now that I have their attention, I can explain the first part of the drill: each team (or table) has a set of materials:

A and B cards each have half the rules of each category. Each list of rules has missing information--those blanks on the A card can only be filled in by information on B's card. The A and B pair sit across from each other, read their lists aloud and fill in the other's missing information. They practice until everyone knows the rules--well, the rules of their category.

Meanwhile, the co-teacher and I circulate, helping with vocabulary and quizzing them on their set of rules, to prepare them for the next phase. Before we move on, though, we watch a video that might help make things clearer for them; I put (not very good) titles on this scene from the first movie, where Oliver explains the rules to new Gryffindor Seeker Harry (or watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcpbSsv-pQ4):

At this point, students should be well-familiar with a sub-set of the rules; I created seven sets of rules cards, incuding: the pitch, the balls, the players, the broomsticks, game progression, rules of play, and fouls. I decided not to use Fouls with my students, as there are a lot of made-up words, and I don't see any up-side to confusing them: Quaffle, Bludger and Golden Snitch are quite enough.

Now a pair of students will share their rules with other pairs of students. "A" students will go first, receiving a worksheet with six categories of questions, as seen below:

My powerpoint for the lesson has a rotation diagram to move the "A" boys from table to table. They ask their questions and write down the answers they are given by the "experts" in the sub-topic. A timer goes off (100 seconds, for my guys) and they rotate to the next rule category. Watching the classroom clock, I have them do four or maybe five rotations.

Then the "B" guys get a question sheet and the process is repeated. As I said, this lesson worked quite well; one class had trouble with their behavior during the "rotation" sequences, acting like hooligans, but even they spent a lot of time actually speaking English!

This lesson preparation was extensive: first, I found the rules of Quidditch at a Harry Potter Wiki site (http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Quidditch, though this page has changed since then); then I had to select and simplify the rules, eliminating as much lingo as possible; divide the rules evenly between A and B; provide "information gaps" to be filled by the other card; create two sets of question worksheets, with three questions on each rule category.

I made the cards and rules topic signs to look as polished as possible and printed them off in color (a moderate to-do at my school) and since I had gone to that much trouble, had them laminated. Now I had to work out the logistics and procedures, and voila, many hours later, another lesson for the files!

While I did this lesson with my second graders (high school juniors), it would also work with the first graders at my school. A great deal more simplification and selection could make this doable at the upper middle school level--and I think it would be worthwhile.

Sometimes a great lesson plan is an idea, a handful of words and a great motivation. Sometimes, it is a well-put-together powerpoint or a couple of songs and a piece of paper. Other times, though, it is a meticulously prepared set of materials, specialized technological resources and an exactingly executed implementation plan.

Lions and Dragons at Halloween

2011-11-02T20:30:00.000+09:00

I went to a huge gathering on Monday night--Halloween; but oddly, not many people were dressed in costumes. I did get one good shot with somebody dressed as a lioness:

I went to the Korean Championship game five, SK Wyverns vs Samsung Lions; it turned out to be the last game of the series, as Samsung eked out a 1 - 0 victory to take the 4 - 1 set. It was their fifth championship title.

The atmosphere in Jamsil Stadium was terrific, and the crowd was loud and non-stop--so was the Samsung PA, located about 20 m. from my right ear.

The Lions' starting pitcher kept posting up zeroes and they got the only offense they would need in the bottom of the fourth off a solo homer to left-center by the left fielder, who gave a nonchalant wave as he came out to field afterward.

The Samsung people kept circulating with freebies to keep the crowd motivated, building momentum to the eighth inning sparklers:

Here I am with the gang, Nick, Brendan, the foul pole, and Kelly near the end:

And of course, at the end, there were fireworks! Happy Halloween!

Education News Roundup

2011-10-30T23:43:00.002+09:00

With this being the Halloween weekend, I couldn't resist this story about how Korean mothers simply have to whine about every-damn-thing: Mothers fret over high Halloween expenses in Korea.

Hundreds of online Halloween goods and clothing rental stores have sprung up in Korea. Most Halloween clothes are imported and priced between 85,000 (75 U.S. dollars) and 100,000 won (88 dollars).
Large discount stores have also jumped on the bandwagon. Over the past several years, Lotte Mart has been seen sales of Halloween goods such as crowns, pumpkin baskets and clothes rise 20 percent each year. Sales have grown 53 percent this year.
Many Korean housewives, however, fret over having to buy Halloween costumes for around 100,000 won (88 dollars) that are worn for just Halloween.

My ass! First of all, my local E-Mart as recently as today had dozens of Princess and fairy costumes, as well as pirate and firefighter outfits for 9200 to 12000 W. Frankenstein's monster and Munch Scream masks were around 5000 W . It doesn't even take creativity to go from the mask to full outfit just with stuff from a kid's closet.

Whose fault is the whole Halloween frenzy, by the way? Why, we waygookin, of course! It's not all these Stepforduh wivesuh keeping up with the Jonesuh!

A woman who has a five-year-old daughter said, “I don’t understand why schools are trying to celebrate an American holiday. Our children are unaware of the origin or the meaning of Halloween.”

See?

On a side note, I have done a Halloween lesson each year with my classes, and they consistently know all the key facts about Halloween, or at least the usual myths. Monsters, ghosts, trick or treat, candy, etc. They know pumpkin, though there is lots of spelling confusion, or at least 호박, and it was my goal this year that they should be able to distinguish between a pumpkin and a jack-o'-lantern.

Moving on, a more serious education story: Saturdays designated as 'Sports Days' at schools, according to the Korea Times. Of course, we're no longer supposed to have school on Saturdays, but since everyone does, education authorities think it would be good to

"[...]encourage students to join various sports clubs offered at their school where they can voluntarily enjoy sports every Saturday,” an official from the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said. “Students from different schools will also compete with each other in a national-level contest, too.” ...
The move is part of efforts to provide students with a supplementary program on Saturdays as a five-day school week starts next year. At present, students have five-day school weeks twice a month.
For various sports-related programs during “Sports Day,” the ministry will increase the number of physical education teachers and instructors to about 8,000 from the current 1,800.

This is all a Good Thing (TM), but it strikes me as Too Little Too Late (TM).

Speaking of which, the JoongAng Daily is tooting its own horn for having been selected as one of four publishers to create new English-language educational materials for elementary and middle school after-school classes. ‘My Apple News’ debuts in EBS English class, says the headline, though it didn't seem on first glance to be related to the recent lamented passing of Steve Jobs.

'Newspapers in education' seems to be a growing fad in English education here, though I remember using the papers as a graduate assistant in the Reading Dept. back at WGC. According to Ass. Prof. Peter Kipp at Ehwa, “The biggest advantage of learning English by reading English-language newspapers is that it offers interesting content that encourages students’ reading skills.”

I actually have to disagree. "Interesting content" is in the eye of the beholder--after all, any reading textbook author fully believes and intends that the content is "interesting" to his target audience. No, the biggest thing, well, two biggest things: currency and consistency.

Presumably, stories in a kids' paper (Weekly Reader, anyone?) are today, hip, happening, fresh, as the idiom goes, off the presses. Second, they have a consistent reabability level. A quick note about this, then you can go and look it up yourself. It is a common belief that newspapers are written at a third grade level. This is not true, it's just that most politicians function at a third grade level.

But seriously, "readability" varies by organ, with a generalization that the more popular the pap, the more basic its readability. What is true is that most paps will rate consistently around a certain readability level. People tend to gravitate towards an organ that matches their reading level, and it is a fact that USA Today has a lower (easier) readability score than the Boston Globe, for example. The trick for educators is to match readability to the level of the students, and hopefully that will be accomplished by 'My Apple News'.

The English Department Chair at my school, Mr Right, is completing his Masters in English at Yonsei, and has asked me on several occasions to proof his papers--with suitable food and drink compensation, of course. His thesis is on newspapers in education, and if the abstract of his research with Young-il students is to be believed, their vocabulary and useage grew by 20 to 30 percent over a two semester NIEE course.

I can state that his writing ability has improved considerably over the last two years. His first couple of papers were a mess, and not just the grammar and language; logic, structure and flow were equally poor. Happily, this abstract contained only a few minor grammatical/typo errors, and two or three sentences that didn't follow, or just didn't fit logically. He either needed an additional bit to make the connection or some kind of rearranging to make the flow more logical. Good for him, and I suppose, Yonsei, for operating a program that works.

Also, on the topic of Mr Right (actually Lee, well, actually 이), he's the best co-teacher I've had. Why? He's not afraid to speak English, to add something from a Korean/personal perspective, ask a question if he doesn't know or understand ...

His English is not perfect--he has a few sloppy habits and can't stop adding "s" to the ends of certains words--but he puts it out there and is insistent that his students do the same. It's a lot more like "co-teaching" with him than anyone else who's ever been assigned that job. He also assigned himself last year to be my 동생, little brother. Then hugged me so hard he broke a rib.

Street Scenes XIII

2011-10-29T21:58:00.001+09:00

To be precise, this scene wasn't exactly on the "street" as it was in a newly opened mall adjacent to Sindorim Sta. These characters, and several of their friends, were wandering around D-Cube City. And cities have streets.

I stopped by there on my way home today from teaching my Public Speaking class--D^3 is huge, but the 5F "Chef Street" or food court was not as impressive as I hoped: about two dozen restaurants, but most of them serving standard Korean fare. I gave the Burger Hunter a try, and pictured below is the "Cheese Cheese Cheese Burger", two patties with Velveeta (TM), mozzarella and grilled onions. It was delicious!

I have written about the rotisserie chicken trucks before, but now there is one at the end of the block and around the corner at least twice a week, making me very happy:

Finally, this bit of delection is called an Egyptian beef sandwich, near as I can tell from the sign:

... and you get one from this guy who parks on a curb in Itaewon:

He doesn't sell the OB Golden Lager, you go into the GS25 facing him to get that.

Hungry?

End of Language Series

2011-10-25T22:15:00.000+09:00

As a great fan of Stephen Fry, I have enjoyed the Language series partly, I'll admit, for hs erudition--but mainly because of its insight into language, which is one of the key things that separates us from the other animals. I urge you to watch these videos!

Book Report #27

2011-10-22T22:17:00.000+09:00

At three years, four months here in the Seoul Patch, it's blog post number 701 (and book report #27)!

Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie by Jordan Sonnenblick - Steven is an ordinary suburban middle-schooler who plays the drums, has trouble talking to girls and is annoyed by his younger brother--until said younger brother is diagnosed with leukemia. Frankly, had I read the blurb more carefully, i probably wouldn't have picked this book, but I liked the title and the cover art, since I am always trying to find a new book in case I teach book club again in my camp time. That said, tearjerker though it is, this book is an honest and well-written account of what this experience is like. Don't read this without a box of tissue on your bedside table.
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett - Armageddon and the end of the world was nevr so funny! An angel and a demon are the key characters in this tale, who have spent the millennia since the Garden of Eden days prepping Planet Earth for the Final Battle between Good and Evil. Unfortunately, they've misplaced the Antichrist, who happens to be an eleven-year-old boy, and he's not really sure he wants the World to End. Okay, so it's basically a lark, but along the way the authors make some valid points about religion and culture, poke fun at corporate training seminars, and make me laugh till I cry two or three times. Good ~~Omens~~stuff!
The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen - Yolen is one of the most prolific authors of children's fantasy fiction in America, with around 300 books. This one focuses on a young New York Jewish girl, Hannah, who complains about having attend another seder at her grandparents' house. Grandpa Will sometimes makes a scene by yelling at the TV set and brandishing his left arm--sleeve rolled up, you can see the blue tattooed numbers on his forearm. He scares Hannah at these moments, and she wonders why he wants everyone to remember, if it was such a bad experience. Anyway, sent to open the door for the Prophet Elijah, as per seder tradition, she is surprised to see not the hallway of her grandparents' building, but a greening plain under a dark sky, across which lumbered a hulling figure. Hannah is thus transported to a Polish shtetl circa 1942, and soon finds herself tattooed with a serial number at the Auschwitz camp ...
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot - Skloot spent over ten years researching and writing this book, some considerable portion of that time working to gain the trust of the relatives of the title character. As that may suggest, Henrietta Lacks was a real person (even if often misidentified as a "Helen Lane") whose importance to the world of modern biological research cannot be overstated. As she was dying of a particularly vicious cervical cancer, Johns Hopkins researchers harvested some of her cells, and found that they--unlike virtually all samples they had tried to date--grew well in culture media. Not just well, extremely well, so well that today there are tons of Henrietta's cells in labs today. Meanwhile, her family and children have never benefitted from their use, and were never even informed of the cells' being harvested. Fascinating, painstakingly researched.
This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper - The Foxman family is sitting shiva on the death of patriarch Mort, and narrator Judd Foxman has just learned that his wife, who just left him for his boss, is pregnant with his (Judd's) child, five years after their first baby was stillborn. Sounds like a depressing tome, but it is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. Not many books provoke a belly laugh every ten pages, especially when it is detailing the complicated, dysfunctional lives of a family in meltdown. Adept turns of phrase at every turn of page, flawed but genuine characters who leap from the page, well=paced story-telling that makes you want to turn the page, and then feel sad when there are no more pages to turn. Highly recommended.

In The Xenophobic News

2011-10-19T21:36:00.001+09:00

First, I must apologize to my faithful readers and "followers" for having been so lax in the last few months about updating. No good reasons, just excuses ... and a promise to try to get my act together. Moving on:

Two articles in today's newspapers in Korea to make one go, as Arsenio used to say, "Hmm..."

A report from the Korea Herald describes law revisions requiring hakwons to double-check E-2 visa-holders' documentation before hiring them. First, let me point out this is impossible because you can't get an E-2 visa until you've actually been hired. But beyond that:

“As the number of foreign teachers increases at private institutions, problems are on the rise with some involved in sexual assault and drug trafficking. And we revised the law twice in order to enhance the verification process and protect students from potential crimes,” said Han Chang-jin, education official in charge of private institutions.

Wow, problems are on the rise, huh? Any statistics handy, or even case studies on point, if I may be so bold as to ask? Well, a little further downpage we get this:

A Korean-American wanted for attempted murder in the U.S. was found operating an English academy in Gangnam District earlier August, shocking many parents and students and raising voice to toughen identity check for foreign teachers.

So, that's pretty much a "No", as the crime involved is neither sexual assualt nor drug trafficking. Okay, that's a bit facile, but how about this: the rule change would be unlikely to catch this individual, as he or she is a Korean-American who almost never comes to Korea on an E-2 visa. Fail.

Next, a group of "7 female foreign students arrested for selling sex " yells the KT head. The girls "included those attending well-known private universities". JoongAng Daily reports it is just six, and mentions they are from China, Mongolia and Uzbekistan. They were variously "lured into prostitution" or "made to sell sex" by a bar owner named Kwon, 58, who so far has not been arrested.

After all, the only thing she did was pimp out her teenage victims in her bar and noraebang. Thr police are considering seeking an arrest warrant:

“We are considering seeking an arrest warrant for the proprietor, who lured the foreign exchange students into prostitution,” a Yongsan Police official said.
“Since there is a high chance of foreign students studying in Korea to fall into prostitution to obtain living and entertainment expenses, there needs to be an active crackdown on the widespread damages caused by the Internet.”

What the fuck are you blathering about, you imbicile, you!?

Education News

2011-10-09T22:34:00.000+09:00

My friend and colleague 'Hwang-tae', as he is colloquially known, mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago that he was going to see a movie, Dogani 도가니 (The Crucible) which is based on true stories of sexual and physical abuse at a school for disabled children in Gyeonggi-do. The movie is for Over-19s only.

I said it sounds quite depressing, and he agreed. Well, it turns out something possibly good may come out of it, as JoongAng Daily is reporting that the government announced a new set of measures to permanently bar convicted sex offenders from teaching. This refers to Korean teachers.

I say "possibly good" for two reasons: alas, it mostly seems to apply to those abusing disabled teens, or at least "especially" disabled teens; further, it is probably yet another example of ill-considered overreaction, or legislation without teeth, as

Students will be disciplined more strictly when they sexually assault their disabled peers than when they do the same to students who are not disabled, the government said, adding that schools will be recommended to change their rules in that direction.

Huh? Recommended to change?

Okay, moving on: story #2 is a loosely-disguised ad for a group which wants to close down the English hakwons, this one called World Without Worries About Private Education (WWWPE). It says "private education" right there in the name, but they seem unconcerned about math hakwons (which I gotta point out more of my students attend than English ones) or music or sports or ...

That's--as I've pointed out before, in my opinion--fine and good: this culture is rather too focused on "getting ahead" in the education game, and thereby robbing children of adequate time to just be kids. The article touts a new "booklet" from the group that addresses "12 misconceptions about English education and gives alternative solutions". Sadly, at least in the article, some of the misconceptions are in the alternative solutions, and some of the solutions are mis-labeled as misconceptions.

I'm not going to belabor this, but let's just take one statement: "According to the booklet, the temporal lobe that controls language ability develops from age six."

Well, no. In fact, just go to the post above and watch the two eps. so far in Fry's Language series to see that fallacy be destroyed. In point of fact, most children have developed the majority of their syntactic and grammatical understandings by age three or four--take the kid whose weird father taught him Klingon alongside English: he learned the vocab, structure and syntax of Klingon quite well, but gave it up circa age three (which according to the bollocks above is before he even begins to learn it) because it wasn't very useful in communicating to his cohort.

So, if you want your child to be truly bilingual, speak Korean and English to her from the crib on up. I must hasten to point out, I am not seriously suggesting this as a solution to the English conundrum in Korea. No, it is clear from research that children absorb new languages like a sponge at least up to age ten or so; and even old people can learn a new language! My point is that it "develops from age six" is utter nonsense.

Stephen Fry on Language

2011-10-08T18:05:00.000+09:00

If you are interested in language, as presumably those of us who are English teachers should be, you will be interested to watch Stephen Fry's new 5 part series on language, "Hello". So far, two one-hour segments have aired, and a couple of fine Youtubers have posted them up almost immediately. Part one:

Part two:

Variety at E-Mart

2011-10-05T21:24:00.000+09:00

My local E-Mart (that's directly across the street) has really expanded its beer selection; you can't necessarily count on getting a particular imported lager, but you can count on a few you've never hear of before. At reasonable prices. Some photos:

It also offers a large number of baseball caps with misspelled, non-sensical or just wrong English sayings or slogans on them. The latest batch:

Why is the current Queen of England's seal on this "golf cap"?

Qualityest?

No idea.

Polisce.

Riddle Me This

2011-09-30T18:46:00.001+09:00

Second graders this week had an easy time of it after their exams, just playing word games and puzzle type things, including some riddles. One of the riddles is

The more you take, the more you leave behind. What is it?

The answer is supposed to be "Footsteps" and the wordplay is on the word "take". I walk around the room, looking at my feet helpfully, and someone usually guesses it pretty fast. But today, someone said, "Girlfriends." I had to concede that is a correct solution, but far too cynical for a seventeen-year-old to have.

Happy Time Over

2011-09-27T17:06:00.002+09:00

My school has been doing mid-term exams during the last week, which means to me arriving at school at the usual time (7:45), sitting around until about 10:30 and then calling it a day. I have more or less created and/or updated my teaching materials for the rest of the year. The weather has been quite spectacular--if on a few days deceptively warm--so I have spent as much time as I could dining al fresco and otherwise soaking it in.

Today at about leaving time, I run into another member of the English Dept. and he sighs: "Well, as teachers our happy time is now ended." We go back to full time teaching tomorrow, and we have one holiday between then and sometime in December--and that holiday is next Monday, Oct 3. This is a terribly long stretch without a break, something like nine weeks. On the plus side, I will have some fun units to teach in that span, like the movies unit, the toy convention, brands and advertizing, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Bonus Product: Yesterday as I was walking home, I passed a street vendor of the sort that lays a bunch of junk out on top of a blanket on the sidewalk. It's virtually unheard for me to buy anything from these guys, but I found the product I've been seeking, the multi-interface, flexi-handled backscratcher. Probably a bargain at oh cheon won, but I got it for sam cheon!

Autumn is Here

2011-09-24T15:55:00.000+09:00

In the last few days, the weather has changed--unsufferable heat and humidity gone, mild, breezy days with temps in the teens to mid-twenties in their place. A change so sudden and complete it's almost as if someone turned off a giant switch somewhere.

Of course, the calendar would say it is so, since the autumnal equinox occured on September 23, but things aren't usually so neat and precise. And sadly, if the last cycle or two is anything to go by, autumn won't be around for very long before winter comes along full-fledged and dumps a thick load of snow on top of us.

So here's to enjoying it while you can--get out and about doing outdoorsy things: go see a ballgame, play in the park, insist that your favorite restaurant set up a table for you outside. That's what I'll be doing, so come on over and join me, have a piece of chicken.

I Like Sports!

2011-09-20T00:17:00.002+09:00

Recently I attended a baseball game at Munhak Stadium in incheon where my Heroes faced off aganst the SK Wyverns. The scores are best left unmentioned but the idea that diversity shines here was less than illustrated by the guy that said to Nick, in passing, "Yankee go home." (Well, okay, Nexen lost 3 - 6 but had a really good shot at it in the seventh.)The original plan was the outlay of extra cash--usual price for a ticket 8,000 to 12,000 W--for the "table seats" but Nick gathered a sufficient crowd (10) to order up a "SkyBox", a long ways down a creepy hall:...with only six seats outside to serve ten people. It's not like we invented the idea that this SkyBox was for ten people, it says so on the ticket (350,000 / 10 people = 35,000 W).We were--all ten of us--good sports about it, and the rest of the crew posed magnanimously for this photograph on my new iPhone:

I cannot recommend going this route, however: 1) it's too small for ten people; 2) the view of the game is fine but not amazingly spectacular; 3) the idea you get freebies in your SkyBox is all wrong; 4) even when you try to order out for food and beer the phone DOESN'T WORK. I guess I'm glad i had the experience but it wasn't all that.Though they did have a special "Wyverns" beer:

...but it turns out it was only Hite with a decal wrapped around it!

On Sunday, I went to Sangam World Cup Stadium to watch FC Seoul host Busan I'Park. This is a great arena in which to watch a match. Alas, the team has done so well of late (winning the title last year) that many Seoulites have jumped on the bandwagon. The upshot is that it's much harder to find a good seat in general admission than it used to be. Still, I got an aisle seat (next to some English speakers) at the bottom of the upper deck. The view was basically like this:

The game, as FC Seoul games usually are, was awesome! Busan scored just before halftime despite FCS's overwhelming possession; Seoul evened up on a corner kick batted around in the box and then earned the 2 - 1 win in the 90th minute. Two of three goals, if I even have to say it, Big Five ones!Anyway, I apologize for continuing to be such a poor blogger, at least in terms of frequency .... I hope the quality at least has not suffered.

Chuseok Reading List

2011-09-13T11:37:00.003+09:00

Old Man's War by John Scalzi - My friend The Stumbler lent me this book, which turned out to be a very good mix of hard sci-fi and battle action. In Earth's future, we have begun to colonize the galaxy, where we encounter other colonizing species, often interested in the same finite number of habitable planets. To recruit manpower, the Colonials offer new bodies--superior, genetically-modified, nanobot-enhanced bodies--to elderly humans near the end of their terrestrial lives. They fight in the Colonial Army to protect colonists from vicious alien lifeforms in the hope that may one day retire to a colony themselves.
On Speaking Well by Peggy Noonan - Noonan is a superb poltical speechwriter, for Reagan, the first Bush and others, who unfortunately can't put aside her political leanings long enough to make a valid point about speaking well. With the exception of Teddy Kennedy's eulogy of his brother Robert, every example of a good speech is by a Republican, and every bad speaker is a Dem. Her overweening lesson is that every speech should be simple, every point simple, every sentence simple. Of course, she lives in a simple-minded world--she's a conservative. Okay, that's a cheap shot, but she likes those, she makes enough of them.
Ten Second Staircase by Christopher Fowler - A story from Britain's "Peculiar Crimes Unit", in which fallen celebrities are being murdered by someone dressed as a stand-and-deliver Highwayman. Meanwhile, the PCU's boss is hoping to get the two aged chief detectives of the unit to retire, but following the law of unintended consequences, the Home Office is moving to shut down the entire office. This is one of a series, and not the first one, but that didn't really impact my reading enjoyment--the characters were lively and interesting, the crimes quite mysterious and the denoument surprising but suitable.
The View from Saturday by E.L. Konigsburg - Juvenilia about four sixth graders who make up their school's Academic Bowl team, and kicking butt over seventh and eighth grade teams throughout the county, the district and the even the state. But mostly it is about the events of the summer preceding their sixth grade year, and about how the four became friends once school started. The structure is quite interesting, as we meet one character, then that character meets the next, who meets the next until we know all four. Charming but not too deep, and a Newberry Medalist.
No One Will Hear You by Max Allan Collins - Riveting, non-stop action and creepiness in what may become a classic of the serial-killer genre. JC Harrow is a small-town sheriff who has come to fame as the host of an "America's Most Wanted" style show called Crime seen! His team of forensic experts and criminologists have a problem on their hands: a pair of competing serial-killers who want to become famous on Crime seen! Meanwhile, JC is becoming a bit too fond of the lady detective from LAPD assigned to the case. Complex characters, clever criminals, perfect pacing and a show-biz backdrop make for a one-sitting read.
Confessions of An Economic Hit Man by John Perkins - This book is abut corporatocracy's insane and ultimately self-defeating march to global empire, and the author's somewhat overstated role in it. While I think the nuts and bolts of this account are generally factual, I don't buy 100% into Perkins's overarching theme that the purpose of the IMF and World Bank is to enslave lesser developed countries by way of overwhelming debt obligations for their infrastructure problems. Further, he fagellates himself incessantly about the part he played in corporatocracy's march to global empire: he was an economist, who habitually inflated projections in order for his accounts to get bigger, more lucrative projects, and thereby saddle the poor, dumb LDC with a loan that was more impossible to repay. Perkins has had an interesting life, but the conspiracy in which he was engaged strikes me as rather ho-hum.

My Chuseok iPhone

2011-09-10T19:47:00.000+09:00

Chuseok is a three-day Korean holiday roughly equivalent to American Thanksgiving--it is the autumn harvest festival. This year's festivities run Sun., Mon., and Tues., and many schools, including mine, ad Wednesday as a travel/rest day, so I don't have classes again until Thrsday, Sept. 15.Sunday is also the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US. Very far from cool.In other news, my bank recently gave me an international credit card--very handy for traveling or setting up iTunes accounts.I've never had the need for an iTunes account ... though I do now because I just bought an iPhone 4.It pretty much looks just like that, though I put a few of these things called "Apps" which is apparently short for "applications" (which those of us in the know know is what we should really call the "programs" on our computer), which is what I needed the iTunes account for.One really sweet "app" is called "Seoul City Metro" from JC Multimedia Design. First, it can use the iPhone's "location" feature to figure out where you are and give you a list of the all the subway stations within 5000 m of where you are. It has an interactive map, and for each station it displays the entire train timetable, putting the current time you're looking at it front an center. It even knows if it's a holiday. You can give it a begin and end station and it calculates the route and time. Much better than my old phone's map, though I didn't have to pay for it.I also put on an app that is a Korean-English-Korean dictionary. It is quite good and even has a pronounciation feature! Unfortunately, the pronounciation seems to be only for English words ...It is from "Cole Zhu, Inc." If you know a better one, drop me a line. Done below where it says "Comments".

An Argument for Streaming

2011-09-04T19:53:00.000+09:00

I have not been a very good blogger of late, and for that I do apologize to my regular reader. I do have a few reasons/excuses, just as a preamble to today's post:
1) Nothing big to blog about of late, things have mostly trod along on an even keel;
2) School and job-related activities have picked up, what with school going back into session, my extra class for Nambu district requiring some evenings and most of Saturday;
3) Other projects in the sitting at the computer and writing vein, having reduced my will to continue at the same for blog purposes.

And here we are again; nothing much to report, except I had a bit of a fracas with one of my co-teachers last week. As background, let me remind the reader that one of the key classroom management techniques I use here is "the stopwatch", something suggested by Dave Deubelweiss during my initial training by SMOE--so it has the imprimatur, as it were, of my employer. We have fifty minutes of class; when class begins, I start the stopwatch, and when the stopwatch (a big red one with one-inch digits) reads 50:00, class ends. If students won't stop talking, are misbehaving, egregiously off-task, etc., I stop the stopwatch (beep) until they get back to what they should be doing.

Another management technique I've picked up is the "exit pass" or "exit check", where students have to show they completed the written work before exiting the classroom; my co-teacher and I each cover a door and mark them off as they leave.

One of my co-teachers has a tendency to leave class either right at ending time or even a few minutes early. On Wed., he left so early he didn't know I was doing an "exit check" (this is usually only done when a class is not being diligent), putting me in the position of checking all forty students' work alone, and making some of them late for their next class. Unfair.

I happened to catch him in the hall on Thursday and mention to him that he left early, leaving me to do the check alone, etc., etc. He said, he needed his break time before the next class, that he thinks I should only follow the bells, and he recommends that I not use the stopwatch method.

I pointed out that this was the technique I had used since coming to Korea, and no other co-teacher had suggested it was a problem, what was ...--

He said, he could not adjust to my teaching style and if I had anything else to say, I could say it to the Principal! He walked off, leaving me to marvel anew at the psychic treat that is the passive-aggressive.

We co-taught three periods together all last semester, I asked him for his comments and suggestions on my lessons on several occasions, he has my email and phone number, but never once made a suggestion or comment. We were to teach first period together the next day, so I went round to his office when I arrived at school, bearing a blueberry pastry and a bottle of OJ from Tous les Jours. I asked if there was a time we could get together to discuss the problem he told me about, since after all we have practically a whole semester left, and I wanted to make sure he knew how important his contribution was ...

So we sat down after first period and I asked him to help me figure out what we could do about the issues. His only problem, at least that he is admitting to, was not following the bell schedule. I pointed out that since the construction of the new gym outside my very windows, we could no longer hear the bells anyway, so I used the classroom wall clock as a guide.

I asked him to consider the teaching situation from my point of view: I have no power over my classes. If I use the discipline techniques that other teachers use, I could easily be deported for assault. I do not assign grades, and the conversation that is the key aspect of my teaching is not even covered in testing. Just about all I have is to make them stay after class a few minutes when they misbehave.

I agreed with him that yes, it is an inconvenience to the co-teacher, but no more than it is to me, and the whole point of it is to be an inconvenience to the students. Hopefully, they'll remember staying after class and losing their break time, and won't repeat the behavior that led to that outcome.

Besides, I asked, more or less rhetorically, how often have I kept a class late? It's pretty rare, he agreed. He also agreed that he was displeased with his students' behavior in my class sometimes, but he could not stop it. The problem is, he explained to me, while I choked on irony, is that some students are able to get along perfectly well in my class, but some of them do not understand anything I say. They are bored and act out. Wouldn't it be better if each class has students of similar ability?

I sighed. Yes, yes, that would be better.

TW3

2011-08-28T21:24:00.000+09:00

Well, I showed up for my first day of classes for the new semester on Monday, only to learn ... there were no classes. I wasn't exactly disappointed by this revelation, but is it really too much to ask for someone to let me know about these things?

The reason we had no classes was somehow related to the fact there was an assembly at 11:00 for the retirement ceremony of Principal Jun and art teacher Lee Cheonggi. A guy retired last year and they had a ceremony for him too, followed by some really awesome pit-roasted pork (much like you'd find at Sprayberry's, for my Newnan readers). It was awesome, and I was looking forward to a similar celebratory meal ... but there was none. Not even the regular school lunch.

Tuesday and Wednesday are normal school days, and then I am told we will have the ceremony to install the new principal, who was previously the Vice-Principal, on Thursday, so there will be no classes Thursday after lunch.

Regular readers will not be too surprised to learn that we indeed had classes Thursday afternoon, and the ceremony began at 4:00. Afterward, Principal Shim was in his office, with the door slightly open, when I dropped by to give him a little gift. A bottle of 18 Y.O. Chivas Regal, the world's best blended, IMHO. He speaks as little English as I do Korean, but I get a really friendly vibe off him, so we sat and sipped a healthy couple of fingers worth while exchanging a few (very few) words.

Late Friday morning, I got a text message from the supervisor at Nambu District Office, who runs the program overseeing my Public Speaking class, telling me to check my email. In the email, she urgently wants to know if I can come to the district office on Saturday from 4 to 7 PM (that's the next day), to help grade eassays.

I almost said no purely on the principle that these people need to be more considerate of our lives, and our time. However, three hours work at 80,000 W per hour is a pretty strong inducement. All the other graders who gathered had known about this since the beginning of the week, so I'm unclear why I wasn't informed. Indeed, as I am the specialist instructor, and as this was the first step in the vetting process of candidates for the course, I would think my input would be primary.

In unrelated TW3 news (That Was The Week That Was), my trivia team was back at full strength on Thursday, and came in first place. Natch.

Education News: School Begins

2011-08-21T23:55:00.000+09:00

Well, tomorrow marks 개학하다, the beginning of school, the second semester at least. And my seventh semester at 영일고. Not a lot of new prep to do, though I have done my best to learn the lessons of previous, um, lessons, and improve my planning accordingly.

More on the new school term as events develop.

Meanwhile, let's inaugurate the back-to-school vibe with some education news:

1) The big story (well, for those of a political bent) is that Seoul mayor Oh See-hoon has gambled his career on a rare referendum concerning the free lunch plan brought in by the new City Council last year when the Dems took control. First, he decided to forego running for the Korean Presidency two years from now when when MB's single five-year term ends. The Seoul mayorship is a natural springboard to that position, as MB himself could tell you.

Then, today, the mayor tearfully announced he would resign--not if the referendum did not go his way (he is opposed to the free lunches) but if the voter turn-out is less than 33.3%. Reports the KT:

The brinkmanship, only three days before the Aug. 24 vote day and without a consensus with his Grand National Party (GNP), underlined the situation that he has no other choice but to take his last option in order to encourage as many citizens as possible to cast their votes, while opposition groups are campaigning to boycott the vote.
“If my decision today can sow the seed for ‘sustainable welfare’ and ‘true democracy’ in the future, I have no regret even though I disappear from the stage of history,” the mayor said.[...]
The mayor called for citizens to go to the polls and support his policy, which aims to provide free school lunches only to students in low-income brackets, over the city council’s idea to provide it to all students regardless of the financial status of their parents.[...]
Finishing the announcement, he abruptly fell down to his knees and bowed his head, an apparent gesture to appeal to Seoul citizens.

2) Korea has a functioning democracy, though it has its odd ideas of what that means from an American perspective. Still, no one who pays attention can doubt that there is a sophisticated political environment beneath the squabbles, lock-outs, fisticuffs and appeals on bended knee. Take the on-going flap over brief descriptions and a few words here or there in history textbooks. Dong-A Ilbo:

Kumsung’s textbook contains biased sentences such as, “Under the Rhee Syngman administration, pro-Japanese collaborators were not eliminated, undoing efforts to start a new country based on national spirit,” and “North Korea`s land reform based on free confiscation and free distribution benefited farmers more than South’s farmland reform did.” The ministry’s order to correct 29 items is based on common sense. A person with a normal historical view would agree to it because of hard-to-understand and unclear expressions and unilateral claims that go against historical truth.

In the US, a textbook publisher can write whatever they want in a textbook, but they must beware that it may not get adopted if it's too "controversial". Indeed, for many years, a single couple, Mel and Norma Gabler of Longview, Texas, actually had the textbook industry by the short-and-curlies, since they had strong influence with the Texas purchasing committee--that state being the largest single buyer in the nation. Alas, the Gablers were anti-science, anti-evoluton nitwits, with the result that when I began teaching in the 1980s, many biology textbooks barely mentioned the term evolution, even though it is a fundamental organizing principle of the field; my earth science books trimmed Big Bang theory to one or two innocuous sentences.

Ultimately, scientists and science teachers fought back; the development of curricula by groups like the NSTA gave us a powerful tool to counteract capricious and benighted policy-makers and textbook adopters. Korea is not yet at that stage; instead, despite its remarkably unlitigious society, textbook arguments go to the courts. As the article explains:

The Seoul High Court has ruled in favor of the Education, Science and Technology Ministry, which ordered Kumsung Publishing to amend its left-leaning high school textbooks on modern and contemporary Korean history. On Sept. 1 last year, the court had nullified the amendment order, saying assessment of the textbooks should come through deliberation by a specific textbook review committee within the ministry, which did not follow this procedure. This time, however, the court said no flaws occurred in the procedure, saying regulations do not require amendment orders to go through the review committee. Textbook authors agreed to make corrections when the ministry makes the order after the publishing contract is made.
The latest ruling said, “The country can screen a book upon request whether the book`s content is suitable for students, whether the book contains a biased view or expressions, and whether it goes against the national system and legitimacy.” The court emphasized that history textbooks should teach future generations historical truths based on Korea’s legitimacy and constitutional value.

This story appeared on 17 August. On 19 August, the Dong-A followed up with this lede graf:

Controversy is mounting over the term “liberal democracy” contained in the 2011 History Education Curriculum. Adopted by the Education, Science and Technology Ministry on Aug. 9, the curriculum provides directions and standards that Korean history textbook authors and publishers must comply with. When the ministry announced the final curriculum, it replaced the term “democracy” with “liberal democracy.” The draft curriculum said, “This explains democracy, economy and mass culture that have developed since the 1960 Revolution.” The final draft says, however, “This is to understand how liberal democracy and economic growth have been achieved since the 1960s and grasp the heightened international profile of the Republic of Korea.” On hearing news of this change, certain scholars are demanding that “liberal democracy” be replaced with “democracy” again.

An on-going irritation with Korean media is the frequent publication of opinion and editorial pieces that are not marked as such. The article has no by-line or Op/Ed designation but it clearly is. Take the xloser, for instance:

People wonder why certain forces show an allergic reaction to liberal democracy. Democracy can be divided into liberal democracy, social democracy, people’s democracy and others. If leftist groups do not pursue democracy that has its roots in liberty, they should make clear what democracy they are seeking.

3) In a completely unrelated story, JoongAng Daily gives us an "intern report" (one of a series written by high school students working with the paper's staff reporters) titled "Gadgets may transform classrooms". True, but then again, maybe they will not.

I consider myself pro-technology in the classroom--I used computers in school as long ago as 1989, I have been school webmaster, taught computer, tried to help my colleagues overcome their techno-phobias, etc, etc. But one thing I know after a quarter century in the teaching trenches is that gizmos and gadgets are tools, they are not teachers.

“Before using my laptop during class, it took me a lot of time, effort and energy to take notes in my notebook,” Sun [A-young, an 18-year-old student at CheongShim International Academy] said. “After the school allowed us to use our laptops, however, I found I could not only save time and effort but I could also easily find the materials taught during class.”

Yep, Sun hits the nail on the head. I don't know when this school started allowing students to bring computers, but it should have been long ago. Indeed, most US colleges require them, and more and more high schools, too.

Ah, but, as the story mentions, that's where it gets sticky:

Despite the rosy expectations, however, there is some concern, as not all households can afford such expensive devices.
“I am very worried about this decision,” said Kim Hye-young, 39, a mother of two elementary school students. “Our family cannot afford such a burden. People like us live every day with financial concerns. We do not have the capacity to pay for such an expensive device.”

Furthermore, some students will not use laptops in an appropriate manner--playing video games in class, or even searching for pr0n, could prove to be a distraction.

So what impact have "gadgets" had in the Korean classroom? The article examines a study called Ssam, in which 16 schools offered classes incorporating IT devices. The story says that within a year, students improved by "55 percent in Korean, 46 percent in mathematics, 47 percent in social studies, 50 percent in science and 34 percent in English. Also, according to the study, students showed improvement in concentration and logical thinking."

That would be pretty impressive if it were not total bullshit. First of all 55%, 46% of what, compared to what? Secondly, logical thinking is difficult as hell to measure, and even harder to measure improvement in, particularly in one year. I don't want to come down hard on the student intern here, so I say shame on you to the professional who failed to point out the meaninglessness of these statistics.

Thirdly, their lowest improvement was in Englsih. Go figure.

What I Read on My Summer Vacation

2011-08-17T20:34:00.002+09:00

I read six and a half books during my 12 days in Bali, the half being the sci-fi anthology "Year's Best SF 16" purposely left for the flight home. This meant I had to pick up an extra, in this case from the guest shelf at Puri Nusa Bungalows on Lembongan--the choices, like the guests, were weighted well against English speakers, but I had little trouble deciding between Mario Puzo's "Last Don" and an intriguing Canadian yarn about small-town life.

Further, suffice it to say that you should read all the "YBSF" anthologies, particularly on airplanes, because a) they exhibit great trust in the infallibility of modern technologies, and even if they don't, you're well airborne before you get to that part of the story; and b) the beauty of anthologies in general, especially with screaming children in the next aisle, is that if you decide you don't like the story you're reading, you can simply flip ahead to the next story.

About the screaming child, a few notes: 1) the two year old directly across from me was angelic for seven hours, sleeping comfortably in Daddy's lap, or studying the In-flight Emergency booklet like it was a comic book--colored pictures, not many words; 2) one row behind was a very similar child who was unsettled by every bump and every strange noise, and didn't mind telling Mommy in no uncertain terms, at the top of his lungs. I wanted to hate that child, but I couldn't--he was only saying what I was feeling; 3) my flights were less than ideal, including night-time take-offs and landings, and coming back to ICN, a foul weather landing. On the outbound flight, turbulence was horrible, including a full one-second drop which caused half the adults to scream! I refrained, but only because I wanted to keep a stiff upper lip for the two elementary-aged French children sitting next to me. Still, those kids were sterling and caused no trouble, though the little chap fell asleep on my shoulder a bit later; 4) not because of that, but I couldn't wait for the flight to end. Okay, I can never wait for the flight to end. I hate flying. Well, not flying, but taking off and landing. And yes, I did compliment the French kids' Mom about how well the tadpoles behaved.

Anyway, this is supposed to be the book report post.

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien - Probably the best fictional account ever done about the Vietnam War, the stories of O'Brien's platoon is riveting and real, but somehow lyrical. Chapter titles like "How to tell a true war story", "The man I killed", "Ambush" and "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" are sometimes as evocative as the tales they contain. The author takes his time to tell each episode, to get it right. Easily the best book I read this vacation, and for quite some time--cannot recommend it highly enough.

Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon - In the last book of his I read, Chabon pretended the Jewish homeland was the tundra around Sitka, Alaska, instead of someplace in the Middle East. His subject matter in this book is just as odd: an effete Frankish apothecary and surgeon joins up with an outsize African warrior to help the foolish part with their money on the trade roads of 10th century eastern Europe. Almost against their will, they take up the cause of an exiled prince of the Khazar Empire. And, as you might figure from the cover art, elephants figure heavily in the tale. A slim volume and a quick read, but full of interesting characters, unexpected plot turns, and Chabon's rich prose.
A Boy of Good Breeding by Miriam Toews - The jacket blurb compares the world of this book to Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegon, and to an extent that's true, but it would also be true of small town life as described by Lewis Grizzard. Anyway, the town, Algren, Canada, is indeed small, at 1500 people--so small it's in the running for a special visit from Canada's Prime Minister to the country's smallest town (a village is below 1500 population). There's nothing Algren's Mayor Hosea Funk want's more, especially since his mother's deathbed confession leads him to believe the PM is actually his unknown father, a mysterious young man in a black hat who seduced his eighteen-year-old mother at a village dance 52 years ago. Good stuff.
The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster - Set before September 11, 2001, Follies is the story of a retired life-insurance salesman who is diagnosed with cancer and moves to Brooklyn to die. But events don't turn out as he planned, for he re-establishes contact with his long-lost favorite nephew, breaks off all ties with his ex-wife, falls in something like love with the mother of a neighborhood jewelry designer who is dubbed the BPM (Beautiful Perfect Mother) by the nephew, takes custody of his lively great-neice, and doesn't die. Along the way, a really good book happens.
Loser by Jerry Spinelli - Spinelli is the author of elementary school angst, and Loser is the tale of Douglas Dinkoff, an easy-going kid who is a lot like every other kid. Well, he raises his hand with the wrong answers in class, can't bounce a ball very well, and laughs till he cries when his teacher makes up the word "Jabip" to describe a faraway, unknown place. By fourth grade, other kids think of him as a loser, but he remains oblivious--and eventually proves them all wrong with a very un-loser-like act.
Nick of Time by Ted Bell - A young teen coming of age, a time travel machine invented by Leonardo da Vinci, adventure and derring-do, history-changing events; this is exactly the kind of juvenilia I like, but somehow this story did not gel for me. Nick McIver's family operates the lighthouse on the smallest of the Channel Isles in 1939, the eve of Hitler's invasion. Meanwhile, time-traveling pirate Billy Blood is after Nick at the same time his great-great-great-grandfather is fighting off Blood's pirate ship in 1825 to prevent him carrying news of a Spanish double-cross to Lord Nelson and the fleet in Portsmouth. Blood has previously kidnapped Lord Hawke's children (Hawke owns Castle Hawke on the south end of Nick's island) and meanwhile, Nick's sister Kate and Hawke's second-in-command (Hawke is secretly a high-up in the Royal Navy) have been captured by a German U-boat. It's too much: the coincidences pile too totteringly high for me, the plot holes gape too wide, but I must say the ending is ripping good fun...

Bali: Nusa Lembongan

2011-08-17T17:45:00.001+09:00

Nusa Lembongan is relatively quiet, low-key beach. But happily, not entirely deserted:

It is probably best known to tourists for the world-class surfing; there are three main surf breaks along the west coast, Shipwreck, Lacerations and Playground. So, many of the bungalow guests were well-gone most of the day, leaving the cafe and beach chairs for me to lounge around on and do some reading.

While there are excursions and their associated boats, the small boats all along the shore are used by locals in the main industry of Lembongan, seaweed cultivation. 80% or so of the economy comes from exporting seaweed, for processing into carageenan, which is a binding agent for processed foods like gravies, ice cream and beer, and a thickener for products from toothpaste to shampoo to fire extinguisher foam.

Seaweed farmers place starter strands on strings strung between the small poles.

The seaweed grows quickly, then it is harvested into the bushel baskets ...

... and laid in the sun to dry. It comes in lots of colors.

The north end of the island, north of the village of Jungutbatu, you can find the seaweed farm community. The crushing poverty is an eye-opening contrast to the resorts and hotels just a fifteen minute walk down the coast.

But at least the sunsets are free for everyone.

Bali: Ubud Culture

2011-08-15T01:21:00.000+09:00

Denpasar is the capital of Bali, and it is the city most Balinese aspire to live in. It consists mainly of impossibly narrow streets lined with Circle K and MiniMart convenience stores. Extending northwest from Denpasar, the city blends into Kuta, Legian and Seminyak, which are over-crowded, commercialized, loud beachfront hells.

Ubud, about twenty miles north in the hill country, is the cultural and artistic center of Bali, surrounded by rice paddies and temples (as we saw in the previous post).

Every Monday night at 7:30, the Ubud Town Hall, right next to the soccer field, is taken over by the Luh Luwih Balinese Women's Gamelan and Dance Troupe. The gamelan music is easily recogniseable (go to my video about my accommodations to hear some) but the Balinese dance style brings to mind classical Thai dancing for all the emphasis placed on finger positions, the use of ornate masks, etc. The biggest difference to me was the stories seemed easier to follow.

Alas, when set on video, my camera did not pick up the dances well in the dark hall, so I'll just include a few stills for flavor. The Gabor, adapted from a ceremony in which young women distribute flowers among the temple's shrines; the Baris, in which a dauntless warrior prepares for battle; and the Oleg Tumulilingham, the hummingbird love dance.

In the Ubud area, and scattered around the mountainous region, are numerous coffee plantations which prepare the thick and strong Bali coffee, as well as the even more well-known "Luwak" coffee. The coffee starts as beans, of course, on a coffee bush:

The beans are fed to a "luwak", or Asian palm civet, a variety of cat:

After passing through the civet's digestive tract, the coffee beans (technically, they're not beans, they're fruit) are gathered and cleaned:

... Roasted and ground:

... then served, along with several other specialty coffees of the plantation, to visitors for 50,000 Rp (USD 5). Needless to say, there is a gift shop.

One of the most enjoyable days I spent in Ubud, and perhaps the most cultural of activities, was taking a one-day batik course, at Nirvana Batik studio. Instruction, all materials and lunch for the 10 AM to 2 PM session was 485,000 Rp. (less than USD 50).

This was awesome fun. First Nyoman explains the method to you. It's not like the batik I did in high school, where there's one color palette and you stain and wax over a period of days in successively darker hues. Instead, Nyoman has fabric dyes that more or less stay where you put them, especially if you stay inside the lines.

Okay, so you start by sketching with a pencil onto the fabric; my inspiration was this snap I took of some plants outside my hotel room window. Then if you're Joan, my only classmate, you go to the next step; if you're me, Nyoman fixes it up for you. He also provides a real life plant from the extensive property. You outline the project in beeswax using this really cool, but hard to work, pen thing, which you dip in the molten wax.

Then you paint in the different areas with colored dyes and let them dry. You fill in the parts you want to stand out with beeswax, and fill in the parts you want to "crinkle" with paraffin, using ordinary paint brushes.

Then you dye it with the background color (or actually have the assistant do it):

Then you boil it to melt off all the wax.

Then you let it dry, iron it, and take a picture for your blog:

I admit I'm no artist, but I like it and I had a great time doing it. Someday it will be framed and hang on a wall in my home--probably a little used guest bedroom.

Bali: Temples

2011-08-13T20:01:00.002+09:00

In Bali, there is a temple on practically every other block; the Ubud area is particularly infused with them, most famously the Sacred Monkey Forest Temple--my bungalow was located on Monkey Forest Road.

The monkeys were everywhere, scampering around, squabbling, stealing food (do not attempt to secrete food of any type on your person, they will literally rip your clothes to get at it). The tumble-down atmosphere had me singing "Yeah, I'm the king of the swingers, oh, the jungle VIP ..."

But it felt a lot more like being in "Willard".

After finishing my visit to the Temple, I was enjoying a beer at one of the establishments near the bottom of the hill (Coffee & Silver) when I noticed some escapees hanging around.

Not far from Ubud is Goa Gajah, known as the Elephant Cave Temple, but no one is sure if that's because of some relation to Ganesha or if it's because the Elephant River runs nearby. The site dates from the 11th century. though there is vidence of an even earlier Buddhist temple on the site. Shortly after the site was discovered by Dutch archaeologists in the twentieth century, it was buried and re-buried by successive volcanic eruptions.

There is nothing much to see inside--the cave makes a "T" about ten meters in, and there is a small shrine at each end. That is all. The series of fountains by the entrance are supposed to bring youth and beauty to those who wash there. I'm waiting.

A few miles further on is Yeh Pulu, a water-bearer shrine, known for its rock carvings from the 1300s. My guide Ketut and I were the only people there. The carvings are 300 m along a pathway which overlooks some rice paddies.

The images appear to depict everyday life: first you can see a man carryng two jugs, perhaps full of palm wine (tuak), following a woman who appears well-to-do judging from her jewelry; the second photo involves an alms- or gift-giving; and the third shows a man wrestling with a wild animal, probably a bear.

At the end of the wall, a little old lady, who is perhaps a caretaker, extorts 5000 Rupiah off you, which I'll grant you is only 50 cents.

The site was uncovered in 1925, and is thought to represent daily life in Old Bali, but another theory posits that, when read from right to left, the relief tells the life story of the Hindu god Krishna.

Bali: Cuisine

2011-08-11T13:05:00.000+09:00

Not that there was ever one single Balinese cuisine, but today's best restaurants are those in Denpasar and Ubud that we dub as "fusion", meaning really that they don't limit their flavor palate according to tradition. However, before I mention the fusions, it's best to talk about what it's being fused with.
The traditions here have been about fresh, local ingredients--something we can say about good food anywhere. Tropical fruits, seafood, locally grown meats (Balinese are proud of the quality of their beef, even if it is a Hindu culture), and spices. The key flavor unit in traditional cooking is garam masala, a mixture of about a dozen spices virtually identical to what we find in Thai, Indian and other South Asian cuisines.

I took the cooking class at Bumi Bali Restaurant on Monkey Forest Rd on a Sunday morning with 17 other acolytes, to find myself already familiar with many techniques and ingredients. If life gives you coconuts, make dishes with palm sugar and coconut cream. We did six recipes, all of them really delicious. The booklet has about twenty others, as well.

Ketut, our instructor, led us about a block to the market where he showed us various ingredients, but we did not actually select produce to cook with, as the cooking gnomes already had them sliced and cello-wrapped when we got back.

Ketut, arranging satays for presentation

Giant prawn salad

During the cooking lesson, we were offered opportunities to assist in preparation, but did not get to perform each technique--massive points off, in my ledger. Ketut was friendly and could answer questions, but he wasn't garrulous in the way one expects of an instructor in these circumstances. More points off.

Babi guleng--whole!

If there is one iconic Balinese food, it is a dish called Babi Guleng--roast suckling pig with certain trimmings. On my arrival in Ubud I was disappointed to learn that the best--nay, the only--Babi Guleng restaurant only went from 11 to 5.

Surely, I said to myself, and eventually to a handy taxi driver, this popular dish must be available somewhere tonight? Ketut understood, and showed me the way--it doubled or tripled the price of the meal, paying for a driver and all, but it was equal to the version I had later at the famous place.

The dish (get the "special" at Bu Oka for the best cuts) consists of rice, green vegetables, white meat, dark meat, hard cracklins, fried "sweetmeats", and a one-inch slice of blood sausage. Koreans would love this dish! Hell, vegetarians would love this dish!

Ubud has a number of famous eateries, but I took my first meal at Cafe Dian, mainly because I wanted to sit next to the water fountain and watch the passersby while eating Balinese style:

Siap base kalas - grilled chicken w/ Balinese spices

Cafe Dian is not currently in the Lonely Planet guide, which means it can't jack up their prices by 200%, as I found Lamak and Cafe Lotus have done. And I won't deny these were both outstanding eating experiences, but the smoked duck linguini at Lotus isn't twice as good as the Balinese Crispy Duck at Restaurant Joni just outside of town.

Lamak was also overpriced, but had an amazing atmosphere including a central courtyard where one could dine under forty-foot palms. My soup course was a tea-infused duck broth with duck meat raviolis; it was delicious snd ducky, followed by a flavorful beef carpaccio:

Three Monkeys is well-known for its pastries and desserts, I heard, as well as the view of a rice paddy from your table. Chocolate mud cake with raspberry sauce, delectable!

There are not a lot of choices when it comes to restaurants at Jungutbatu, the village on the north end of Nusa Lembongan--mostly the restaurant at your bungalows, or the restaurants at the bungalows all up and down the shore. Puri Nusa was adequate,with a nice grilled tuna:

But the best place I ate was called Agus Shipwreck, about two doors down, where I can recommend the beef stew and the grilled baby snapper. But really, what all the restaurants specialize in is sunset:

Bali: Hello, My Name is Ketut

2011-08-10T17:42:00.002+09:00

Bali is a small island in the Indonesian archipelago with a distinctive history and culture. Unlike majority Muslim Indonesia, 85% of Balinese are Hindus--Indian explorers brought their religion to Bali in the 600s, and the unique Balinese brand of Hindu is visible everywhere. Small offerings of fresh rice, flowers and fruit in little banana-leaf boxes are placed outside virtually every building daily:

Every home and business has at least one spirit house for offerings, and most have two different varieties:

Mailbox of the gods

Ganesha statues are commonly associated with entryways (this one at my hotel in Nusa Lembongan):

The statues are usually girded with a black-and-white checkered cloth, called poleng; the black represents evil, the white is goodness, the gods, and health; the idea is that you cannot have one without the other, that together the world is balanced. Where red is included, it represents blood or life.

During my visit, an important cremation ceremony was in preparation, so things were particularly festive, and the Royal Palace at Ubud was filled with artisans hard at work making ready:

Bamboo is not native to Bali; it must imported at great expense from Java

Another distinguishing feature of Balinese culture is the architecture. Houses are compounds, with spiritual protection as mentioned, made of thick black concrete and stone, with ornate friezes and decorations.

This bas-relief was actually on the wall of my terrace in Ubud

Better hotels are built in the traditional style, or at least to mimic it. I put together a video tour of my hotels in Seminyak and Ubud to show the general feel and features of the style.

The Balinese people are friendly and helpful--unemployment is low, though a great many are self-employed; in tourist centers, they are tour guides and taxi drivers, perstering foreign passersby for their trade: "Taxi, Mister?" Education is required through high school, and most everyone speaks Indonesian, Balinese, English and usually some other language like Japanese, helpful in dealing with the many tourists from there.

This seems weird, but there are basically only four names on Bali! Everyone you meet--male and female--is either named Wayan, Nyoman, Made or Ketut. They are named by birth order, ending with Ketut as a fourth child. If there is a fifth, they start over again. Here is a photo of Made, one of the friendly staff at Puri Nusa (Island Palace) on Lembongan. His nickname is Jambu, which is Balinese for guava, the tropical fruit.

In his hands, he is holding bottles of Bintang, the most popular local beer. Its alcohol content is 5.0% by volume. The other local brands are Bali Hai (4.9%) and Anker (4.72%).

Enjoying a Bintang and a book on the beach at Nusa Lembongan--you can see the mountains of Bali's main island behind me

Books and Bali

2011-07-26T00:29:00.001+09:00

I leave at 18:05 today local time for about two weeks in Bali (see directions below).

Just kidding. That's a sign for a bar named "Bali" above the restaurant where I had a kick-off dinner tonight with Chris, aka The Stumbler.

It's likely I won't be posting while I'm gone, so here are a few thoughts for other things to read until my return:

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon - Set in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, this is a dark and complex psychological Gothic mystery, and a very good read. Although I more or less figured out the mystery inside a hundred pages, I still wanted to figure out why so I gladly kept reading. Young bookseller's son Daniel comes across a little-known novel, The Shadow of the Wind by one Adrian Carax, and when he tries to find other books, he learns that someone is systematically buying up and burning every book of Carax's ever printed. His search to find out why goes to the heart of the Barcelona power structure, laced with insanity, incest and murder.
It's Superman! by Tom De Haven - De Haven's inspired reinvention of Superman keeps many of the standard elements of the lore: grows up as Clark Kent in Smallville (where he gradually discovers his "talents"), ends up working at the Daily Planet with Lois Lane, battles lex Luthor. But things are quite interesting along the way: he travels west as a railroad hobo with a wrongly-convicted photographer named Willi Berg, he works as a Hollywood stuntman for a time, he shacks up with a B-movie costume seamstress (which is how he gets the Superman garb--it was originally intended for Saucer-Man from Saturn). Clark/Superman is plagued by doubts and uncertainty, but fueled by righteous anger. I'm not a comic book fan, but this isn't a comic book, just a good read.
Idiot America by Charles P. Pierce - Seems at first glance to be a left-wing diatribe, but is actually a closely reasoned expose of what has gone wrong with America since the Reagan Administration. Idiot America is a nation where intelligence, experience and expertise are not only not required, they are anathema. Pierce has done his homework--bad on him! in Idiot America's view--and cites example after example of how modern America risks its sacred liberty by buying into the notion that truth is anything enough people believe, if they believe it fervently enough, from creationist Reverend Ray Mummert who pointed out in the Dover school board ID case that "We have been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture" to ... hell, I'm gonna stop there because it's just too depressing to continue. Just so you know, the last Bush Administration comes off looking pretty bad, and his detailing of the facts in the Terry Schiavo case will make you want to waterboard Bill Frist--not because you would acquire relevant information. Which you wouldn't. It only works that way in Idiot America, where a Supreme Court Justice (Scalia) cites a TV show character named Jack Bauer to justify torture.
Never Look Away by Linwood Barclay - The jacket blurb from no less than Stephen King proclaims: "The best thriller I've read in five years," and I almost believe it. Each new twist makes you think you've finally gotten a handle on the plot, but it's soon followed by another change that sends you puzzling. And the best part is that none of it feels contrived, except when it's supposed to. Reporter David Harwood, his wife and child are expecting a fun excursion to the newly opened amusement park in their area when everything goes suddenly and terrifyingly wrong. Harwood finds himself embroiled in a nightmarish situation involving his missing wife, false identities, mysterious informants and a robbery gone bad. Superior plotting, believable characters and perfect pacing make this a riveting read.

This Blog is Pure

2011-07-24T21:57:00.000+09:00

Koreans are obsessed with English--not so much speaking it as wearing it. As I was reminded yesterday at the baseball All-Star Game in Jamsil, when we saw a middle-aged woman walk by with "Up Yours" printed on the back of her tee-shirt.

Here are a few other tees I've caught lately with my cell-phone:

Attractive, but barely literate

They're not even trying! More misspelled words on this shirt than correctly spelled ones

The English here is fine, I just thought it was amusing

Education News

2011-07-17T22:53:00.000+09:00

This is probably the last Ed News Wrap-up until after the new semester begins, not because Ed News doesn't happen, but because I'm lazy and don't pay much attention to it during the inter-term hiatus.

Nothing earth-shattering of late, but interesting:

1) No. of women in higher education doubles, says the KT headline, but this is absolutely,unwquivocally NOT what it means to sat, at all. The article means to say that the number of women with a higher education has doubled:

The number of women in Seoul with higher education has almost doubled in the last 10 years, according to a survey Sunday. [...]
The research by Seoul City showed that the number of women aged 30 or over who received college education or higher jumped by 95.4 percent to 1.1 million in 2010 from 575,000 in 2000.
During the same period, that of men rose by 45.1 percent.

Girls are also matriculating high schools and continuing on to university at a better clip than boys--last year, 66% of high school girls went on to college, compared to 59.8% of boys.

Women are also defering marriage and motherhood, shadowing US trends of the seventies, with an increase of 37% of women in the 25-34 age cohort remaining unmarried compared to 2000.

2) From the JoongAng Daily, and perhaps of more interest to our waygookin readers, "At hagwon, demand for U.S. teachers rises". The story states early on: "Because Western norms have been embedded within these instructors’ gestures, speech and behavior, these teachers provide education in English while also exposing students to Western culture." This is particularly important for families planning to send their children to the States for English immersion.

You see, the teachers themselves, in this meme, are irrelevant, what's important is their embedded features, as though they are educational Terminator units with their mission hard-wired: Never mind John Connor, demonstrate American cultural minutiae to our children, please.

[One tutor at a popular hagwon in an upscale district] believes that an American teacher offers a certain trust to parents and students, which has increased their employment in Korea:

“There are lots of factors, but I think the overarching reason is that it is similar for most students,” he said. “[The] number one reason people go to these academies is to learn. And I think the biggest thing is [that they come with a] certain trust and feeling that they are going to get the best education from these native speakers rather than someone who can speak English but is not familiar with the culture. A lingering doubt evolves from that type of teacher.”

Meanwhile, although the national SAT will be adding an English speaking component in a year or two (such dates being eminently mutable), SMOE is dismantling the very high school conversation program with NSETs that represents the public schools' best chance at competing. Go fingure.

Yes, that includes my job. But, the way I understand it, I can keep my HS job as long as my school decides to offer it. Anyway, assuming a positive medical exam tomorrow, my job is secure for at least another year. Besides, who knows what may happen in 2012!

End of Semester (Whoo-hoo!)

2011-07-16T01:41:00.000+09:00

Today was my last class of the first semester--second semester begins on August 22. Usually, I would have to do two to three weeks of "camp" before the actual vacation begins, but yet again my camp offerings proved so unpopular that too few students signed up for the camp classes to "make".

What this means is that I am more or less free to enjoy an amazing twelve days in Bali with a return date well in advance of visa renewal strictures--remember, kids, it's only CHINA that requires Americans to have six months remaining on their Korean visas before visiting!

I made sure my classroom was spic-and-span today by having the last class empty the desks, sweep up papers and trash, and put up their chairs. I wipe down my horizontal surfaces every few weeks--window ledges, countertops, teacher's desk--and make sure the student desks stay clean, so we were all done by 3:00.

My "handler" Mr Oh let me know that I will do a Q&A with teachers and administrators from Australia, New Zealand and Singapore next Friday. We do this every year, on account of my school won some award blah blah. This is the only firm commitment I have, other than medical check and Immigration visit, until next semester.

Speaking of next semester, I have been asked by Nam-bu District to teach the Public Speaking and Debate class on Saturdays that I did last year. I am very happy to do it again, for three reasons:
1) the money is as good as it gets, including good pay for worksheets and ppt slides;
2) I get to use my expertise in this subject area, which is part of my BFA degree;
3) the students are awesome: obviously good at English, but also just plain smart--scholarly, thoughtful and opinionated. It's like having a whole class full of the three or four best students of my usual classes at Young-il go.

To be honest, if this kind of thing continues, I will find it harder and harder to think of reasons to leave Korea!

Good News for Aussies

2011-07-12T00:29:00.000+09:00

Jesters, a popular western Australian meat pie chain, has opened in Itaewon, around the corner from Dunkin' Donuts--go straight two blocks from Exit 3. For some Aussies, this is he equivalent of the Taco Bell for Yanks: it's not the greatest food in the world, but it's a real taste of back home.

My only experience with Down Under meat pies came on my trip to New Zealand; they were quite tasty. On my trip to the new Jesters, I got the "Classic" which is the traditional mince pie, and a "Southern Man" which is beef and cheese. I rounded it off with a mango smoothie, and the total came to a relatively hefty 11200 W (considering the #2 Combo at Taco Bell is 4500W).

The fillings were both really tasty, but I imagine the real trick is in the pastry. The Jesters website (Australia; Korea) claims their unique "Jaffle Pie maker" does the job better, but I found the crust less flaky and more chewy than I'd like, though on the other hand, I hate a crust that explodes into bits the moment you bite into it.

Still, it's definitely worth a trip, and I found at the website there's a location in Hongdae.

My Korean Things (to the tune of My Favorite Things)

2011-07-08T00:23:00.000+09:00

So click on the video from The Sound of Music and sing the lyrics below instead. Okay, ready? Go!

Rainstorms in Jangma and students who'll listen,
Sour Chinese cabbage and pa dalk fried chicken,
Dour old ajumma with long apron strings,
This is a list of my Korean things.

Well-paid tutorials and pink-tinted poodles,
Hwe-shik and mouse-click and doncass with noodles,
Bosses that act just like they're Deng Xiaopings,
This is a list of my Korean things.

Girls in white uniforms with plaid pleated fashions,
Itaewon losers who pretend that they're captains,
PC bang perverts who play with their dings,
This is a list of my Korean things.

When the kim-bap,
When the pay drop
'Cause there's no union shop--
I simply discard all my Korean things,
And then I fly home non-stop.

NB: This is just for fun. I got my new contract today, and my pay did not drop--in fact I got a raise. Therefore, I won't be flying home non-stop in August, but to Bali for a brief vacation. Stay tuned for more.

Restaurant Review: Gang Ho-dong's Baek Jeong

2011-07-05T13:38:00.001+09:00

He may be a Stumbler, but my buddy Chris has a pretty sharp eye when it comes to new dining experiences in Gangseo-gu cheong. And so it came to pass that we dined together last night at 강호동 백정 Gang Ho-dong Baek Jeong, which opened within the last two weeks across the street from our rendezvous point, the Family Mart Kevin calls "the office".

Anyway, the name means "Gang Ho-dong Meat Man". Gang Ho-dong is a Korean celebrity, a wrestler turned comedian, TV presenter and restaurateur. He's the guy I'm posing with above, and just so you don't forget between walking in the door and ordering your meal who the man is behind this culinary experience, that's also him in cartoon form on the menu cover.

We dined al fresco; the menu includes beef and pork, but we stuck with the red meat on this occasion; 소갈비살 beef rib meat was 11000 W per serving, and really tender and flavorful; most of the pork menu was 7900 W. One of the things I especially liked about this place was the ring on top of the fire basket, which was partly filled with scrambled egg to cook while the beef is grilling, and the other compartments so could cook garlic, onions, kimchi, etc without worrying about charring it.

Education News Wrap

2011-07-03T23:58:00.000+09:00

Time for the weekly *cough, cough* post about what's going on in education here on the peninsula. And this one is particularly interesting, or at least [your adjective here] since it crystallizes some of the key issues in Korean education.

First up, there is "the problem with an easy CSAT prep test", the problem being that too many Moms complained that the test does not allow their particular genius children to shine, since there was just too much shiny-ness.

It’s an important issue because CSAT scores are weighed heavily by universities in their admissions criteria. “If the official CSAT this year is this easy, getting just one problem wrong will place you in the second level,” said Park Su-jin of Seoul Foreign Language High School. Park is in charge of helping students at the school with their university admissions.
“Because of this [exam], it will be harder on the students.”

One might suggest that the best action on an easy exam is not getting just one problem wrong. That's what Norfolk & Chance did last Thursday at 3AP in winning the Trivia Contest, after all. But this is Korea, and it's always more complicated than that:

[Previously] KICE came under heavy criticism from parents. Last year, only 11 brought home a score of 100 percent for those sections. The prep test is intended to be used a barometer for students to determine their readiness for November’s CSAT. [...]
This isn’t the first time KICE [Korea Institute for Curriculum Evaluation] has come under fire for the CSAT’s difficulty level, which was introduced in 2008. Every year, parents complain that it is either too difficult or too easy. Korean students often compare it to water or fire.
It’s an important issue because CSAT scores are weighed heavily by universities in their admissions criteria.

So, which is the greater problem, that the test can be by turns judged--by less than impartial parties--too easy or too hard, or that a single test, administered on one and only one day in November, is weighed so heavily in in college admissions?
Next, three recent stories concerned the digital age and the Korean student. Yonhap News via KH describes the results of an OECD study on digital literacy. The story begins with the sentence:

Young South Koreans learn the best from computers and the Internet according to a survey of 15 year-olds in 19 countries, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said on Monday.

This sentence is a total--and typical--misunderstanding of the report. It really says that Korean students, thanks to their unwholesome addiction to PC bangs and MMRPGs like Starcraft, have a head start on digital reading. Reading. They can read from a computer screen better ... and "their ability to solve problems using the Internet is even better,” a Seoul Education Ministry official said, without a shred of evidence for his statement from the study.

Even an occasional reader of this blog knows I am as techno-savvy as most teachers and more so than most with similar hair-hue; at my school I am the "God of Powerpoint" since I seem able to bend that program to my will. I bought into the Internet for homework information, cool links and interactive assignments when they could be found, long ago. I totally believe in the power of technology for good, and of course, for ill.

All textbooks to go digital by 2015, announces another KH headline, stating that soon students in all age groups will be able to access textbooks and activity books using smartphones, tablet PCs and so on. This is a good thing.

Citing the best score South Korea garnered in an OECD digital reading survey, the Education Ministry believes that the digital platforms will bring about a sea change in the classroom and boost the country’s educational competitiveness.

Oh, dear. Well, see, no. That's not ... um, [sigh] Or, put it this way:

The problem we face now, however, is an exaggerated trust in digital education. Some people wrongfully assume that the quality of academic activity will improve with the use of multimedia digital material instead of conventional textbooks. However, without a teacher’s guidance, the impact of digital textbooks may fall short of expectations. There is a risk that digital textbooks will only aggravate addiction to the Internet among the young, when 12.8 percent of students are already suffering from this condition.

The above is from a JoongAng Ilbo editorial titled Smart education, not lazy teachers, which does a reasonable job lying out context for the e-textbook, teachers, and the computer-based classroom in the 21st century. Many in the educational administration field, especially the political wing--in Korea and America and probably everywhere--seem to view technology as a money-saver: more technology units=less teacher units. Certainly, quality interactive materials can free a teacher's time from rote processes like grading, but they cannot replace the truly interactive experience that is at the heart of education: teacher-student face time.

Comfort Women Protest

2011-06-28T21:55:00.001+09:00

This is a follow-up to a post from November, 2008, that you can see by clicking: Every Wednesday at Noon ...

On a pleasant Wednesday in June, I made my way to Jong-no and stood outside the Japanese Embassy to join the halmoni in attendance and their supporters at the weekly Comfort Women Protest.

Sixty-odd years ago and more, when they were young girls, these women were pressed by various means (from lies about good factory work to outright kidnapping) into "service" by the Japanese military in so-called comfort stations throughout the Asian theatre of World War II where they were raped repeatedly by Japanese soldiers on R & R.

While the Germans have by and large admitted their war crimes in that era, and made reparations, the Japanese government has done no such thing--officially denying that international law was ever violated. Indeed, some in the upper echelons during this era were later elected to high government positions.

Long voiceless and powerless, the remaining Korean women who were violated by this Japanese policy and its execution, or at least those who found the strength to overcome their shame and injury have decided to speak out. Every Wednesday since 1992, those women who were able have assembled here to speak truth to power.

Over the years, their numbers have dwindled as the elderly women grow sick or die; on the handful of occasions I have added my pasty Caucasian frame to the crowd of supporters, the number who attend has ranged from a low of two on a frozen February day to eight on this day.

Someday, and that day is sadly not too far away, the number in attendance will be zero.

Some Good Books

2011-06-27T22:49:00.002+09:00

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman - Richard Mayhew is one of Gaiman's typically unlikely heroes: a good boring man with a good boring job, good boring girlfriend and good boring prospects. Until the untypical thing happens, and he is led into one of Gaiman's fantasy worlds--this one a dangerous, complex society hat has dwelt underneath London for millennia. Now he must help the Lady Door evade the ominous Mssrs Croup and Vandemar and find the Angel Islington if he wants his boring but safe life back. Rich in action and imagination, well-written and well-paced. Good, very unboring stuff!
Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel - Beatrice and Virgil are stuffed animals, she a donkey, he a howler monkey. They are stuffed. They are the lead characters in a play being written by a taxidermist. The taxidermist sends a copy of the opening scenes to a successful author (who seems much like Yann Martel) to ask for help. So the author and the taxidermist begin an odd and unlikely collaboration that culminates in a scene of unexpected violence. There is much to like in this book, including the way Martel uses animals to explore human behavior as he did in Life of Pi, but I found it ultimately too odd and too unsatisfying.
Red Scarf Girl by Ji-li Jiang - Shanghai in 1966 found 12-year-old Ji-Li Jiang an outgoing, ambitious and bright Chinese girl. A class leader, talented, popular, she was on her way to admittance into Shanghai's best middle school, then onwards to high school, university and a great life in Chairman Mao's new China. Then came the Cultural Revolution and the campaign against the Four Olds--old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas--that must be destroyed. Despite the fact that her family were fine communists, they were targeted by the Red Guard because Ji-Li's grandfather had been a landlord in the old days. This memoir describes what happens to Ji-Li and her family during a two year period at the height of the Four Olds campaign. Highly recommended for anyone interested in Asian history.
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield - A complex and exceptionally well-written modern Gothic: a decaying manorial estate in the Yorkshire countryside, madness, forbidden urges, untamed twins, sabotage, and murder are some of the common Gothic themes explored in this book. Best-selling author Vida Winter is terminally ill and wishes, once and for all, to tell her true life story. As biographer, she chooses unknown Margaret Lea who has secrets of her own, and so unfolds the memorable story that may have been 'The Thirteenth Tale of Change and Desperation'. I suppose this is Chick Lit, but it was such a damn good read I didn't really notice.
Hiroshima by John Hersey - This groundbreaking piece of long-form journalism covers the story of the first nuclear attack in history by focusing on its effects on a half-dozen ordinary people who were near Ground Zero on August 6, 1945: a seamstress and mother of three, a pair of priests, two doctors, and a young secretary. Originally published in 1946, this 1985 edition includes an Aftermath chapter following up on the lives of Hersey's original subjects 40 years later, only one of whom has passed away. What surprises me most about these people is their disinterest, in the most part, for finding someone to blame--whether the Americans for obvious reasons, or the Japanese hierarchy for failing to protect, or at least warn them.

Fearing the Future

2011-06-27T22:17:00.001+09:00

“Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.”
--Ambrose Bierce, Devil's Dictionary

Only 19.5% of 2,500 Korean teenagers responded that "they would fight" in the case of another war in Korea. The story, in today's Korea Herald, suggested that the survey, conducted by Korea Advanced Youth Association and Teengora media, means that Korean students are not "patriotic". I think it depends on how you define patriotism. It has come to mean to many of us a mindless spouting of nationalistic platitudes, and by that definition Korean teens are just as patriotic as American ones.

Meanwhile, in another survey conducted by Chungcheongbuk-do Office of Education, about 37.6 percents of male teenagers replied “yes” to the question concerning their willingness to join the army in case of war.
The study revealed a high gap between genders, as 5.9 percents of female replied positively to the same question.
Another 32.7 percents of boys said they would assist their nation indirectly, making total of 70.3 percents to involve in the war.

What I don't quite understand here is how this question is relevant in face of the fact that Korea has compulsory military service for males. These teenage boys are required by law to perform military service of about two years by the time they reach age 28.

My experience with them, in fact, is that they have three main "fears" in their lives, in this order: 1) their score on the Korean SAT; 2) their military service; and 3) girls.

In a happy coincidence, the JoongAng Daily has a story about a Korean man who was AWOL for 16 years being given a "second chance."

Lee deserted the Army in 1994 due to his grief and confusion following the death of his parents in a traffic accident.
It is hard for a deserter to live a normal life in Korea because every organization is required to cooperate to find runaways.
There is no statute of limitations for the crime, which the military calls a “violation of the order.”
Lee has not publicly disclosed how he lived during his 16 years AWOL.

He turned himself in and was sentenced to, drumroll, please... twenty-four months of military service. And now, at thirty-seven, he is the oldest rank and file soldier in the Army.

Insadong: Little India

2011-06-25T22:45:00.001+09:00

Insadong is a great place for top quality Korean food, but when I was there recently I decided to try Little India--I was in the mood for curry, and I had been wondering about the place. It looks authentic enough from outside:

...and from inside as well:

Of course, what really matters in a restaurant is the food, and I was quite pleased. I chose from the "special set" menu, which was a little pricey at 23,000 W but was plenty of food. I ordered chicken masala, lamb curry (meat dishes are your choice of beef, lamb or chicken), yoghurt and fruit desert, and a mango lassi (a kind of Indian shake). It came with rice and naan. And a samosa. It looks good.

My first bite of the curry was reassuring--it was really tasty, just the right heat, sweet and meat flavors. My first impulse was to finish it off, but what if the masala was a disappointment? I wanted to save half in case I needed to wash away a nasty masala.

Fortunately, I needn't have bothered, as it turns out the masala--despite being chicken instead of (to me, at least) tastier lamb--was better, more nuanced, than the curry. The samosa, the tetrahedral pastry, tasted fresh and light.

Next time you're in Insadong, unable to get any decent street food since the pocha have been moved along by the local office, I can recommend the Cafe Little India.

This Week in English B

2011-06-25T21:57:00.000+09:00

This week my classroom was converted into the Exhibition Hall of the Young-il Job Fair. This is one of my favorite lessons, and one of the students' as well. It comes from BogglesworldESL, but it has to be beefed up for my classes since I need 10 HR reps and 31 job-seekers in order to accommodate 40+ students.

The activity is essentially the same as described at the website, but I increase the range of skill sets, and sneak in a lot of names that Koreans aren't used to pronouncing--lots of l, r, f and consonant blends. I also use a wider range of companies, including Korean chaebol like Hyundai Heavy Industries and Dongwon FB, and some internationals like DDB Agency and Chevron. Each company has two job functions to fill, so the interviewers have to use the information they learned from the applicant to decide which job to tell them about.

I made a couple of "Welcome to the Young-il Job Fair" type banners, and arranged the classroom as you see in the photos. My co-teacher chooses 10 students to man the interview booths, and gives instruction to the job-seekers in the hallway while I go over the duties of the company reps. "The success of this activity," I intone, "is all up to you. If you are serious, and if you make the others speak and listen in English, this will be a great lesson." Even high school boys respond well to being put in a position of trust and responsibility.

Once that is done, the lesson runs itself, except for guarding the entrance door to ensure an orderly process, monitoring conversations, and checking that interviewees are writing the information they learn correctly and in English--spelling doesn't matter in my class, but not writing in Hangeul does.

Monday 5th period was the Open Class for my contract renewal process, and I was told to expect several members of the administration as well as English Department members to observe. Only the vice principal showed up, walked around for about ten minutes, and left. I was told he was "very pleased". He is rising to become principal when Mr Jun retires in August, so that's a good sign.

Every 토 is 놀토

2011-06-20T21:29:00.000+09:00

... at least, starting next year, and at least, according to a story in the DongA Ilbo titled, Schools to introduce 5-day week from next year. 토요일 to-yo-il is the Korean for Saturday, and nol-to is a contraction for "no school Saturday".

Some years ago, Saturday was just another school day for most of Korea's middle and high school students. Then, the government cut down to half-days on Saturday, and more recently to half-days on only the first, third and fifth Saturdays. At my school, these are club days.

"A five-day school week system will be introduced on a voluntary basis at all elementary, middle and high schools nationwide in earnest beginning with the 2012 school year,” the [Education, Science and Technology] ministry said.
Since schools have different educational environments for class, the ministry plans to require school steering committees to review the system and implement it on a voluntary basis.
In line with the expansion of the five-day workweek at companies in Korea, the five-day workweek for the entire population will start in full swing from next year.

Since it is "voluntary", I'm not going to hold my breath. I am sure a great many mothers are unhappy about this, but at least schools will not fall down on their baby-sitting task: "child care classes will be conducted every Saturday for children whose parents both work".

On the other hand, hakwon owners will be happy, as each hour out of school is an hour potentially in academy classes. As the article describes:

The five-day school week system, however, has fueled fears over a hike in private tutoring expenses and lowering of academic performance.
As such, the government will test the new system at 10 percent of elementary and middle schools from this year’s second half. The system will be operated on a trial basis at certain schools to make final check on side effects that could arise from the expansion of the five-day school week as well as countermeasures.

Whew! We can see they've thought it through quite thoroughly: a 4 month trial in one-tenth of schools is certain to iron out the kinks in a social change of enormous magnitude; this is not about shortening the school day by ten minutes, it's loosing 1.5 million children on the streets twice a month.

On the one hand, of course this is a positive move for the health and well-being of Korean children; but on the other hand, I do wish the-powers-that-be here would be a bit more circumspect in these kinds of undertakings.

But it doesn't actually impact me in any case: a) my school will no doubt opt to continue with Saturday school; and b) I don't work on Saturdays.

SSGT Reckless, Korean War Hero

2011-06-14T22:12:00.001+09:00

Last week was a lesson on Sports in my first grade classes, which is mainly a survey activity: teams are given a specific topic and they work together to devise three good survey questions to elicit the opinions of their classmates. Topics in sports include favorite sport, attendance at sports events, women in sports, etc. This year, gambling and game-fixing was included, due to the K-League scandal.

And Animals in Sports. I make that team ask some form of the question, Is it morally right to use animals for our entertainment? I make them ask because I want to know what Korean students think on this issue. I myself am a bit conflicted on it: I love the circus, elephant parades, dogs pushing prams and lion-tamers included, I have been to the racetrack a few times in my day, I even saw the cobra show in Thailand last month and uploaded video to Youtube! But I'm always a bit je ne sais quoi: it's one thing to use them for sustenance, another to force them to perform just for the purpose of relieving our ennui. Of course, being wild creatures, they'd probably be dead otherwise, rather than, say, populating lawn chairs at a clean yet inexpensive resort.

Interestingly, my students seem to be divided right down the middle: 50%, more or less, think it is uncool to treat/mistreat animals like this. Fast forward to today, when when one of my old (well, thirty or so) students posts the link at top on his FB--he's a horsey type from way back.

I'm wondering what my current students would think of this use of an animal, or this particular animal. What do you think? You can read more here: http://www.scuttlebuttsmallchow.com/mascreck.html

It's quite a story, but it ended pretty well for SSGT Reckless. One cannot say the same for many other animals drafted for military use, particularly bomb-carriers like the Soviet anti-tank dogs or the USA's Project Pigeon. Go to this Wikipedia article, scroll down to "As living bombs"--is a content warning here really necessary?

A Fable of Aesop

2011-06-08T22:51:00.000+09:00

One day, an ESL Teacha was thinking of ways to make his conversation students actually speak English in class. The Teacha thinked and thinked until he was all thunk out. "Oh well, I guess I will just repeat the Aesop's Fables lesson plan I have done before. It wasn't too bad, and some students did actually speak English." In the lesson, teams of students performed one of Aesop's fables in front of the class.

The Teacha also knew that this lesson plan forced students to wrestle with English comprehension in a way that was new to them--they had to simplify the language of an old-fashioned story and make it clear and easy-to-understand.

The time came for the lesson to be implemented. In the first session, teams of students got an Aesop fable of their own to read and simplify, and make into a script. The story was already in English and students were told to rewrite or restate complicated words and sentences in easy English.

Alas, some of the ESL Teacha's helpers "helped" students to rewrite their story in Korean and then translate it back into English. Using "grammar-translation" like this impedes fluency and should rarely be done according to modern language teaching theory. When the Teacha found out, he chewed up the bad assistant helpers into small pieces, spit them out, and buried them behind the library in a kimchi pot, never to be seen again.

In the second session, the students presented their stories in front of the class. As the teacha expected, some of the teams just stood in front of the room and took turns reading parts of the original story without much change. But many of the teams stripped away arcane language, found the key parts of the story and acted it out so other students could understand it! Also, they enjoyed themselves a little bit.

The moral of the story: "Aesop's fables are still accessible today--2500 years and 10,000 miles away!"

I've montaged together one of the stories above, the Bear and the Two Travelers, and will do the same treatment to two or three others if I have the energy. However, I would appreciate feedback on whether you were able to hear and understand the story as told this way--does it need subtitles or captions? Thanks.

For the record, I started with a version of each story at www.aesopfables.com/, then did some amount of editing and simplifying myself before printing out two copies per team. I chose stories on the basis of: 1) did I like it? 2) did it have some action, not just dialogue? 3) did it have some dialogue, not just action? 4) is it short? 5) could it be staged sensibly, with just a desk, a chair and some paper plate masks? 6) did it have 4 characters? (I also have one story with 3 and one with 5 to cover my bases.)

Pizza and Beer

2011-06-07T18:15:00.001+09:00

It's time for the "World Beer Festival" at your local E-Mart, well, my local E-Mart anyway, so I toddled over to see what they had on offer. Several varieties, like Singha, Kirin and Budweiser, were only available in multi-packs, so I forwent those brands and picked up one each of the "World" brands one could pick up only one of.

I needed something to need all that beer to wash down, so I got a big slice of the Combination pizza. You can see there is no corn or sweet potato on it, and the toppings are plentiful. The crust gets a bit soggy in the middle but I'd say this is as good as any reasonably priced pizza I've had in Korea, and better than most.

Beer: W20,970 total; Pizza: W2,500 per slice

Education News

2011-06-06T21:50:00.000+09:00

1) The World Competitiveness Yearbook is out, and Korea quickly flipped through it to find its picture. "Geez," Korea said, "did my hair really look like that?! And no one said anything?!" More to the point, Korea’s education ranks 29th in world, according to the folks that put out this annual snapshot of 59 countries.

A story at JoongAng Daily explains that the ranking is based on an analysis of 11 quantitative factors, such as total public expenditure on education and student-teacher ratios. The number also figures in 5 factors culled from corporate surveys, such as how well the education system meets the needs of a competitive economy.

2) Online lessons invade schools, says another JoongAng headline this weekend. The story quotes several people who are unhappy with a trend for teachers to show online videos, parents and education officials, and a few people who like it, mainly students and teachers.

The story focused on the Internet as video provider rather than investigating its capacity to provide interactive learning, review and reinforcement. The article concludes:

“It takes more than the Internet to help students develop creativity and build character,” said Joo-Yun Cho, a professor of elementary education at Seoul National University of Education.

That's certainly true, but it takes more than mind-numbing lecture and rote memorization, too.

Read a Book

2011-06-04T18:38:00.000+09:00

Look at the Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut - This is the third posthumous collection of unpublished stories from the great writer (the other two being Armegeddon in Retrospect and While Mortals Sleep) and its content conforms to many of the themes he elaborated in his published stories as collected in Welcome ot the Monkey House: the dehumanizing effects of modern life, the underappreciated educator, the insanity of the Cold War. The wry humor, the O. Henry twist, and the spare prose of his best writing is there in some of these pieces, but it's still in development. This book is for the Vonnegut fan, or the student of writing more than for the fledgling in Vonnegut. But for me, weak Vonnegut is better than none at all.
It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini - Sophomore Craig Gilner is attending New York's prestigious Executive Pre-Professional High School, the first step to a good college, a good job and a good life; but he can't sleep, he can't eat, he can't keep up in school. Finally, after suicidal thoughts get the better of him, he checks himself into the mental hospital a few blocks away from his house. What follows is the humorous but realistic story of how he starts to get better.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe - Okonkwo is a leader in his Ibo village in Nigeria. He has learned from the example of lazy, perennially-indebted father, and his hard work has given him a large barn full of yams, three good wives and numerous children. A tragic accident leads to his banishment from the village for seven years, and upon his return, not only is his position much lower, but his village has been changed--white man has come, built a church and started to establish white government. Their tribal religion, and tribal justuce are under threat. Okonkwo convinces a few of the elders and other villagers to take a stand, with tragic results. A powerful fable on the theme of man vs society, and an interesting read.
Invisible by Paul Auster - Paul Auster has published two dozen books, including a collection of poetry, and I had never heard of him before picking up this book. Weird, yes, but fascinating, and a solid reading experience. The summer of 1967 found Columbia junior Adam Walker preparing for a Year Abroad program, earning spending money as a clerk in the University library and splitting a flat in Morningside Heights with his older sister. He meets a French couple at a party, and soon a random moment of violence alters the trajectory of his life. The story has three narrators, covers forty years, and stretches from Los Angeles to Paris's Left Bank to a Caribbean island. I'll be on the look-out for more with his name on it.

Air Con--On

2011-06-01T21:17:00.000+09:00

I have mentioned that the weather this spring has been quite mild--with windows open and fan running, my officetel has been quite comfy. Until this weekend. This weekend, it got hot. Oh, the weather outside was around 29 or 30 C, but with my southern exposure and eight-foot windows, my thermometer climbed to 33.5 C at 3 PM on Saturday. That's 92 degrees in American!

So, I finally turned the air con on. Or tried to, but neither the remote control nor the button on the wall unit would make it do anything. I made my way downstairs and fond the security guard who speaks English and explained the problem.

"Oh, it's not a problem," he assured me, and showed me an announcement buried on the bulletin board at the elevator bank. "See, 'Air con preparation announcing,'" he read, "they will turn on air con on June first, it will not be a problem."

"Yes, problem," I countered. "It's too hot now; I am not worried about next week, but today!"

He laughed. "I understand; already many people have complained."

"And ...?"

Well, And nothing. Someone in the management offices decided that it wouldn't be hot enough for air con until June, and that's it. Now, this only flummoxed me because it has not been the procedure in the past. I don't know when they have turned on the air con power circuit before, but it wasn't as late as June first, and it was before I needed it.

33.5 C--come on, that's hot. I know the temp because I bought a little thermometer a while ago, the red alcohol type: cheap, dependable technology. I just couldn't abide there at home, so I made my way to Itaewon for some frosty cold beverages and returned when it was a bit cooler. So, yes, Adeel, that may well have been me you saw!

Moving ahead, today is June first. The temperature today was somewhat cooler because of the rain; right now it's 20 C, or about 68 F outside. But I don't care, I've got the air con blowing!

Tuttle News Wrap

2011-05-25T21:23:00.000+09:00

1) The kenari, harbingers of spring here on the peninsula, finally bloomed this year nearly three weeks later than in 2009. Spring has been mild, to say the least, but it looks like we've turned to corner on warmer weather.

You couldn't call it hot, but there is a definite warming trend, and very nice weather for sitting at a sidewalk table and enjoying some chicken and beer of an evening.

2) Prosecutors are investigating a match-rigging scheme in the soccer K-League involving brokers in Changwon and unnamed players in teams participating in the Rush and Cash Cup--mostly "relatively low-paid players on the second string", according to a Korea Herald account.

3) Just Monday, I asked my new "handler" if he had heard anything about my contract renewal process; he hadn't. Today, I got the first piece of paperwork in the process, titled "End of Term Report", which sounded ominous until I saw the first question was about my intention to renew: yes or no?

For the record, and for the time being, the answer is yes.

4) It's week one of a two-week lesson on Aesop's fables in first grade, wherein each team is given a fable to dramatize in front of class next week. This week, they have to read and simplify the story and then write a basic script. Their command of "simplify" and "write a script" seems a bit tenuous this year compared to last, but stay tuned for some photos and perhaps a video...

5) There is no number 5.

6) The Rapture happened this weekend, and it seems I got left behind. If you are reading this, you did, too.

Can We Make A Difference?

2011-05-22T22:39:00.002+09:00

At a get-together a few nights ago, one of my fellow English teachers here in Korea was feeling frustrated: after nearly three years of teaching here, he has not been able to really make a difference in the way his school works; by extension, we foreigners will never be able to make positive change in the Korean educational system.

I feel his pain. After three years, I still can't get my co-teachers to speak English in my presence at English Department meetings--well, at least not until sam-cha (third round), when the libations have loosened lips somewhat. Each new department head has asked me for my opinion on what the school can do to improve my effectiveness. My answer is: 1) give me smaller classes; or 2) more class hours per week with my students; or 3) at least stream the classes by English ability levels; and 4) periodic, regular meetings with my co-teachers. So far, none of those things has been implemented.

The Korean educational system, not unlike education bureaucracies anywhere, seems particularly entrenched. Although one can trace numerous attempts by national administration after administration to decrease the reliance on after-school academies (hakwons), to change the memorization-based, rote-learning culture of instruction, to encourage creativity, and to raise the level of education for the poor and middle class, most who follow education policy here would agree that nothing has really gotten better.

An article in the JoongAng Daily a few days ago illustrates this point, with a a story titled The widening educational divide. Acceptance rates to Korea's most prestigious universities is proportionally much higher for so-called autonomous or special-purpose schools than for "ordinary" high schools. Of course, that's one of the goals of the autonomous school idea. Key grafs:

A closer look at the numbers shows that the overall number of students accepted by the best universities in the country from normal high schools started to decline beginning in 1974 - when the standardization of high schools began. One school in Seoul that sent 67 students to Seoul National University in 1981, had only six successful applicants last year.
The standardization of high schools was implemented by the government in an attempt to narrow the gap in the quality of education received by the rich and the rest, and root out memorization-based education methods. This meant getting rid of all entrance exams that high schools utilized prior to 1974 and assigning students to random schools.
But what was meant to broaden the quality of education, ended up having the opposite effect. Indeed, the Korean education system has never been more polarized, and a memorization-based approach to learning prevails throughout Korean schools.

If the Korean government can't fix it over a period of thirty-five years, I don't think a few thousand foreign English teachers will do it within our typical two to five years tenure.

But can we make a difference in our little realm? After all, many of us are given minimal guidance on our curriculum and classroom activities--what we may see as an annoyance can be an opportunity to make a difference. Think outside the box, focus less on grammar and more on communication; have students move and act rather than sit passively; create a scene or a stir (in a good way, of course), let the powers-that-be know you're here and you're serious about teaching.

My friend has done just this at his school: he reads storybooks at lunchtime; he teaches an afterschool science class; and so on. In fact, his school recently won an award from the city for its outstanding English program! I think it's fair to say he has made a difference. Alas, the presentation of the award, and some great perks, were lavished on the Korean faculty members, and he was completely ignored. Such thoughtlessness is inexcusable, of course, so I won't try to excuse it--still, this isn't the first time a foreigner has been slighted in this way, and it won't be the last. Hurts your feelings, naturally, but it doesn't decrease your impact.

Teaching in Korea can be frustrating; cultural differences like han and nunchi cause us to stumble and misunderstand things, to create rifts of which we are unaware, and to offend or be offended where no offense is meant. Open criticism is not something familiar to Korean, or indeed Asian, culture, at least on a one-to-one basis. When my lesson has not gone well, my co-teachers will not critique it for me; lacking a meeting protocol where they would be comfortable in critiquing me, I have had to figure out ways to ask for their input whereby I am not directly on the line. When I need them to change their ways, I approach them with I am having trouble with so-and-so; what do you think it is? Perhaps you can help me by doing such-and-such.

I would guess most foreign teachers would point to the testing culture as the biggest problem with Korean education--a student's entire future seems to boil down to one nine hour period on a Thursday in November of their senior year, the Korean SAT, or 수능 suneung. In order to get into prestigious universities, Korean students must forego sports, dating, and fun to attend cram schools, spend untold hours in "self-study rooms" and, in too many cases, contemplate suicide.

But so would Korean teachers. They are just as frustrated with their inability to change the system as we are. Well, much more.

Despite all the English grammar and vocabulary they are taught, the average high schooler has great difficulty putting together a simple English sentence expressing their own thoughts.

So I no longer worry about the "average high schooler"--I confine myself to my own, the ones at my school. Through practice and repetition, by giving them need and means, I will make it easier and easier for them to express a simple thought well in English. Then a slightly more complex one. And so on.

Of course, it's neither simple or easy. And I'll never change the system. But the occasional success is reward enough to keep me going, and the paycheck doesn't hurt, either.

Vacation Reading List

2011-05-20T21:11:00.000+09:00

Well, I had a nice two week vacation, and devoted much of my time to reading: on the subway, on the planes, on the buses, on the porch of my bungalow, on the beach, in the restaurant...

I did, therefore, a good bit of reading, and here are my brief reviews of what I read. The list is arranged sort of in order of recommendation, though I have to say I really lucked out in my selections (either that or you can judge a book by its cover), since this is a really strong collection. Room is a strong #1, but #2 through #5 are all really good, and definitely worth a gander.

Room by Emma Donoghue - A seriously creepy but ouststanding book! Five-year-old Jack, our narrator, lives in Room with Ma. He knows Room really well, from Bed Wall to Door Wall and back; he sleeps in Wardrobe, wrapped in Blanket, at least until Old Nick comes and goes. Eventually it becomes horrifyingly clear that Room is an eleven-by-eleven-foot high-security garden shed where Jack and Ma are kept as Nick's prisoners. There is Room, and there is TV, for Jack--one is real, and the rest is only TV. But this paradigm begins to break down as the boy realizes that Old Nick brings their food from the grocery store--how much of TV is real, Outside of Room? A leaf silhouetted on the skylight is the tipping point, and Ma realizes they must somehow escape. Harrowing and gripping, the escape scene happens about midway through the book, and had me actually pacing the floor as I read. Highly recommended!
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows - While it seems on first blush to be Chick Lit, this is a book for everyone who loves literature and believes in its power to transform lives. The novel is a collection of letters from the aftermath of WWII, among a writer and her publisher, their friends, and a group of people on the British Channel island of Guernsey. It tells the story of the island's occupation by Germany during the war, how a clandestine pig roast led to the formation of a literary society, and how a tragic love story between a German and a local leads to another love story that is not so tragic. Well, that second love story is how the novel ends, but at least we can hope that it isn't tragic.
Feed by MT Anderson - Teenager Titus has been reasonably not-unhappy with his life thus far in this novel of the future, allowing his "feed"--a transmitter wired directly into his brain-- do most of his thinking for him. Until he went on Spring Break trip to the moon and met a girl. Violet was different: she asked Questions; she toyed with her feed to make her consumer profile impossible for the Corporations to read; she wanted to visit Nature--real Nature, outside the city domes. When her feed begins to fail, and cause her body to fail along with it, Titus begins to examine life and love. Happily there are no pat answers in this book, but there is an ending that is uncontrived and powerful. And a Tuttle Award-winning opening line:
We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer - One of the most unusual books I've read in a long time, and one of the most puissant. A character with the author's name travels to Europe to trace his roots, particularly to find the Jewish shtetl of his grandparents, which had been blasted to oblivion by the Nazis. He engages a tour guide, Alex (whose charmingly broken-English letters after the trip comprise about half the novel) and Alex's grandfather, and the search is on. The story of the little village and its ultimate fate are by turns humorous and heart-rending.
Your Republic is Calling You by Kim Young-ha - Ingenious and carefully crafted, the story is about a North Korean spy who has acclimated so well into Seoul society that when the order comes for his return, he can't bring himself to separate from his wife and child--or can he? The action takes place in one 24 hour period but still seems to cover the lifetimes of all involved as well as the history of the two Koreas. Kim is one of Korea's best-known writers and his wordcraft and tellingly observed detail (as translated by Kim Chi-young) go a long ways to explaining why.
Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen - It's open season on tourists in south Florida just ahead of the Orange Bowl parade, and reporter-turned-gumshoe Brian Keyes has to run the the infamous terrorist group Los Noches de Diciembre (the Nights of December) to ground before they kill still more sun-seekers and the hotel reservations start drying up. A hilarious and ascerbic take on the Sunshine State's condominium lifestyle and the havoc it has wreaked on the Everglades and its wild denizens. Hiaasen is a prolific bestselling novelist and award-winning Miami Herald columnist--this was his first solo book, from 1986, but it's got all the elements that have made him so successful.
The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte - This book was a grand chase, but unfortunately the quarry turned out to be a dead mouse--by which I mean the ending was an enormous disappointment. Those of a keenly literary bent will enjoy the dissection of Dumas and his contemporaries, as did I, but that should be fodder for the plot rather than an end in itself, which unfortunately is what it is. The jacket blurb which led me to select this book called it a cross between Umberto Eco and Anne Rice--alas, it was the medieval historianship of Rice and the macabre fantasy of Eco.

Bungalow on Koh Chang

2011-05-19T09:59:00.001+09:00

I spent Monday through Friday on Koh Chang at a really great little resort called Porn's Bungalows. Nothing fancy, as you can see from my beachfront bungalow:

It's located at Hat Kaibae, about 2/3 of the way down the west coast of Koh Chang from the Centerpoint pier. Facing the west afforded some great sunsets:

From my bungalow porch:

From the restaurant:

This view cost 900 Baht per night, including hot water and fan.

Thailand: Floating Market, War Museum, Cobra Show

2011-05-18T22:06:00.000+09:00

Since I reserved my hotel for a three-night stay, I got a choice of half-day or one-day package tours. I chose the one with the main destinations you see in the title, except the Cobra Show was supposed to be a tour of a coconut processing facility, which would have presumably included monkeys climbing up and down palms gathering coconuts--on the a whole, I got the more exciting deal.

The floating market is rather more a tourist destination than a market these days--I wonder how many mangoes this lady sold from her boat on a given day:

A few more photos and you've got the gist of it. The bottom photo shows starfruit, lychee and mangosteen, the triumvirate of Thai exotic fruit.

From there, we took a longtail boat down the klong for about a twenty minute ride to a temple that specializes in snake worship; adjacent to it was a "Thai Cobra Show" for only 200 Bt extra. I made a video collapsing the 30 minutes into about three minutes, with just the exciting bits:

From there, we stopped for lunch and headed west to the bridge on the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi province, part of the Siam-Burma railroad built on the backs of Allied POWs. There is a famous movie about it, but it's not very accurate. Some 13,000 POWs died in building the railway, along with 60,000 or more civilians under brutal Japanese rule.

You can pay your respects to those who lost their lives by buying some "jewelly" at cut rate prices.

Adjacent, more or less, to the bridge site is the JEATH War Museum, with the acronym representing the nationalities involved--"Japanese, English, American, Thai and Holland". But it is much more than that. Much more. Rubbing shoulders, or at least sharing exhibit halls, with military armament is a collection of Miss Thailand Pageant formal wear going back thirty years; a vast collection of dilapidated typewriters and wireless sets, coins and bills with a face value totalling millions; a collection of rocks and gems that seemed promising to an old rockhound like myself, but alas was quite ordinary, aside from a couple of two-foot amethyst geodes. Most exhibit halls were decorated with floor-to-ceiling wall murals depicting various events and personages in Thai history, including every king and every President. Alas, the lighting conditions were poor and flash photography forbidden (and my camera sucks).

Still, there was a strange display that claimed to contain 106 bodies from the Siam-Burma Railroad construction. (I had hoped to visit an Allied cemetery but we just drove by instead of stopping.)

The ground floor porticos (the museum is a sprawling, massive facility) had a series of statues--the left hand building had key WWII figures, including the bad guys:

... and the good guys (that's Truman and Einstein in the first one):

Finally, a few shots of the exterior of this extraordinary place:

Time to call it a day and head back to the hotel.

Bangkok Street Scenes

2011-05-17T17:25:00.000+09:00

I slapped together a video (under five minutes) of footage taken in various kinds of vehicles in Thailand, like sa tuk-tuk, a klong boat, songtaew, etc.

My hotel was located in the downtown Banglamphu district, between the Grand Palace and Khaosan Rd. The area could be termed seedy--even though the streets are lined with august government offices, they are populated by street vendors, beggars, women (and ladyboys) of easy virtue. Some photos taken within a few blocks of the hotel:

I also like pictures of balconies:

Finally, some guys having a cockfight at 9:30 on a Sunday morning in May:

Last Day in Bangkok

2011-05-14T23:40:00.001+09:00

Banglamphu is the cultural center of Bangkok, where you will find that tourist Meecca, Khaosan Rd. Okay, just kidding. No, I mean you will find Khaosan Rd there, but the tourist Mecca is really the Grand Palace, Wat Pho (reclining Buddha temple) Wat Phra Kaeo (Emerald Buddha temple), Giant Swing, etc.

Sunday morning was a bright, warm time to go the Grand Palace/Wat Kaeo compound for some standard tourist shots, as above, a short walk from my hotel. Along the way, a multitude of "tour guides" and tuk-tuk drivers informed me that a) the palace is closed today for special ceremonies, come with me to the Lucky Buddha temple; b) it's only open after 1 PM to tourists, come with me to the Lucky Buddha temple in the meantime; or c) you must wear long pants, you can rent them free but only after 1:30 PM, come with me to the Lucky Buddha ...

Don't listen to these guys, they are hucksters and scam artists--they are right about one thing, though: you have to wear long pants to get into the Grand Palace compound. However, you can leave a 200 Baht deposit for free rental of one size fits all long pants--anytime the palace is open to visitors. You can see mine were a stylish browny-green. Some detail shots:

One of the things I remember best from my childhood visits to the palace was the acres and acres of wall murals telling the history of Thailand. Giant elephants, spirit gods and monkey kings mingled with real kings and human warriors in those ancient days, so it's as much mythology as history.

After getting my full of gold-gilt spires and magic warriors, I took a quick tuk-tuk ride due south to Pak Klong Talad, the flower market in Chinatown, right on the river.

After that, a bit of pig's knuckles from a street stall for a late lunch. This meal was 35 Bt, about USD 1!

I went back to the hotel and took a nap before my final evening in the city--the next morning was to be a long bus ride to Koh Chang along the east coast, about six hours. I arranged for a dinner cruise along the Chao Praya River; both the lonely Planet guide and the hotel recommended the Wan Fah cruise, at 1200 Bt ($40) a little less pricey than some of the others. The boat departs from the River City pier at 7:00 so I ordered up a taxi at 6:15 for the 20 minute ride. If you know me, you know I hate to be on time, I like being early.

Well, the driver assured both the hotel clerk and me that he knew where to go, and proceeded to take me to two places completely unconnected to the river. Via hand gestures and some forceful pidgin, I made him understand I was going on a dinner cruise--river, boat, eat--so he took me to some effing dead end street. Meanwhile I'm watching the fare rise, the time tick away, and my mental state achieve a mix of apoplexy and catatonia.

Finally, at 6:57 he pulls into the Sheraton Hotel, where I can see the River City complex next door. I curse his grandchildren, toss him some money and race toward the pier. 6:59 I can see a riverboat whose roof is emblazoned with "Wan Fah Cruises"--looking very elegant. I breath a sigh of relief, realizing that this is Thailand: hell, the damn thing will leave ten minutes late, at least. Just as I arrive at the Wan Fah counter, the boat starts to drift away! I can't believe it!

Fortunately, the counter rep had a walkie-talkie and got the boat to pull in at the next pier to take me on board. I looked at my watch significantly:7:02. In Korea, I would understand, but this is Thailand, for St. Christopher's sake!

Unfortunately, most of my photos came out very poorly, but here's my review of the Wan Fah dinner cruise: good. They have two menu choices, Thai and seafood. I chose Thai, which began with spring rolls, then a spicy prawn soup. The main course had four dishes: steamed veg with prawns, red curry rice, chicken in massaman curry, and fried fish in sweet and sour sauce. These were all fine except for the fish, which was so drenched in sauce it wasn't recognisable as fish. Desert was a fresh fruit plate with some tasty Thai candies--yummy.

After dinner, the boat turns around and heads back south, and the entertainment begins, which is a sampler of traditional Thai dance. A few pics:

The cruise returns to River City a few minutes ahead of schedule. The day began with unscrupulous tourist ripper-offers, and alas, ends with them as well. I showed the first cabbie that met me my hotel card, he said "300 Baht." I said, "You're crazy, it's 60 Baht!" "300 Baht!" "I'm not paying you 300 Baht for a 60 Baht cab ride," I said. I walked to the next guy. "We will all charge 300." "Meter," I said. "Who will go by meter?"

Turns out none of them would. "Fine," I told him, "I'm not paying you 300 fucking Baht for a 60 Baht ride. I'll just walk a couple blocks until I see a taxi who will go by meter."

About this time a cab comes along not part of the River City rip-off clique. I say to him, "Meter!" as I give him my hotel card. The other driver starts to talk to him, and I get pissed. "You shut up!" I say. He does.

Long story ~~shor~~ less long, I take the metered ride, he lets me off at the corner by the hotel--56 Bt. Tipping is not usually done in Thailand, but this was an exception.

Children's Day and Stuff

2011-05-05T23:25:00.000+09:00

Today, I packed my bags, cleaned my officetel (who wants to come home from vacation to a dirty apartment?), and went off to the opening day of the six-day Spring Hi Seoul Festival, coincident with Children's Day, a national holiday where the banks close and everything.

I'm not sure who I took my photo above with, but I can't resist the outsize mascot photo op. I know the dude below, however: he is Mr. Baek Won (100 won piece), part of a drive to get Koreans to contribute to worldwide relief efforts.

This was all at Gwanghwamun Plaza and Cheonggyechun. I was hoping to see some live music acts, but I was rather early in the day, I suppose--loads of stages are set up, so I urge my fellow Seoulites to get out and enjoy some free concerts!

Alas (well, not really), I will miss the Hi Seoul Festival action since I'm off to the Gulf of Siam for a week's R & R.

'Cinderella Law' and Other Teen News

2011-05-02T16:58:00.000+09:00

1) The major papers report on a new law from the National Assembly to ban those under age sixteen from playing online games after midnight (see JoongAng and Korea Times, for sample coverage).

Gaming is big business in Korea, considering both export value (income to Korean gaming hubs exceeds USD 1 billion per year) and local economics (the monies earned by PC bangs--you never see folks in there just checking their email, or printing something off real quick, it's mind-numbing hours of Starcraft or WOW).

Industry sources say while the curfew will not affect the revenues of game publishers in the short term, it will certainly harm the image of the companies in the local and overseas market.
“The mandatory shutdown system is unconstitutional and allows the government to rule over families,” said the Korea Association of Game Industry in a statement. “It’s regrettable how [the system] has branded game publishers as those with ill intentions like those making drugs.”

While the 'Nanny state' issue may be worthy of debate, more problematic is the matter of enforcement--it is a simple matter for teens to use their parents' registrations or buy them from other people to get around the midnight curfew.

PC bang owners have other things to worry about besides checking IDs, especially with the Ministry of Health and Safety set to impose a nationwide smoking ban on billiard halls and PC bangs, according to a Herald article.

2) The government "envisions" free mandatory kindergarten for all children by 2016, according to the Herald. At a time when the US is actively defunding its education infrastructure, apparently because taxes are out of hand (NOTE: US income taxes are at historic lows--your taxes have never, ever been this low!), Korea is actively doing just the opposite. To the current nine years of free, compulsory education, they want to add a tenth: in Korea, you pay to attend high school (years 10-12), though Seoul's new government substantially decreased the rates last year.

The government-developed common curriculum will be used in kindergartens and daycare centers alike, according to the plan.
About 400,000 of the nation's 435,000 children who turn 5 next year, or about 91 percent, will benefit from the policy.
Children who are educated at home or at high-cost educational facilities, including English language institutes, will not receive the subsidy, but officials expect the expansion of state support will encourage more low- and middle-income parents to send their children to kindergartens or daycare centers.
The government will revise related laws in the second half of this year to give a legal guarantee to the new system, officials said.

3) Koreans’ TOEFL ranking drops, sez the headline. Interestingly, the average score of 81 remained constant from 2009 to 2010, but ranked 80th of 163 countries. In 2009, Korea was 71st of 157 countries.

The Netherlands topped the list with an average score of 100 followed by Denmark with 99 and Singapore with 98.
India and Philippines are also high among Asian countries, ranking 19th and 35th, respectively.
North Korea ranked 96th, China 105th, Thailand 116th, Japan 135th and Saudi Arabia 153rd.
The international average score in 2010 is 80 with 20.1 in reading section, 19.5 in listening, 20.7 in writing and 20 in speaking.

In case you wondered.

Coming Events

2011-05-01T17:46:00.000+09:00

My school has midterm exams this week, meaning I will walk to school, sit at my desk for a couple of hours, then walk back home, or wherever I want to go, each day. Except for Thursday, which is Children's Day and a national holiday.

The next week, students go on class trips--last I heard the first grade was headed for Jeju-do, and the second grade for China (their plans for Japan were changed due to safety concerns). The next Monday and Tuesday are holidays due to my school's Founder's Day, so I don't have classes again until May 18.

Friday, I am leaving for another vacation in Thailand (before the weather gets too hot and humid there) and will be gone until the next Saturday. After a trip to the southwest gulf island of Koh Samui in February, I decided to hit the northeast: Koh Chang, or Elephant Island. Probably Hat Kai Bae, which seems suitably quiet for my tastes.

Once school starts back up, it's a long grind until semester exams the first week of July. Oh boy!

Never Know Who You Might Meet ...

2011-04-29T00:56:00.001+09:00

This post is actually no more or less than clearing out the images that happened to be on camera today!

First thing this morning, I took a picture out my classroom window of the progress being made on my school's new gymnasium. To me, it appears to be going quite fast, even if the last two days' rain put a temporary stop to things. Here are the latest pics:

This week's class lesson has been in preparation for the midterm English exams. I previously asked my co-teachers for sample questions that would be similar to the exam, but only got 50% to do even that much (and I think, despite all that that my co-teachers are a cut above ther ordinary!)

Anyway, we're playing Jeopardy, but mostly without the Jeopardy features--I don't require them to answer in the form of a question (except the grammar category) and they don't lose points by guessing wrong. Except on a Daily Double.

Purists (well, like me, really) would argue that without a jeopardy, a risk, you're not even playing Jeopardy. Yep. Sue me. I think it's more important to get them to try--if they felt they'd be penalized for a wrong answer, we'd have total silence.

The graphics are good, the format is logical (easy questions behind the 100 value, working up to the 500 dollar question, which must be exactly right), the competition is tight, and the kids love it! Here are students brandishing their noisemakers before the clue is revealed:

Yeah, that is a rubber chicken for Team 4. Going in order, if I gave it to Team 1, it wouldn't be nearly as funny!

Mr Right held back with a few students to rearrange the desks back into the usual fashion, so I was finished with school earlier than expected. So I was walking down Deungchon-gil toward one of my favorite restaurants when I spotted a bevy of ladies ahead of me wearing colored sashes. They had a mascot of some kind with them, and so I pursued them in order to add to my collection of ME+mascot photos.

Success! I think what he have here is a walking perfume atomizer for a cosmetics firm. You never know who you might meet on the streets of Seoul!

Education News

2011-04-24T21:50:00.000+09:00

1) Korean History will become a mandatory subject in Korean high schools starting next year, according to articles in the JoongAng Daily and the Korea Times. The decision reverses a policy adopted only in 2009 to make history optional in the name of decreasing the academic burden on students. Why the quick turnaround?

“Due to the Japanese government’s recent claim over Dokdo, demands have been high for teaching students the history of Korea,” said Lee Ju-ho, the education minister. “The new policy is aimed at encouraging students to feel proud of Korean history and uphold their will to protect our territory.”

Ah, Dokdo. Of course.

2) In an unpublished survey of 290,000 Korean students and parents, students give low approval to leveled single-classroom English courses.

The Hankyoreh acquired an unpublished Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) research report on the results of English education policy and plans for development Thursday through the office of Kwon Young-ghil, Democratic Labor Party lawmaker and National Assembly Education, Science and Technology Committee member. Middle and high school students were surveyed on five areas of English education policy, namely leveled single-classroom English courses, English-only classes, EBS English education broadcasts, weekly one-hour conversation classes, and subject-based classrooms. Of these, only the EBS program was found to have more than 50 percent of respondents answering that they believed their English skills improved after the experience. Positive response rates generally fell in the 40 percent range for the remainder.

Fewer than half the high school (39%) and middle school (48%) students responded that they believed subject-based classrooms would be helpful in improving their English skills. These would generally be classrooms in which native speaking teachers require students to listen to English and actually speak in English some non-zero amount.

"In contrast, some 64.9 percent of high school students and 68.9 percent of middle school students responded affirmatively to a question about whether they believed the EBS [television] program helped them develop their English abilities." In this class, students are not required to do anything other than watch TV, or go to sleep.

“This report clearly shows that the Lee Myung-bak administration’s ‘English immersion education’ is nothing more than a lot of noisy sloganeering, and that satisfaction rates at the actual scenes are low on the whole,” Kwon [Young-ghil, Democratic Labor Party lawmaker] said.

This report in actually proves nothing at all, except perhaps that Korean middle and high school students hate to actually speak English and much prefer to sleep or watch TV. The survey asked their opinions but did nothing to evaluate their English proficiency or its improvement.

But let's be realistic. I (like most in EPIK) teach students for fifty minutes once a week, in about fifteen of the 19 weeks of a semester. That's 25 hours of contact time, max. There is not a lot of room in there to affect dramatic change--so I settle for incremental improvement, mostly in the unwillingness to try speaking a little bit.

Not surprisingly, high marks were found in the elementary school area, where about 80% felt that adding one to two hours of English instruction per week would help them improve their English abilities. No shit, Sherlock.

The Hankoryeh story begins with this anecdote:

In January 2008, then-Presidential Transition Committee Chairwoman Lee Kyung-sook, currently chairperson of the Korea Student Aid Foundation, said at a hearing on English education, “Americans do not understand when you say ‘oh-ren-jee.’ You need to say ‘ah-rinj’ for them to understand you.” Lee expressed the view that the method for writing English words should be changed accordingly. “Ah-rinj" subsequently became a symbol of the Lee Myung-bak administration’s “English immersion policy,” and a number of English education policies were implemented under the administration, including leveled single-classroom English courses. Three years later, however, the results have been poor.

Indeed, Koreans still say oh-ren-jee. But other than that, actual results of the programs were left totally unexamined by the report.

Street vendors driven out of Insa-dong

2011-04-24T18:49:00.000+09:00

Yesterday was the official celebration of 새마을운동Saemaeul Undong, the "new village program" of the seventies and early eighties in Korea by which the government modernized, electrified and macadamized, if you will, most of the country, and the countryside as well. The movement was the public face of strongman Park Chung-hee's infrastructure improvement program, which is recognized for its success in taking Korea from dirt-poor, backwards-ass feudalism to a fully industrialized First World economic powerhouse.

How disappointing, then, to read about Jongro-gu's plan to squelch the Saemaeul spirit of entrepreneurship by ridding Insa-dong of its 포장마차 pojang macha, the street vendors who line the street with their covered wagons.

The article, entitled Street vendors driven out of Insa-dong, does perhaps a better job explaining the position of the embattled vendors than it does explaining why the local government wants them gone. According to the article, "Jongno-gu Office cites passengers’ right to pleasant walking on less congested streets". That's it? Really?

Last time I visited Insa-dong was during Tanner's visit, and navigating the crowds was not an issue. But that was in the coldest part of January, so I went back on Saturday, under very pleasant weather conditions, to see how bad it was.

Hmm, what's what in the center of the bottom photo? An automobile? Why, isn't that illegal on this street on a Saturday? "The ward office plans to move Insa-dong’s 76 stalls to two designated spots as part of its plan to make the street car-free on weekdays as well as weekends." How about the ward office start by enforcing the laws currently on the books?

But what are talking about here, anyway? I didn't attempt to shoot every one of the 76 stalls, but here are a few of my better stills:

So, first of all, the crowding along Insa-dong-gil is quite manageable; and secondly, the stalls, far from being a hazard, are one of the charming and memorable things about the "Insa-dong shopping experience." I would urge the Jongno-gu powers-that-be not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

If they are serious about making Insa-dong a more traditional experience, they would do better to ban places like this:

An Occurrence in Whitechapel

2011-04-22T22:07:00.000+09:00

"As you can see, something terrible has happened here! Your job today is to find out who this person is; who did this to them; and why they did it!"

Thus begins this week's lesson, a create-your-own style mystery set in Victorian England. The student pairs are Mycroft Pound and his friend and associate Dr. Browning, who must work their way to the solution of the crime by reading the "event cards" and deciding what to do next.

3 1/2 hours spent arranging my classroom after school last Friday was the final stage in preparation of this lesson. I adapted the story from one by Helen Brooke titled "Mystery in London", put the events into MS Word, with their various "go to" statements and some appropriate images to suggest atmosphere, and had them laminated.

Laminating was a good move, because as those Dear Readers who have come a-gathering in my Seoul patch for a long time may recall, I did this identical lesson two years ago.

I created an all-new Pound and Browning mystery for last year's classes, "Murder in Hyde Park". I only teach students for two years, so two mysteries is all I need--I'll recycle Hyde Park next year, should I still be here, etc, etc.

After the dramatic introduction and explanation, students pair up as the detective duo and receive their handout:

They have to read the opening and answer a few comprehension questions before they can begin. They record the number of each event card they visit as they go along in the grid below the picture of themselves (that's Mycroft--or more humorously, "Microsoft"--Pound on the left).

I have the luxury of a deserted classroom across the hall from me, so once a team solves the case and answers my exit questions, they can repair next door and work on a puzzle page I made reinforcing key terms from the lesson.

Most students really enjoy doing activities like this--it is challenge for many of them: while the most fluent teams may finish in ten minutes or so, twenty-five minutes is a more likely time frame. Of course, these stories could be adapted further to make them harder to solve, or much easier, depending on your needs. It's one of a teacher's rewards to observe the victory celebration as they exult in completing this task.

Sadly, many of my classes have a few students who resist doing anything productive no matter how I try to motivate them. Frankly, I just do not expend too much energy worrying about them. I would rather focus on the cases where students had not finished the mystery when classtime was over, but still wanted to find out what happened--naturally I or my co would shepherd them through the final cards so they could reach the end.

News From the North

2011-04-18T23:25:00.002+09:00

Springtime is creeping northward on the peninsula, and so is reaching the DPRK about now, hopefully giving its impoverished masses a few moments of joy while they enjoy the sun on their backs.

Alas, this bright sunshine may be obscured for many in the North: in addition to "fresh U.N. sanctions for a nuclear test in May and flooding a few months ago that wiped out farmland in a country that already faces chronic food shortages (Reuters)", NASA Earth Observatory posted this image of widespread forest fires:

[The Aqua] satellite captured this image of smoke pouring from dozens of fires (marked in red) in North Korea. These fires could be related to agricultural burning; however, the huge plumes of smoke blowing eastward from some of the coastal fires suggest that those blazes are forest or other wildland fires. Much of the Korean Peninsula’s precipitation falls between June and September during the “wet” monsoon phase. Therefore, these fires are burning at one of the driest times of the year.

The Reuters story reports that no official word has come from DPRK media, but today's Korea Times online has this:

“This year there are many reports of forest fires in North Korea. Residents here are waiting for it to stop spreading by itself. They are also criticizing those who are trying to put out the fires,” reported a North Korean radio broadcast.
According to the media, residents are happy about these fires because the land will be cleared for farming and firewood will be readily available to them.

Gotta wonder about the logic (or English) there: burning down a tree doesn't create firewood, but fired wood. Further, the clearing of land for agriculture is meaningless in an extended cycle of drought and flooding when you lack modern means of irrigation. Like, say, North Korea.

Of course, it's not the residents saying those things, but the party cadres, whose job it is to prove that in North Korea, shit doesn't stink.

Speaking of which, the Daily NK has a story about the spread of Paratyphus in Pyongyang--a bacterial disease associated with poor sewage, flooding and civil engineering failures common to the Third World. Like Pyongyang, sadly.

Since the disease is bacterial and highly contagious, treatment is best done in isolation, while the area where the disease breaks out should be thoroughly disinfected.
However, a country with limited resources such as North Korea struggles to deal with such things. The source explained, "Paratyphus normally spreads through water and defecation, and has spread quickly now because the water pipes here are old and there is a lack of water treatment chemicals.”
“There is a water treatment plant in Nakrang district but there are no chemicals so the authorities are at a loss as to what to do," the source went on.
Nevertheless, the North Korean authorities are doing what they are best at; working to control passage through areas where the disease is currently spreading in an effort to hinder its movement. According to the source, "Public Security Agency guard posts have been set up all over."
In addition, the authorities are allegedly only approving travel for people carrying certificates confirming that they have been vaccinated against the disease. The vaccination and certificate are both officially free; however, this is not really the case in corruption-ridden North Korea.
Therefore, since the cost of the certificate is expensive and obtaining it troublesome, many small traders and other travelers are said to be bribing their way past the guard posts with money or cigarettes.

North Koreans deserve better than this. That is an obvious statement, but one that the Chinese government and the Kim regime's other enablers need to recognize. Also, something more South Koreans need to become more passionate about...

Yeouido Cherry Blossom Festival 2011

2011-04-17T23:15:00.000+09:00

Today was a fine day for a visit to Yunjungno, the avenue that circles Korea's National Assembly building on Yeouido--teeming with sights such as the above. The air was crisp, the sky blue, the slightest of breezes drifted across the Han River, the sightseers roamed twenty abreast and a thousand deep, with as my blogger pal GBSTW! put it, "nary an elbow thrown".

Along the first third or so of the promenade, one sidewalk is devoted to displaying sculptural or free-standing artworks. The theme seems to be that the works must be largely comprised of natural objects like flowers, leaves and branches (not from cherries, though) placed in some kind of relationship to glass or metal. Below are some of the more interesting examples:

Well, enough of that. Now back to the stars of the show, a few more shots of cherry blossoms.

Survey Says

2011-04-13T23:33:00.000+09:00

I have been doing the same lesson back-to-back in my first grade classes the last two weeks. Well, it isn't the same lesson, per se, but the same activity--a survey of habits and preferences of other students in the class.

Each team has to create three survey questions about their specific topic, then spread out and find their classmates' opinions, habits, preferences, etc. I give them a form, thus:

Curiously, there are a few difficulties with this form, experienced by more students than I would like to admit: 1) writing their questions along the slanted lines--some students ignore the lines and write horizontally; b) trying to fill in the answers to the three questions going down a column, rather than across a row (??!); 3) writing their own name repeatedly in the space labeled Name. So I have created a mock-up version to illustrate how to complete the form. In fact, I have a whole notebook filled with mock-up versions of different hand-outs for my lessons.

Each team is given a specific topic related to the general unit topic. for instance, last week we finished the cell phone chapter, so topics included: game-playing; camera; parents/punishment/restrictions; statistics. This week the subject is food, and topics include fast food, genetically modified foods, Youngil school lunch, snacks, cooking, etc. My classes have 40 students, or ten teams of four, and thus ten topics, but you get the idea. The co and I move actively from group to group helping them with their questions. Then they spend ten to twelve minutes going around the classroom, asking their questions and answering other students'.

At least, hopefully. Korean students have a real desire to please the teacher, which means to them completing the worksheet. If there are twelve slots to fill in, they must fill in ALL twelve slots. They know it would be impossible to do this in twelve minutes by speaking their questions in English, waiting for their classmate to process and answer the questions, then understand the answers and write them down (which is exactly what I want them to do), especially if they than repeat the process in reverse.

So they tend to do two things which utterly defeat the purpose of the activity, no matter how strenuously and clearly they told NOT to do them: a) give their survey paper to the other person, let him read and write his own answers (see, they read and write English quite well--they just can't speak and listen. That that fact is why they have this class doesn't seem to register with them in their zeal to complete the assignment); or b) read it in English once, then translate into Korean for the sake of expediency.

During the last phase, they return to their groups, combine the data and calculate the results; to wrap up, I ask each group a question to see what they learned about the class's food preferences, like: "Team I, what percentage of students think the school lunch service is delicious?" and "Team A, what is the favorite fast food in this class?" For MI Theory practitioners, this is the opportunity for the math/logic intelligence to shine.

The class survey, pretty good lesson idea. It's not perfect--I don't yet have any lessons that are. It provides a focused, student-generated opportunity for conversation. It requires both teachers to actively listen and relentlessly correct during conversation, which makes it quite tiring.

But you learn things. For instance, very few students admit to having "self-pics" on their cell phone, and ice cream is easily the most popular dessert food among my students. Also about 70% are happy with the school lunch program, a turn-around from two years ago, when we ditched J & J Catering for Dongwon Food Service.

The funny thing is, Dongwon was so much worse, the situation became such that the faculty lunchroom was deserted because everyone left campus for lunch. Now, they have J & J back again, and people seem far happier.

OB Golden Lager

2011-04-12T23:17:00.000+09:00

A new product from our friends at Oriental Brewery, OB Golden Lager claims to be made from 100% German Hop and Golden Malt, as you can see in the photo. Now available at my local E-Mart (and probably yours, as well).

For the unfamiliar, OB produces a large percentage of Korea's beers, including the Cass and Cafri lines. Their chief competitor is Hite. Generally speaking, Korean beers are brewed with rice rather than barley malt, and therefore have a different flavor profile than Westerners are used to. Lighter. Weaker, some would say.

Well, different. At 4 to 5% ABV, certainly not less potent.

A little history: Oriental Brewery, "since 1933" as the logo says, was a victim of Japanese colonialism. Then the Doosan chaebol came along:

Oriental Brewery was re-established in the aftermath of the Korean War, emerging later as a reputable international brewer with a diversified portfolio that included construction, machinery, glass, beverages, media, and trade businesses.

Indeed, today's Doosan Bears baseball franchise was originally the OB Bears, as we were reminded on baseball's opening day at Jamsil Stadium when the pre-game festivities celebrated 30 years of the KBO.

When Colonel Sanders brought Kentucky Fried Chicken to Korea in the early 1980s to popular acclaim, OB saw an opportunity to sell a lot of beer by marrying it to fried chicken, and opened hundreds of "chicken hofs" around the country. What better to wash down that delicious new Western golden fried meat than a crisp cold beer? What, indeed? It was a successful strategy that is no less successful today.

OB no longer shelters under the Doosan umbrella--bought by InBev a decade ago and shed to KKR in 2009, it is a back-bencher in the game played by the Big 10, who now account for 65% of the USD 300 billion industry.

So how is the OB Golden Lager? I wish I knew, but my sinuses have been decimated by the recent haze of yellow dust, I have a sore throat and occasional sneezing fits. Still, I'm taking one for the Dear Readers and trying to work my way through the six-pack as a taste test.

I can recommend it, though, because despite all that, it has a definite beer taste. It also has a nice head and a darker color than, say, Cass. E-Mart has had Carlsberg on sale, so I have been spoiled by a good Danish lager from the folks who isolated the species of yeast that makes pale lager and brought us the pH scale.

Education News

2011-04-10T20:14:00.001+09:00

1) All the major papers are covering events at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute for Sciece and Technology), where four college students have committed suicide since the beginning of the year. This seems extraordinary, but according to the DongA's take on the tragedy:

... a combined 16 students have committed suicide, with four taking their lives in 2003 and this year each. Given the student body of 10,000, this translates into 1.4 to 1.5 suicides per 10,000 students per year.
This figure is no different from the national average suicide rate for undergraduate and graduate students. Of 2.1 million undergraduate and graduate students nationwide, 230 to 340 kill themselves every year.

Still, the recent flurry of deaths have prompted concern. Some critics place the blame on president Suh Nam-pyo, a former MIT prof. who took over the reins in 2006. The Korea Herald chronicles:

Suh revised the tenure system which used to guarantee the faculty members’ right to stay permanently at the school. He then ordered all lectures at the school to be delivered in English.

In 2007, Suh adopted a unique tuition system, which is believed to have driven many students to the verge of breakdown.
The state-funded elite school, which was established in 1971 to nurture talented scientists and engineers, had not originally received any tuition from students.
However, under the new tuition system, students are required to pay different levels of fees up to 6 million won ($5,538) a year when their grade point averages are less than 3.0 out of 4.3.
Of the total 7,805 students enrolled last year, 1,600 students, or 12.9 percent, paid an average of 2.45 million won. And the figure has been on the rise recently, with 4.9 percent in 2008 and 8 percent in 2009.

According to reports, this problem did not affect the students who died, but Suh is nonetheless walking back the policy. It seems to me a pretty poor policy to begin with, adding huge pressures to students, espcially from poorer families; it was also an effective design to empower unethical professors to bestow grades in return for, ah, favors.

2) Speaking of bestowing grades, a JoongAng Daily article titled 'Teachers are under fire for revising report cards' reports on homeroom teachers at 23 high schools in Seoul for revising previous teachers' comments on report cards without permission, to enhance sthe students' chances for admission to colleges.

According to the office, the teachers revised the cards because so many parents and students pressured them to do so, saying any negative comments would hinder the students from gaining admission.
“It is true that teachers feel burdened when parents and students beg them to change the comments on the cards,” a teacher in Seoul said. “If we don’t do it, they would blame us, saying we are leading students to fail to enter university.” [...]
Among the revised comments on the cards, 41 percent of them were about career counseling for students, and 32 percent were about reading habits of students. The rest of them were about student club activities or volunteering.
Teachers who committed the unauthorized revisions of report cards will be given warnings or reprimands.

3) Finally this week, both the Times and the Herald cover a report from Korea Educational Development Institute stating the number of high school students choosing to study a second foreign language (after English) fell sharply last year, after authorities decided it was no longer necessary:

The number of second foreign language classes at high schools nationwide also fell 11.2 percent to 18,554, the data found.
The dive in popularity for a second foreign language has come after the government adjusted high school curricula in 2009 to put more emphasis on the study of English, Korean language and math. Learning a second foreign language was compulsory until 2009.
By language, the number of students who chose German as a second foreign language marked the steepest 26.9 percent fall from 29,881 to 21,841, according to the data.
Students of Spanish also fell 25.4 percent, followed by French (18.6 percent), Japanese (17.5 percent), Chinese (13.3 percent) and Russian (5.6 percent), they said.

Off the Bookshelf

2011-04-07T00:22:00.000+09:00

The Queens of K-Town by Angela Mi Young Hur - Chick Lit set mainly in New York's Koreatown about a dysfunctional family with a kind of reverse 'wild goose' phenomenon: a Korean family has come intact to America, but the mother returns to Seoul, ostensibly to care for her dying father. The narrative is confusing at first, as Cora's story is told alternately in first and third person at two different points in her life: first, at sixteen, in the period surrounding her friend's suicide, then at 26, when she is contemplating suicide herself. Lots of familiar elements, from the grad student whose thesis keeps shape-shifting to the mistakes one makes after too much soju in a Korean barbeque restaurant, woven together in a way that at least kept me turning the pages.
Bangkok Babylon by Jerry Hopkins - I picked this up in Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport for fear that my borrowed Sony eReader's battery would die on the flight home, and it makes great travel reading, as it consists of about two dozen profiles of Western expats in Thailand, written with Hopkins' famous ability for broad narrative sweep mixed with a unique eye for telling detail. His subjects include a couple of CIA operatives left over from the Viet Nam war, a couple of bar owners, the Lonely Planet guide author, a few businessmen, a child molester, and himself (he's the guy that worked for Rolling Stone and then wrote seminal bios of Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, among others, creating a new genre).
The Book of Unholy Mischief by Elle Newmark - This book has the makings of great novel, with delicious imagery (it mostly focuses on life in the kitchens of the Doge of Venice in about 1498), well-drawn characters, and an intriguing plot about how chefs serve as the Guardians of knowledge in this benighted time, with their recipe books as secret compendia. After 350 pages, we're well-set for a stunning climax. The reader has been sensing the momentum of a subplot about the Gnostic Gospels and the power-hungry Borgia in Rome, Pope Alexander VI, but the story ends without even a mention of them. Perhaps this was the author shying away from Dan Brown-ing it, but whatever the reason, it is a serious flaw.
The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart - The jacket blurbs for this book compare it to the great Roald Dahl, but I frankly don't see it. On the plus side, I found its 485 pages an adequate diversion for a few days, with its quirky but believable characters who find themselves in a peculiar set of circumstances and undertake a risky adventure to thwart a mysterious foe. In the negative column, the evil foe and his sinister plan seem rather farefetched--not just to me now, but to me as a reader at age twelve (the target demographic). Still, it has lots of clever puzzlers and sticky situations for our heroes to solve along the way, thereby keeping the reader engaged. There is a sequel, which I might pick up if I find it on sale, like this volume was.