Gecko Tape? Oil-Defecating Bacteria? Spider Silk Construction Materials?

These are the kinds of things that end up in 8th grade conversational English textbooks when you let an SF writer do some of the content. (The spider silk was actually suggested to me: I just riffed on the theme of biotech.)
It also happens to say a lot that anyone besides an SF writer could [...]

Shepherds and Sheep

Those of you who knows your Canterbury Tales well don’t need the exact line I’m thinking of in that title, so I won’t give it here, since it would be overstatement. Or, well, no, not really, but it would be not-nice understatement, anyway.
I’m struck, in reading the work of schoolteachers who are trying to write [...]

Woah!

Left Flank linked to the excellent opinion piece on the state of Korean society by a Korean correspondent who spent almost five years abroad, titled “Koreans Need to Learn Life Skills.” She spells it out, asking essentially what kind of adults do you get in a society where children are shuffled between cram schools and [...]

Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind by Gerald Graff

This is, basically, an excellent book. Make a gift of it to those you know who are decision makers in departments. Read it if you want to help make things better for your students. More for those who want details, as well as my reflections on a few of the things I learned reading it, [...]

Using Technology in Classrooms

You know, I always find it interesting how people like to talk up the idea of using technologies in the classroom to help students “learn in new ways.”
The fact of the matter is, learning in new ways is exactly what is making classrooms look increasingly obsolete. At least, classrooms as we know them today. Often [...]

The Positives of Foreign Students Around (And How to Maximize those Benefits in Korea)

I’m in the middle of a pile of essays in my composition class, in which approximately one out of four students is from China, and an incident in class last week came up that I wanted to post about. (I was grading the essay that we discussed in class crit last week, which I’ll discuss [...]

The Rip-Off

Some weeks, things really do raise my hackles. It’s the concatenation of all kinds of things that are probably universal, but which in Korea are much more in-your-face or more, I don’t know, commonly accepted. What’s hitting me more and more is how the atmosphere of acceptability impacts negatively on individuals and on society in [...]

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