Jihyun Park and I were recently interviewed by Cristina Jurado about our translation work—that is, our work translating Korean SF to English. You can see the interview (and lots of other cool content) in issue 2 of SMALL PLANET, here.
New Interview!
Category: KOREA
Night Forest
Today, another report of a game I’ve used in an EFL class. This time, it’s Heart of the Deernicorn’s Night Forest.
Classroom RPG Resource
For those interested in RPGs in the classroom, incidentally, here’s an interesting resource full of all kinds of role-playing games.
TEFL Alice is Missing
At the university where I work these days, one of the classes I teach every semester is Screen English. For the last three semesters, I’ve included the silent, text-based role-playing game Alice is Missing (from Hunter’s Entertainment) as one of our activities. Usually we play it toward the end of semester, when students are eager for something to break away from the familiarity of student-led discussion group exercises. Despite a few challenges, it goes surprisingly well. The challenges include:
Thomas Kane’s “Learning Losses”
Since 2022—if not earlier—Thomas Kane has been banging a drum for more schooling as a remedy to what he’s calling “learning losses.” He was still banging that drum in 2023, and still is these days, too. Specifically, he argues that kids fell so far behind during in school during the pandemic that they won’t be able to catch up on their own. Kane apparently has pretty hard research showing how much this is the case, measured in “points” and also measured in weeks of school. He tends to argue that kids are so-and-so many weeks behind where kid were immediately …
A Positive Change
There’s an exercise I do in my writing class. It’s actually designed to give students practice working with modals like “should,” and “must” and “might” and “can.” One of the places where we use these kinds of modals a lot is when we are giving advice, since of course using the imperative is less polite and bears a higher chance of offending the recipient of the advice. So I’ve devised this “Dear Abby” type exercise. Students choose one of five letters requesting advice. The situations are all different: Someone is feeling depressed in general and burnt out from work After months …
Show Me Your Work
This post is mostly working through the challenges that Chat-GPT pose for a general-education TEFL writing instructor. As Stephen Marche noted, “nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.” Well, almost nobody. I kind of am, since I’ve been dealing with analogous issues for decades now. So anyway, these are my thoughts, for anyone interested in them.
A Lovely Discussion of a Lovely Story
I’m late catching up—it’s been one of those weeks—but on the radio a few days ago, Paul Matthews (@ajosshi) discussed our translation of Bae Myung-hoon’s lovely short story “The Peppers of Green Scallion,” which originally appeared in Clarkesworld a few years ago. Listening to Paul read from and discuss the story was a delight for both of us, and he definitely hit on a lot of the things that made us love the story and want to translate it in the first place. You can check out a recording of the discussion over on Arirang’s Check it Out podcast. (Or …
Old-Fashioned Korean Cinemas in the Early Oughts
I’ve posted here only irregularly for years, but for various reasons I’ve hung onto the site. I had actually reached the point where I was starting to wonder whether I shouldn’t just port everything over to a free blogging site online. However, as I write this, Twitter is being strangled to death by the decisions of a single nimrod, and it’s reminded me that I don’t really want to be dependent on some large corporation for the continued availability of what I’ve posted here… but if I’m going to keep this site, I should probably post more here than just …
Grade Grubbing: An Update
So, something I would have thought impossible happened, and I thought it would be worth noting for posterity: grade grubbing has dropped to almost zero in my classes. There are a few reasons why this has happened. 1. The Kim Young Ran Law got passed. Hands down, this is the main thing that has helped. A few years ago, the Anti-Graft and -Corruption Law was passed. (It’s also referred to as the Kim Young Ran Law sometimes.) The effect among university administrators was immediate: they stopped being willing to accept even the smallest thank-you present from anyone: one guy helped …