“Do you know him?” she asked, and mentioned that he’d been in Korea from 2001 until the time of the murder (in 2009), and had worked as an instructor at “a university in Jeolla Province.” I arrived in Jeolla Province in very late 2001, and I think it was in 2002 that a guy showed up as a new teacher in my workplace (a university in Iksan), after what had seemed like a year in Jeonju.

And the guy I knew was at least somewhat delusional, in a way that definitely affected his relationships. So… how about that? I actually have a sneaking suspicion I did know the guy, not that I’ll be visiting him in jail.

Even if the guy I’m thinking of isn’t the same person, it says something that the first person who came to my mind as a very likely candidate for being this guy was someone who spent years working with children in Korea. Brrrrrrrrr.

***

So I mentioned a while back how I’d be hosting a learn-to-brew session with some of my students, with the goal of producing two (approximately 5-gallon) batches of beer for a cocktail party being held later this semester.

On Wednesday night, we met up and I pulled a bunch of samples of different styles for them to try, including a Belgian Dubbel, a pretty hoppy American Pale Ale, a hoppier-than-style Belgian Pale Ale, a bottle of Leffe (for a proper BPA), an ESB (commercial bottle of London Pride), my Belgian Wit, my Belgian Saison (the Secret Agent recipe), and a German hefeweizen (I think it was an Erdinger), and my chocolate stout.

Ironically, the most popular style among the students was the one we decided not to make, because, sadly, we can’t get our hands on the grain that really makes British beer styles shine: that is, Marris Otter and the ESB style, as exemplified in our tasting by London Pride. (Which, incidentally, I was told later isn’t made with M.O. but rather Pale — not that we can get Brit. Pale malt either.)

We struggled to figure out how we could make it work, until finally we realized that without the ESB style in the runningour terrible decision could be skipped. After all, half the participants wanted to make a Saison, and the other half wanted to make a hoppy APA. I asked them to decide whether they wanted to have the yeast do the work, or have the hops do the flavoring work. Since we were split on that question, I finally suggested we try both approaches once, and put off doing an ESB until next semester, and until I can get some tips from the brewers I know on how to do an ESB right.

So that’s what we’re doing: a parti-gyle of 40 liters, split down the middle: half will be an APA hopped with Galena (for bittering) and Cascade and Willamette (plus a little more of my leaf hop Cascade dry hop before bottling, or after kegging), and a Saison fermented with Wyeast 3711, with a little spice added at the end of the boil. (Some ginger, some kaffir lime leaves, a spoonful of crushed black peppercorns, and maybe some fresh rosemary at the end of the boil.)

We will meet up tomorrow morning, early (10:00 am!), which meant today involved a lot of running around. By the time I’d formulated my recipes, it was too late to order grain and besides, for some reason (in a society where vast amounts of commerce is done online) Administration at my university frowns on receipts for reimbursement when the purchase occurred online. (Explain that.) I went to the LHBS which is on the absolute other side of Seoul, got the grain and hops, realized I’d underestimated the cost of hops in Korea, and headed home, only to have dinner and then head back out again in search of a bigger brewpot, some bleach, and some ginger. As I mentioned in the post linked above, this is an excuse for me to buy a bigger brewpot, and after some searching I managed to find one (aluminium, 50L, which should do for my bigger double batch brew sessions, in cases where I’m using same hops/different yeast.

(While I was at it, I found a 10L cooler with a spigot that I think I can use to do sour mashing, of which I plan to do a certain amount this fall. I’d prefer to have a round 20L cooler for both sour and non-sour mashing for single-batches, but didn’t see anything that size.)

Next Morning: Well, brewtime is half an hour away but Miss Jiwaku and I got up early, so we have installed our new fridge, rearranged fridge contents, put the old fridge out in the common room (I’ll clean it on Sunday), and done a bunch of other stuff. We still have to install the new semi-compact drum washing machine in the brew room, which will deprive me of a brewing-dedicated space (unless I can get a heavy-duty shelving system), but will free us up to do laundry without going up and down 3 flights of stairs twice per load. It’s a tradeoff I think I can live with… until spring, anyway.

Okay, so now I need to get showered and start hauling stuff out into the hallway. I’ll have the students helping me join in on carrying down the cooler, grain, boil pots, and so on… it should be a good start to the day. But I’d better go get organized. (I need to tuck my carboy of California Common into a bucket to cool or something…)

For some reason, not one of the foreign teachers I know (except one) was told about this, so when we got the text message on Friday — yeah, on Friday — we were all shocked. I’m sure it was on a calendar somewhere — in fact, I’m told it was — but as for actually communicating the change, well: communication is not a strong point here.

Anyway, I can’t complain too much: I was talking to another guy I know who is teaching at a university in Seoul, and who told me that in addition to classes, he has to attend two faculty meetings a week. (One in English, and one in Korean with English translation.) Every week. I fail to see how there could be enough business to necessitate weekly meetings within a department, let alone faculty-wide. (I suspect it’s just another kind of endurance test, especially since the meetings are first thing in the morning, ie. at 8:30 am.)

The funny thing is, even with meetings that often, he is in a position similar to mine in terms of being in the dark about things: I was telling him how I got the text message about the faculty meeting being on Friday morning — on Friday afternoon. (I’d thought it was happening on Monday.) He laughed, and said, “You should be used to last-minute everything by now, after so many years in Korea!” And then he told me a story of his own most recent, “Drop everything and come now,” notification from work, for a meeting everyone else obviously knew about beforehand.

Ah well. My schedule this semester looks okay, and the classes are not overwhelming so far. I’ll be busy this week, trying to get a story revised and out, as well as preparing for a couple of the classes. There are familiar faces in some classes, and a lot of new folks; the problems that have never been fixed still aren’t — and obviously never will be, because nobody seems motivated to get a faculty-wide movement going to fix those problems. But I know I can’t do anything about them except tell the students to be sensible and register wisely. (Stop taking classes out of order, stop turning COURSE 2 into COURSE 1 by not taking them in the correct sequence.)

Beyond that, my limited energy and time will be going to things I want and need to do. So there.

Something that really stood out for me was the way in which people talk about comedy, or entertainment in general. I’ve noticed it before, in the way many Koreans talk about music, but finally I think I put some pieces of the puzzle together. Now, I’m not 100% sure I have something here–it may be that my students are all just picking up the same phrases from the same sources–but it is an interesting pattern nonetheless.

It’s the idea of “letting off stress.” Now, anyone who has lived in Korea knows that it’s a stressful place, much more so for Koreans with all the stress of social expectations upon them so much of the time. But it’s interesting that time after time, I’ve heard students talk about how sitcoms are great because they allow people to “let off their stress.” The same thing goes for other forms of entertainment: when people discuss them, I’ve noticed many people tend toward speaking of entertainment in utilitarian ways: that movies are a way of “escaping from the stress of life” and that singing or dancing or listening to songs are all ways of “letting off stress” too.

All of that is an interesting way of putting things, and it certainly points toward why fiction sells so poorly here: for many people reading is not, like dancing to music, or guffawing at comedians, a particularly effective way of letting off stress. If you construct entertainment as serving a utilitarian purpose, all kinds of interesting things happen. Reading seems to go out the window (and reading, too, seems to be required to serve a utilitarian purpose — nonfiction and especially financial, self-help, and travel books dominate the Korean bestseller lists); films are expected to be light and amusing, not deep and powerful and moving (which might be part of why the Korean film industry seems to think it can keep the Korean Wave going with a flood of superficial comedies, and almost all SF films here seem to be both nationalist — useful to the cause of national consciousness — and action — serving as a pressure valve); music becomes background for one’s personal venting of steam and stress, so much so that live music (not live on TV, live in the same room as the listener) is an alien experience to most young people and completely manufactured pop music seems to suffice as said background; and so on.

Now, we could say that some of this applies in the West too. I’ve noticed that a lot of people seem to adopt a more utilitarian view of the purpose of reading as they get older, claiming to have once loved fantastical fiction but having moved to nonfiction, history, or “practical” reading as they got older; the origins of the garbage music we hear Korean boy bands and girl groups cranking out is American, after all; and it’s not like Hollywood hasn’t voided its conceptual bowels onto the screen with shallow garbage for decades on end now.

Still, I get the feeling the causes are somewhat different, or at least, that these views tend to dominate reading and comedy and music (if not films) less North America. Most Anglophones I know don’t seem to construct their consumption of comedy, of fiction, and of music on utilitarian grounds at all: for us, we watch How I Met Your Mother (or any program) primarily for enjoyment, not as a pressure release; we like the music we do for reasons more tied to how it makes us feel, or how the music sounds, or (very commonly among Westerners) because of the kind of identity we construct for ourselves around it — the way it serves as an accessory for a specific kind of identity — than for its usefulness as a way of letting off steam; and we read fiction because we enjoy stories about nonexistent people and things. Because reading is fun, because music is enjoyable, because sitcoms make us laugh and we like to laugh.

I’m not saying Koreans don’t read fiction, watch movies, and listen to music for comparable reasons to those that motivate Westerners to do so. I’m quite sure plenty of Korean people watch sitcoms basically because they enjoy them, and listen to music because it makes them feel good, just like Westerners do.

What I’m talking about is how people talk about these activities. It seems pretty consistent to me that there’s a different set of reasons given by Koreans for consuming pop culture than the ones I’d expect, and the one that’s jumped up and hit me in the head today is the oft-mentioned utilitarian reason: the claim that one consumes entertainment for some useful purpose. When the reason given is not for the improvement of one’s English, or development of a better understanding of a foreign culture, then in my experience the reason given invariably has something to do with a stress-release.

(A footnote: one field in which we do see a similar justification advanced is in SF: some fans or promoters of SF seem to think that appealing to the utilitarian function of SF as cultivating interest in science among kids will help justify giving it to kids to read.)

The thing is, I’m not sure if this is purely a justification, in the Korean context. It’s not rare to see examples of Korean fiction or film or music that are somehow transparently preachy, didactic, or otherwise, well, utilitarian. Even some examples of Korean media or fiction that I happen to like display these qualities — my favorite Korean SF films, The Host and Save the Green Planet, for example, both partake of an overt didacticism.

This is what I’m wondering about: whether what seems, in Western culture, to be a relatively marginal view — the idea that entertainment ought always to serve a utilitarian purpose — hasn’t somehow become (or remained) more prominent and mainstream in Korean society. I don’t have any good answers for that question, but it’s a notion I’m kicking around.

If this is the case, then it seems to me that overt didacticism is just going to more naturally fit into the Korean narrative aesthetic than it does a Western one. It might even go some distance in answering the question suggested in this post by Patricia Park (which I found linked at The Grand Narrative in this post): if didacticism is part of the aesthetic, it justifies greater excesses in melodrama, for example. (Which brings to mind, for me, a lot of medieval literary and dramatic texts. The York Mystery Plays, for example, are melodramatic and didactic in a way that makes modern Westerners look on quizzically, but those are the kinds of performances that come to mind when I see Korean TV: waaaaaaaaaay over the top, melodrama up to 11, and so on.

I don’t think it’s a complete explanation. But I think it’s interesting to consider. And it’s a good thing to consider for someone like me, who finds himself wondering, when watching Korean TV dramas, how anyone could take them seriously or feel deeply engaged by them. If aesthetics is a big part of it, then the next twenty years will be interesting: plenty of my students find Korean TV rather off-putting and seem to prefer American-styled TV dramas. I wonder if the makers of Korean TV dramas will manage to keep up with their audience, or what will happen when the next generation of wannabe TV auteurs comes up in the ranks and tries to make TV that works in the newer aesthetic. It seems already to have happened in film, to some degree anyway, but film was a pretty-near dead industry not long ago. TV is different. Hmmm.

Two members of my writing critique group–well, a circle of friends, is what we actually became over the course of 2010–are leaving Korea now. Jei is off to America, and Nick (with Katrina) is off to adventures in Southeast Asia, and then another job somewhere else. The group will not be the same without them, obviously, but I will also miss them just for the people they have been, and for the things I’ve learned from them. Nick especially has inspired me to say yes to life, or to foods, or to going out, a little more often.

We of course have all kinds of plans to see each other again–at cons, making visits, and so on–but things are changing. There are, of course, a number of members of the same group who aren’t leaving–two leave, and including me, four stay for the moment (though another is off in a few months) and they’re good friends and I look forward to plenty more good times with them; but it’s the absences compared to before that haunt one in advance.

Anyway, I am happy to say that we have been saying goodbye in style, with lots of good food and drink, in keeping with the way we’ve been meeting up all along; we did our last critique circle in a sushi bar, sipping sake and not eating any sushi. How many people can say that? There’s a goodbye tonight. It may not be apparent on my face how it feels. But it’s not easy, especially with these particular friends.

Meanwhile, I am trying to push down that spring in preparation for classes, which begin tomorrow. I’ve migrated my course website to a subdomain of this page, and have looked over the syllabi, but I am too distracted to do any sensible last-minute revision. As I walk here and there on campus, students pop out of the woodwork, yelping my name, and waving. I smile and wave back, of course, but I am distracted, not yet ready to put on the Professor persona, not quite prepared to dive into those waters again. I will be, tomorrow, of course; but not today. Not now.

I have a writeup of my visit to Rome, and a lot of notes on Italian craft beer, which I will work into two posts, as well as some stuff on kegging, my brewing plans for the year, and so on. I’m thinking of splitting off the homebrewing/beer-tasting stuff into a separate subdomain as well; or maybe craft.gordsellar.com, since then I can include the posts about other areas of DIY artisanal food-making I am getting into, like home-curing meats, cheesemaking, and baking (as well as Miss Jiwaku’s new hobby, making soap by hand).

In that case, I could let this site be more of a place for stuff on SF, occasional musings and rants about Korea, and personal posts. Or maybe I’ll just isolate the homebrewing stuff to a category-posts-only section of this site, I don’t know. I am thinking it over.

It’s this kind of keeping busy that gets one past all those goodbyes (or see-you-laters) and hellos (or welcome-to-my-classes) that one isn’t quite ready to say. But I know in a few weeks, I’ll be busy and head-down, working.

On what? I’ll save that for my next personal post, though the watchwords are:

• time management
• expectations management
• novel-drafting

And in this case, I don’t get to have only one or two out of three. I need to have all three. More on that next time.

The comment is a priceless example of Korean netizen commentary. After claiming that Koreans need to start putting electronic bracelets on Southeast Asians in Korea–despite the fact that crime rates are much higher across the board among Koreans than non-Koreans here (this morning’s news had a litany of horrors, such as a drunk gangster who stripped to his waist tried to kill someone on the subway, and a nut who killed someone on the cross-country express train because the victim “looked like his brother”)–and that “if these guys think they’re going to get caught, they just kill people,” this tool actually claims that 90% of all unsolved murders in Kyeonggi Province over the last five to six years were committed by Southeast Asians.

90% of the unsolved murder cases, note.

And this, friends, is why I think that critical thinking is so important. Not because it’d prevent nutters from saying racist crap online, of course, but because nutters are free to post all kinds of idiotic, illogical crap online.  And this is the sort of thing you do actually hear people repeating. Stopping them and saying, “Wait, if the murders are unsolved, then how can you know that 90% of those murders were committed by Southeast Asians again?

(와, 초능력자야! He must be a freaking telepath! No? Oh, it’s just another racist idiot.)

And this is why I think it’s so important for educators to work hard to fit critical thinking into education at some point. I heard a professor recently attribute the lack of many students’ ability to make a coherent argument to “the failure of the Korean [public, secondary-level] education system” and, almost in the same breath, to back away from actually doing anything at the undegraduate to address that supposed failure. The universities blame the schools, the schools blame the universities (or parents), and the students are left hanging.

It is possible to do better… but it takes effort, and it takes people who are vested in something other than the safety of their positions. As with all universities, in Korea the people calling the shots and the same ones who exert systemic resistance to change, experimentation, and everything else necessary for improvement. The thing is: when you want to make something better, you need to try new things. With new things, sometimes you get chickens, and sometimes you get feathers. But Admin doesn’t like feathers. They demand chickens, and if you deliver feathers occasionally, they ding you for it.

And who is dinging Administration for being made out of feathers? Nobody, actually. C’est ça, c’est la problème.

… I am asking myself: what next? It’s not just problems in education that have me wondering this, of course: there are other things afoot that have me checking the escape hatch to this orbital sat, making sure my suit doesn’t have any leaks, because hard vacuum is a bitch.

But for the record, I think the problems are systemic to education everywhere, but the parts that are exacerbated in Korean education are especially hard for me to reconcile myself with.

A colleague in another department I was talking with told me the idea that undergrads are incapable of individual or creative thought goes way up the ladder at my university, effectively almost all the way to the top.  She was told, when she was hired, that it is unfair to think students at the undergrad level can think critically at all, and it is unfair to expect them to do so.

Now, people I suppose are entitled to think otherwise. I cannot say the Korean education system as a whole is “wrong.” But I do think it’s a case of the system, the society, fighting the wrong fight here: I think critical thinking and creative writing are absolutely crucial skills for the world we’re tumbling into, for the world we’re now in. I think without them, we are utterly screwed.

It is unfair to ask students to think critically, if you’re not teaching them the skills associated with it. Persisting in not teaching it, though, is unconscionable if you ask me.

So… what next?

Something about a student asking me the difference between thesis and hypothesis, and telling a student, “No, you don’t have a thesis.” The funny thing is, I swear I remember the inquiry, and it wasn’t by email. It was in a class, just last week, and I think I even know who made the inquiry. (That’s not to say she wrote the post, mind you.)

In any case, I was surprised that this is the only reference Miss Jiwaku found. I assumed there’d be a number of students complaining about the homework I assign and so on. Maybe those complaints are posted on cafes that aren’t publicly searchable? Ha!

It’s nice to be able to write a paper about some topic, or make effective presentation, but if nobody’s shown you how to make an argument, or how to ask the kind of questions that tend to be worth asking (about your own preoccupations, even if nothing else)  then how useful are those “practical” skills?

Anyway, about the saddening thing she said: well, she asked how one comes up with an interesting thesis, and I walked her through an example. “Give me your bag,” I said, and on the bag was written, over and over, “NEW YORK NEW YORK NEW YORK.” I asked her if she liked New York, and she said she did.

“Have you ever been there?”

“No!”

“So why do you like New York? How do you know? What does it mean to like New York? What ideas do you have about the city, and why do you have them?”

We talked about things like how sofas became popular in Korea, why pimatgol has been torn down, and more. The thing that made me sad, though, was when she said, “Your words are like magic. Suddenly you find something interesting in anything. Suddenly you can find some interesting question everywhere.”

I’m not bragging about this. Frankly, any student who doesn’t realize that his or her own words are like magic, is a person who has been failed by his or her education. Because, in the end, education is about teaching people how to think. This student, encountering very basic processes of thinking about the world around oneself, confused it with magic, the way Arthur C. Clarke imagined we would be unable to distinguish any sufficiently advanced technology from magic.

Except that thinking about the world is a very, very basic technology. It’s a very basic process, and every student should have a fairly good handle on it by the third year of her or his studies… especially when someone is studying language and culture as a specialty, as all of my students do (albeit, in some cases, as a secondary specialty following business, science, or some other subject¹).

I’ll be honest: while I am skeptical of the idea that Korea’s the only society that uses education to pummel the creativity and wisdom from its masses, I do think Korea’s elevated it to an artform (of sorts, if a horror show can be an art). Miss Jiwaku has a friend who is a teacher, and she was talking to her lately about teaching. The friend was saying things like how high school kids appearing on TV in a quiz show ought to dress in school uniforms, because after all they are students and should look like students, not like adults. Miss Jiwaku balked at this, not only remembering how much she hated having to wear a school uniform, but also remembering how this friend herself had absolutely reviled it, how she had seen friends stuck wearing hand-me-down uniforms that didn’t fit because they were too expensive to buy new, in the correct size. This friend herself had complained at having to wear a skirt, and now she was saying kids should wear them.

The problem, you see, isn’t just teachers. A lot of good teachers somehow become cogs in a big bad system. John Taylor Gatto and others make similar arguments about education in the West. But if we’re not teaching students how to think critically, how to ask questions and seek out answers to them, if we are training people to leave school only to be easily brainwashed by spurious explanations of the world… what are we teaching people in schools?

I’ll confide another depressing comment here. I was recently told by a Korean colleague that I was asking too much of students. I was saying how

When you’ve proposed the same obvious, simple curriculum changes years in a row, when students are even pointing out they there should be prerequisite courses, though, it becomes hard to see what one ought to do. Here’s the obvious, you say. Let’s do this.

Oh, but we can’t, comes the reply. And here’s a spurious reason why.

The most recent form of this, though, I encountered yesterday, when I was told that, “We can’t expect creativity from students. They’re only undergrads.”

Which is a puzzling sort of assertion, especially when it’s made in the context of my comment that something on presentation proposal was essentially a regurgitation of popular claims on the internet.

(Specifically, that American depictions of Koreans and Asians in general betray a deep-seated, unmistakable, pervasive white supremacism supposedly universal in American entertainment and American society as well. Premised on the notion that Lost was anti-Korean. That the reason human trafficking is presented as being perpetrated by Koreans in films like Crash is because of racism, and not because it’s such a serious problem in Korea and in Korean expatriate communities in places like Los Angeles. Because William Hung didn’t win American Idol — despite being a “handsome Asian man” — because he’s not white:

I’m sympathetic to the idea that Asians, especially Asian men, get short shrift in American entertainment media. But Lost was only racist if you’re a thoroughgoing sexist. (I’m far from the only one to have noted that Jin becomes a very sympathetic character over time, while Sun is pretty much sympathetic all the way along, and is indeed one of the few characters–major or minor–who is really, genuinely nice and sympathetic from the start, along with Bernard and Rose.) As my American co-worker pointed out, there’s real-life reasons why human trafficking is framed as a problem with Korean-Americans (and Koreans, period) and the problem is real and serious in Korea, here and now.

And William Hung? I mean, really? It is not apparent from the video above that he’s as untalented as plenty of other Idol Search TV show contestants? Does he compare so favorably to this guy?

Maybe all that karaoke one must experience living in Korea has simply callused this poor student’s mind to the horror of that awful singing.²

Whatever the case, what my (undoubtedly well-meaning) colleague said to me is plain wrong: when we challenge students to do something they think they are unable to do, what often happens is that they surprise themselves by rising to the challenge. Hell, the premise of my approach to teaching is that one must push students to constantly take on bigger and bigger challenges, until it becomes a habit for them, because that is how one learns to do increasingly difficult things. And in my experience, most students who are actually interested in learning adjust to the higher standards: they learn what they need to, they push themselves a little harder,, and suddenly they’re doing things you assumed might be too hard for them.

(Like having their own ideas about the world, instead of just regurgitating. This is something I am working on learning too, in another way: in classroom discussions, I’ll hear things that would make most Westerners turn horrified, disgusted. I feel that way too, sometimes. I often stop and feed in a little information, some statistics that devastate the popular (regurgitated) opinion. But today, I stood back and watched as students themselves did this, looking up statistics and facts online. It’s not optimal–they’re not totally sure how to separate wheat from chaff when it comes to statistics, for example–but they’re  looking beyond what parents, media, peers, and professors tell them to think.)

But I have another objection to assuming undergrads are incapable of thinking creatively, and it’s not even to do with the evidence that, in a lot of cognitive areas, young adults perform better than their elders. I believe that treating students this way is to treat them like little kids, and in doing so we do both the students, the future, and the society a great disservice. It is, indeed, a form of infantilization, and infantilization, as Robert Epstein argues in his latest book, is the surest way to disempower, silence, and subdue young people.

Korean society needs its young people to think hard, to talk loud, to push for changes that need to happen if Korea’s to contend with the future that it is tumbling towards at high speed. Without those changes, a host of problems that already exist now will bloom into full-on dysfunctions and social crises. What Korea needs right now is not more of the same, but rather creative attempts to deal with its problems. However, in institutions that are dominated by people who aren’t just older, but who also think younger people ought to know their place, and cannot come up with anything worth considering, a vital wellspring of human creativity is being stifled and indeed utterly blocked.

Perhaps it would behoove Korean society to consider the concept of “flow” to crucial to its local version of feng shui and of oriental medicine alike: if you block a flow, you do serious damage and cause problems for the whole system. Right now, the flow of respect from old to young, and the flow of ideas from young to everyone, are both severely blocked. There is room, in other words, for a reenvisioning of the social dynamics we see in Korea even from within the same cultural sources that underpin this status quo. A society normally need necessarily to not look beyond its own tradition to find sources for a radical reevaluation of its status quo.

And I think the situation is serious. A long-term expat I know, and was talking with the other night, said to me that she felt as if the country was falling apart at the moment. Koreans I’m close to who live here have generally expressed a sentiment of worry about the immediate future of this country, and very many of them seem to simply wish to leave, because the machinery that has brought the society to this peril is too big, too complex, too much like a juggernaut that they feel no hope for stopping its movement, changing its course, or even surviving as it slams through their own lives.

And by the way, I’m not saying Korea is unique in this. The results of the very recent mid-term elections in the USA terrify me, not because Obama’s my personal political Jesus (he isn’t) but because the other guys are so much worse. I sometimes feel as if the whole of the modern, “developed” world is sinking down into the sea, and we’re arguing about whether taxes are fair, whether women should be able to have abortions or birth control pills, whether there should be sex-education. Canada’s not doing significantly better, from what some friends tell me… we’re become a blue state-red-state American-styled football game too, in the years since I left (and it was already starting in the years before I left Canada.)

And the same kind of fiddling-while-Rome-burns is what  see when I look at Korea. And it doesn’t have to be that way, at all. But unless we start asking people to think, holding them responsible for their opinions and challenging them to have reasons for thinking the way they do, we might as well just give up on education altogether. We might as well just lie down on the track while that juggernaut train rolls in, with its rich older men at the helm, and most of humanity shoveling coal and slopping buckets of oil into the furnace.

It’s now or never: are you a teacher, or just a cog in a machine that’s chewing up the whole world?

And what would you rather be?

#

^{1. Korea seems like one of those AD&D campaigns where everyone is playing a multi-classed character, not characters with a single class. It also seems like the kind of campaign where people would be minmaxing their characters. Yes, I am suggesting that all those comeliness points (for those who remember AD&D first edition) come at a cost: if you spend all day worrying about your makeup or hair, you’re not thinking about the world, and it will cost you intelligence and wisdom points.}

^{2. Seriously, on the karaoke: I am starting to wonder if anyone has carried out serious tests for sensitivity to tuning problems. I don’t mean sensitivity in terms of ability to detect such problems, but rather, in terms of ability to tolerate off-key music. I am unusually sensitive to it, such that I find karaoke outings pretty much unbearable even with people I’d like to have fun with–primarily because, let’s be honest, most normal people cannot sing very well. I wonder whether people in societies where karaoke is popular are more tolerant of off-key singing because of the popularity of karaoke, or whether the karaoke is more popular because the off-key singing doesn’t bother them as much as in societies where karaoke is less popular, or what. One might imagine noise-sensitivity in general might play a part: I find Koreans very much more noise-insensitive on average than North Americans (and hence most coffeeshops are riotously loud here) but at the same time, in my experience, Japan is much, much quieter and they’re all over the kaaraoke. So, of course, it may be there are mostly other factors at play — acculturation, genetics, experience, development — that could explain all this. But I still think a study inquiring whether average Koreans are more or less tolerant of noise, and especially of off-key music, would be very interesting.}

You moron, piss-stain down the front of your pants
At the slightest hint of disagreement; you are less a
Hunter than a scavenger, searching the entrails of my
Words for other words, that feed your puerile bilious rage;
You are, you tool, a symptom of the plague that cannot be
Avoided, a black mind-curse, a chancre on the tip of the spirit,
With your broken logic, your paltry demands and your
Implied threats. You don’t understand, do you, you dog?
You can take precisely nothing from me that I want.
Except the future of your own kin, for you are,
A sign in yourself of how lasting this sickness will be.

Ah, and you thought you could push my to heel, to obey?
You didn’t expect I would bite back when you barked, neh?

And your handshake at the end, unmistakable as cancer,
A promise: I shall watch you with rheumy eye, with my
Screeling voice ready to decry what you haven’t said.
I shall bitch and whine how and when I am told to do,
And tattle, and take my tattling slow, and lie,
While the city burns, while rapists rejoice and kids are
Immolated one by one upon their desks. I abjure you,
You anachronistic shitbag of a man.
The door should break your ass on the way out,

But I am better than that. And better than you
Might give me credit for. And yet, this seems as good
A reason as any to slam it as hard as I can, when I
Take my leave of your company, and of this little room.

Which was a rant I won’t inflict on you now, but involved the usual disorganization and short-sighted stupidity one comes to expect from the Kafkaesque bureaucracies so common here, but also the kinds of retarded policies that make it easier for, say, an unemployed Korean (with serious cash flow problems) a lower credit risk than a gainfully employed non-Korean — which, in other words, require we do everything through Koreans, as dependents, instead of in our own names.

(Both of which — the bureaucracies, and their retarded policies — I’ve had quite enough, thanks.)

The weird thing, though, was that this guy I was ranting to assumed that (a) I couldn’t read Hangeul, and (b) I had no understanding of Korean society.

He smiled proudly to himself and said, “Well, I’ve adapted. I’ve pretty much gotten used to Korean society now, I have a pretty good understanding of the culture.” He said this as if he were proud to contrast himself with me, a know-nothing Westerner who didn’t get it yet. To which I was so dumbfounded I didn’t quite know what to say.

Then he showed off his Chuseok presents to me, bragging that his boss had spent W150,000 on him, and told me of his deep-seated desire to please his Korean boss (at the private company where he was working), and “bring home the bacon” by forcing the boss’s unwilling employees to improve their English against their will and despite the fact they have little need of it. When he confessed anxieties about some students who didn’t seem to want to learn, and I mentioned, “No matter what, you’ll always have students who don’t truly want to learn, or have the capability, or even need it…” he just smiled and said something like, “Well, I’m just trying to bring home the bacon. I wanna do a good job and make my boss happy.”

Uh, okay. But maybe you’re the one who doesn’t get it yet, pal.

Honestly, he didn’t seem like a completely bad guy — not someone I’d want to have a beer with, necessarily, but he seemed just a little clueless and overly earnest, and of course a touch arrogant — but I have to ask: what is it about Westerners in Korea that makes them think that within a year or two, they know all there is to know?

(And yeah, I probably went through that too. I like to think I’m not still in that state.)

#

You wonder, how could a cowboy be so much like the zen monk in that strange book your auntie from San Francisco sent you?

He rides up as the sun is coming up, serene on his old stallion, a faint half-smile on his face, and dismounts. Hoisting the saddle off the horse’s back, he rubs the horse down and smiles at you. It’s the only greeting he ever gives anyone, but friendly enough.

You ask him, finally, how he got that way. Zen, you say, and you wonder if he knows the word, even.

But he just smiles his smile a little less faintly, and gives you a look like, “A former life,” but instead he says, “Long story. Sit down, lemme tell it.”

And he takes a cup of coffee from you, strong and black and steaming, and he says, “When I was working out on the Paulson ranch, at first I was just glad to have any work. I worked the harvest, I fed the pigs, I roped cattle. And one day, I found a wild horse, a stallion, out in the field. I figured, alright, I’m going to run him in, tame him. Sounds like a nice side project.”

He smiles, glancing over at his horse. “Not this boy,” he says, patting old Bucker on the noise. The horse snorts. “It was another horse, black and huge and scary as hell. I’d never broken a horse before. But I watched the old guy who broke him in, and the next time a wild horse was around, I gave it a shot. And what do you know, I was pretty good at it.

“And then, one day, the old guy who’d tamed horses for the ranch at the time, he retired, and I took over part-time. I was still feeding the pigs, cleaning the barn, whatever. Now, breaking horses, we didn’t do it often, but once  in a while was enough for it to be my thing. A wild horse came in, they’d call my name.

He sips the coffee, sniffing at the steam before he swallows. “S’good,” he says.

You thank him, and he sees you’re eager for him to go on, so he winks and says, “Well, it lasted a little while, before old Paulson’s daughter come up to me and says, ‘We need you to take on cleaning the barn, let Jimmy do the wild horses.”

“And I’d never heard of Jimmy before, never even saw him. When he was breaking horses, I was cleaning the barn. And the thing is…  the reason she gave was …

“She told me that basically, the handles on the barn doors were too high up for Jimmy to reach, I think it was. Jimmy was short. Now, a short man can break a horse, mind you, but the sounds I heard… well, Jimmy took that phrase, ‘breaking a horse’ a little too literally. You’re not supposed to just let ‘em run wild; and you’re not supposed to really crush their spirit, neither.

“No, you’re sposed to just find a way to show the horse that it can be, and wants to be, ridden. You get close to it, talk its language with your face, your body. You ease it into tameness.

“The thing is, I loved it. I really loved it. It was like… like whiskey on a cold fall night by a campfire. It was like watching the sun go down across the big sky with the sound of guitar and singing in your ears. It was something I loved to do. But Jimmy was doing it, because the handles of the doors to the barn were…”

His look isn’t wistful, it’s not angry, you realize. It’s just… puzzled.  People had paid money for the horses he’d brought over. Very good money. Jimmy’d never broken a horse before, but the barn doors. It’s good, how it still don’t make sense to him. If it did, that’d be wrong somehow.

“I wondered if anyone ever thought about moving the barn door handles down, you know; pulling them off and nailing them back on a bit lower, so Jimmy could reach ‘em and all. And then I just stopped wondering, and cleaned the barn. Found a lasso hanging on a hook, and practiced with it a bit. Roping cans of paint, roping saddles and door handles and all kinds of things. I’d never had occasion to learn that skill, it was incidental, but I did.

“The lasso, it’s about this, what did you call it? Zen? It’s just you know, thinking about where you want it to go, and letting your body put it there. That’s all. It’s how people get born, how people get from one coast to the other, how people find their way home at night. It’s simple. Your body knows, deep down inside your bones, how to get that lasso wherever you want it. You just have to let your body put it there. Get out of the way and the rope goes.”

He pats his horse again, looking out at the horizon now that the sun is mostly up, the brilliant pink and gold of the sky fading to heartbreakingly clear blue, and he turns his face toward you and smiles.

“So then… when I was good and ready and didn’t need no more practice with the lasso, I got up on my horse, and I rode ‘er off Paulson’s farm. Didn’t shout, didn’t shoot nobody, didn’t do nothing but shake hands, say see you later, and get on my horse and go. An’ I ain’t looked back since, no boy. I didn’t get to tame horses for a good while after that… but I also didn’t have to stare at door handles wondering how nobody could think to move them. I didn’t have to stare at the feedbags for the horses, and wonder if that was what it looked like in there, sawdust mixed in with their food. I didn’t have to hear Jimmy breaking horses all wrong.”

You know how the rest of it goes, and he knows it, doesn’t tell the rest on account of that. How long it took, you don’t know, can’t guess. But he got back to bringing horses over, eventually. How it must have felt to ride off the Paulson farm, after all that time cleaning the barn. And though you know he’d never have done it, you wonder — because so many men would have stayed on, cleaning the barn and staring at those goddamned door handles — how it might have gone if he’d just shut up and kept cleaning the barn.

Out on the field is a tree, one that got broke a few years ago, in the winter. Only tree for miles around, so that when people pass it they make themselves a wish, and it got piled down with snow, and then it rained. Snow and ice, and then the weight brought the tree down. Strangest thing. And it’s still growing, but bent, broken and wrong, like fingers on the hand of man who never grasped a lasso, never got up on that horse and rode off.

And then you glance at the door handle.

And then you look at your own hand, and know.

And it’s even worse when it’s nine at night and a couple of people come in wanting to sample the beer, just see what it’s like, and they’ve clearly just eaten dinner and tell you so, and you say, with the smarmiest look possible, “Well, I don’t sell draft beer without anju,” as if you’re talking to some hakwon teacher or something, and to top it all off, the anju on your menu is a ridiculously overpriced joke — even moreso than the regular overpricing of mediocre-to-bad food that anju often is, and even more unappretizing…

That’s wrong. Hakwon teachers aren’t, as a class, a lower order of life, nor do they deserve to be treated with disrespect. Some hakwon teachers are fine people, and some are losers.

If it helps at all, it’s just that the 21-year-olds who I never see except in a drunken state of some kind, and often talking loudly about the bodies of young women passing by (as if nobody in Korea speaks English, least of all young women)… those are the idiots who stick out in one’s memory so much more vividly. Or in my memory, anyway.

But hell, I have friends who teach in hakwons. Anyone who speaks to them as if they were second class citizens would piss me off to no small degree.

And what’s ironic is, I have one hakwon-teaching friend who’s likelier to be treated with respect than I am, on any given meetup: he dresses up (for work, it’s required) while I usually turn up in jeans and a T-shirt (because, living on campus, I can change out of my work clothes before just about any outing).

If you’re a Westerner in Korea, one little eye-opener is to dress the opposite of usual one day. If you’re usually dressed informally, dress up one day and go out: people will assume you’re a businessperson or a professor. If you’re usually dressed up, then dress down, and people will assume you’re a “lowly” hakwon teacher.

(For those of you playing along outside Korea, hakwons are basically what we know as “cram schools”, very loosely akin to those schools I’ve seen in movies — don’t know if they’re real, we didn’t have any I knew about in Saskatoon — where Chinese-American or Jewish-Canadian kids might have been sent to after school to learn Chinese or Hebrew. [I hear stories about such places -- are they still around? Were they common at some point?] Except you can learn cartooning, science, math, Japanese, art, cooking, and all kinds of other stuff at them. But a huge proportion of the hakwon market is English study. And to teach in one, all you really need is a BA in any subject… any subject. And since getting to Korea is so relatively easy, this means a lot of young people coming to teach for a year or two and pay off their student loans; it means a certain number of young men who come to prolong their adolescence, as well… which group I’m quite happy to disparage, as I do anyone who is an adult but refuses to act like one.)

Well, I worked in a university language center for a while, so technically I’m not sure if I’ve ever worked in a “hakwon” the way most people mean — our work involved kids and adults, but only 4 hours of class a day — but I know that for all intents and purposes, I was a hakwon teacher then. And became a professor in a flash (as, with an MA, I was overqualified for the job, in Korean terms). I was the same person before that job change as I was after.

But I apparently am no longer the same person, having absorbed (and grown my own amount of) derision for the hakwon teachers of the world, unfairly. If I’m going to avoid using the word “ajeoshi” and “ajumma” the way Westerners so often do — strictly as a pejorative — then I’m definitely going to avoid using “hakwon teacher” that way too.

• The Great Dictator
• The Muppet Movie
• You Only Live Twice (James Bond 007) & The Manchurian Candidate* (1962 version, not 2004)
• American Zombie
• The Godfather* & Brighton Rock
• Jungle Fever
• A Scanner Darkly
• The Stepford Wives
• His Girl Friday & Jackie Brown*
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail
• Brassed Off
• The Lady Vanishes & The Birds*

Films individually marked with an asterisk (*) are to be watched outside of class. The list is unbalanced, to be sure: far too few British films, even if we count 2001 and the James Bond as “British” to some degree (Clarke’s involvement in 2001; Bond being of British origin). Some might seem unlikely choices — The Muppet Movie, for example, though I want to use it to get a discussion going about kids’ entertainment in the English speaking world; or A Scanner Darkly as a way of getting at subculture, counterculture, and drugs in an American historical/cultural context — and there are other films I’ve considered  including, but haven’t done. Are my students better served by being shown Almost Famous or The Godfather? Should I swap in one of the Star Trek films — or even Harold and Kumar Go To white Castle —  for A Scanner Darkly? Some part of me really wants to show them The Revenge of the Nerds or Police Academy or maybe Airplane or something. American Zombie seems minor compared to many films, though it opens up the possibility of talking about politics differences between protest culture and “issue” politics in the US as compared to Korea. Finally, some part of me wants to show them one of those crazy Beatles movies, maybe during the same week as A Scanner Darkly. But I’m also wondering whether I wouldn’t prefer to include, say, Brazil in place of A Scanner Darkly… which would up the content of UK films in the list, but would also mean missing the whole 1960s drug culture/counterculture thing.

It’s a tough job… I rather wish I had a  full year of classes in which to show films. Year-long courses do exist at the Universities I attended in Canada, but in Korea they seem not to — perhaps because of the long break between each semester, I’m not sure. I can think of many more films I’d like to show, but cannot. In one sense I’m approaching this the way the film class I took as an undergrad was taught: my prof, Don Kerr, selected a bunch of films most of us would never have gone and seen outside of the context of his class, including some on my list: Wings of Desire, His Girl Friday, The Lady Vanishes, and Brassed Off. Part of the point of the course is giving students a chance to watch films they likely wouldn’t otherwise look at, hence the inclusion of, say, Brighton Rock and Brassed Off and Jungle Fever. There is a bit of idiosyncracy — I mean, as with a reading list in a lit class, I’m going to teach films I like and think are worth seeing because they are exemplary films, while also being useful windows into culture and history — but I think that’s natural.

Anyway, I’m curious what reactions people have to this list… feel free in the comments section.

– Ezra Pound, in (I think it was) Guide to Kulchur.

And he is, gender-exclusivity aside — plenty of women must talk for an hour too — quite right in this observation. The teacher must talk whether talking educates, or does not educate. The teacher is employed as one who “teaches” and there are all kinds of expectations that may make teaching a rather different endeavour from educating.

Not that one should take Pound at his word all the time; he was a nut. But he also claims somewhere in the same passage or section of that book that the educational quality of the French university system dramatically increased when the length of classes was reduced, I think to forty or fifty minutes instead of an hour. It’s a polemical flipping of the bird to universities and all that, but when you are next looking out into the eyes of students who seem to see themselves as empty vessels, waiting for you to pour out your vast wisdom, it’s worth pausing and asking yourself whether that last ten minutes will be educational for those students, or just a person talking till his or her quota is met.

Meanwhile, I have a cowboy story to tell… but not in this post.

Seven chapters of the progressive Korean Teachers and Education Workers’ Union, the Parents Association for True Education, and the youth human rights group Asunaro will host an event Wednesday to launch the Seoul headquarters for rules on students’ human rights.

Can you imagine who disagreed?

In response, the conservative Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations released a commentary Tuesday saying, “Legislating laws on students’ human rights encourages conflict between teachers and students.”

And the killer is their reasoning for doing so:

“Rules on students’ human rights do not respect schools and see things only from the perspective of universal human rights,” the commentary said. “Too much emphasis on a student’s human rights could infringe on other students’ right to learn and teachers’ right to teach.”

One is tempted to wonder why schools — institutions designed to serve human beings — are supposed to be “respected” more than the human beings they’re designed to serve; one wonders to what degree a sane person can argue that a system that is incompatible with the perspective of universal human rights doesn’t deserve to be maintained.

One of the examples given was what students who feel a little hungry in class might demand the right to go out and eat, and if the teacher says, “Wait till breaktime,” the student might claim his or her human rights were violated.

Which seems inane. A Westerner would look at such a dispute and point out the fact that if the rules were written intelligently, this kind of outcry would be immediately demonstrably silly. Write the rules well, minimize the loopholes for abuse on all sides, and enjoy the increase in quality that ensues. Yes, writing rules well is hard: but it’s much better to have rules that can be repaired than to have none: at least, that’s what makes sense from a Westerner’s perspective.

I say “a Westerner’s perspective” because, obviously, it’s not Westerners who are the primary stakeholders in this dispute. Korea’s Confucian background may have soemthing to do with it: after all, as Simon Leys puts it:

Confucius had a deep distrust of laws: laws invite people to become tricky, and bring out the worst in them. The true cohesion of a society is secured not through legal rules but through ritual observances. (From Ley’s introduction to his translation of The Analects of Confucius, pgxxv.)

If you ask me, though, this explanation is too clever by half. There may be some cultural foundation on which this distrust and fear of rules is seen as normative among right-wingers — but there are left-wingers from the same culture who are calling for a specific set of rules to be established.

So to me, it seems likelier that the reality is simply this: Confucius was unfair to rules: human trickiness comes out whether you have them or not, and the teachers who’re against having rules are just leery about having one form of trickiness — the kind that is used in a rules-poor system — replaced by the need for another kind of trickiness — the sort that we find in a rules-rich system.

If anyone is looking for examples of how a rules-poor system makes for an unlivable modernity: drive a car in Korea. While a majority of people know and follow the rules, a large minority seem to operate as if the rules of the road either don’t exist, are guidelines, or simply don’t apply to them as individuals. (I don’t drive myself, but the rides I get with Western friends and in cabs are, as often as not, quite harrowing.)

In any case, for those who don’t live in Korea, here’s a roundup of links on the kinds of issues that are at stake for Korean schoolkids and their human rights:

• A moronic editorial that points out how things are soooo much better for schoolkids today than during the dictatorship era, and how it’s the human rights of North Korean schoolkids that are the real concern. Er… so, until the Koreas reunite, South Koreans have no right to criticize the establishment or improve things? How stupid is that?
• Corporal Punishment is now banned in Gyeonggi-do, the most populous and powerful province in Korea. Which is confusing: everyone says it’s not allowed, but it’s widely practiced just the same. Anyway, it’s being officially replaced by a reward-and-punishment system called Green Mileage. No word on whether Stephen King has taken offense on the copyright pseudo-infringement, though it is telling that this system’s name is so close to the name of a famous prison novel and film.
• Here’s an article from 2003, published by Human Rights Osaka, about the Korean education system and students’, teachers’, and parents’ rights.
• Hair is, for some reason, an obsession among Korean school administrators and teachers:

In 2008 students at certain schools who had naturally brown or curly hair face discrimination and even were required to carry special ID… because it’s not allowed for students to color or perm their hair.

Hair length is a constant issue, as are summary clippings which, quite obviously, are designed not to shorten hair but to humiliate (see the pictures in this article also). It’s worth noting that during the dictatorship era, this kind of summary hair-length checking and clipping was carried out on the street, in order to “prevent cultural contamination” — but Korean society is now thankfully free of such ridiculous dictatorial practices… except, of course, schoolkids. Note that this kind of crap is a newsworthy oddity in the West: in Korea, it’s everyday practice.

• Matt at Gusts of Popular Feeling, who’s done a ton of research and writing on this issue, points out just how much of the worst part of the dictatorship era lives on in South Korean schools today. (You can find more of his writing about issues affecting Youth in Korea — including school issues — here.)
• I wrote earlier about violence in Korean schools here, as part of my discussion of the film Kick-Ass. There’s a lot of writing about that online, though… feel free to Google around.
• As part of the same discussion, I mentioned school uniforms, and I personally think it’s quite self-evident how oppressive it is to make people wear them. (After all, anyone who’s shown up at a party to find someone else wearing the same article of clothing as himself or herself will know what this feels like. Anyone who argues it’s different for kids, or when carried out on a mass scale, is, I think, wilfully ignoring that kids have feelings too, or that oppressive structures can be carried out on a wide scale. (Consider the amount of spying on fellow citizens that has been part of most totalitarian regimes, including South Korea’s postwar dictatorships.) But I think it’s more worthwhile to point you at a couple of articles mentioned in the source footnotes to Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness (or see the book’s website), which stand as good evidence that, on a scientific basis, it’s oppressive to make schoolkids wear them…

  (And I’ll add, before someone jumps in an argues that Korean society is different, being “less individualistic” and “more collectivist,” that these articles and other studies in general suggest that human beings are neither fully individualistic nor fully collectivist, but rather balance the two tendencies or needs. We can predict the boundary line for norms being set in different place, but that’s unlikely to do away with the deep-seated need to both fit in and be however different is permissible or lauded in a society. (And my everyday experiences with Koreans in and out of classrooms supports this observation.)

Brewer, M.B. (1991). “The social self: On being the same and different at the same time.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 475-482. Basically: Brewer outlines the basics of Optimal Distinctiveness Theory, showing that people socially seek to be both similar enough to others to “fit in” but also distinctive enough to be perceived as an individual with distinctive, worthwhile traits. Basically — we like to fit in, but not too well.

Fromkin, Howard L. “Effects of experimentally aroused feelings of undistinctiveness upon valuation of scarce and novel experiences.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Volume 16, Issue 3, November 1970, Pages 521-529; and (no link, sorry, the issue has not been added to the journal’s online archive) Fromkin, H.L. “Feelings of Interpersonal Undistinctiveness: An Unpleasant Affective State.” Journal of Experimental Research in Personaluity 6: 178-85 (1972).  Basically, it’s neither pleasant nor good for your experience of the world to be made to feel less unique than one tends to already feel oneself to be.

Anyway, what I meant to point out, at the outset, is not the problems alone, but that there is at least discussion going on. Not all the links in my link list are about negative things: the banning of corporal punishment is a really good thing… in theory. However, I’m not optimistic about how quickly, or effectively, this will root out teacher-student violence: the real remedy is to fix the dysfunctional school system itself — a system that exaggerates the dysfunction already found in the modern, industrial school system more genrrally. (Which is to say, schools everywhere are a mess, not just in Korea… but the Korean model seems to bring out even more of the bad and suppress too much of what good can be scraped together in modern schools.)

By the way, hat tip to Surprises Aplenty!, who got me going on this subject and from whose post on the issue my first link was taken.

Товарищи на жилье для чужих учителей:

Ошибка пришло мое внимание. Ебаный в рот, который “фиксированной” из коммунальной стиральные машины убрали ручки. Без ручки, мы не можем изменить настройки температуры воды. Конечно, это не было преднамеренным. Может быть, Ебаный в рот были по приказу пьяного комиссара? Возможно, они были пьяными себя, и забыл, чтобы заменить ручки? Машины являются новыми.

Я не верю, они могут быть настолько бесчеловечными, чтобы сказать: “Ах, эти животные, пусть вымоют одежды в холодную воду. Я не должен жить в своем жилье!” Они никогда не мог сказать, что из нас, могут ли они?

В любом случае, пожалуйста, примите это уведомление: ручки не могут быть заменены в течение некоторого времени. До этого, вы можете изменить настройки температуры воды с кусачками.

Спасибо!
Товарищ Золотой

Indeed.

I’m also not sure what to say to the lady who seems to think my laundry-drying rack is some kind of communal rack., on which she’s supposed to be leaving her stuff hanging for a week or two at a time. But that’s a different story.

Ha, you can see him waiting for the ice to crack, but it hasn’t yet. You can see him glance over at the other tables, at the girls who aren’t exquisitely made up, who aren’t dressed in the most stylish outfits, and wondering if, maybe, life would be easier with one of them. Poor guy. Poor girl.

All of which is pretty pertinent to the stuff below, so I’m mentioning it. But really, when I started this note, it was just to note that I’m writing this on Friday night, not on the Saturday afternoon when it will be appearing on my blog.

#

I was writing some feedback for one of the great students in my Creative Writing class, and I ended up rewriting one of her poems, to make my point that when writing poems, we can be, as I wrote to her,

less concerned about putting the sentences together in a sequence that makes sense in the way a “prose” story would. It’s still storytelling, but works in little tiny stolen moments, instead of cinematically. In poetry, we leave most of the story out because a smart reader can fill it in. It’s almost like taking a story and smashing it on the ground, and then picking up only the most interesting pieces and assembling them so the reader can see all the bits we left out.

I rewrote her poem — which is, by the way, obviously a sort of rewrite of the origins story of “Sleeping Beauty” as an allegory for the plastic surgery craze that we have going these days over here in Korea, which is pretty neat, really, for student writing — because it seemed the best way of showing her what I meant about cracking apart the narrative in this way, and using spaces to imply stuff, as well as to focus on the really crucial moments, to make them gorgeous little fragments.

Anyway, which is not to say my rewrite of her poem is gorgeous, but I think it’s not bad. And since I cannot send it out somewhere — that seems ethically wrong — I figure I may as well plonk it up here for people to enjoy.

Beauty, Sleeping

A face, hideous and gnarled,
scarred, untouched, the color of shame and
a lonely shadow at the foot of a tree
tears upon its cheeks.

The sage’s voice intones, the ashen
wand waves, and then there is light:
like sunrise bursting through the dimness
she turns radiant now. Finally, dawn.

The village boys hurl stones more more.

Yet dusk haunts her, alone at the tree;
crepuscle clings to her throat. But softly
comes a distant voice, a lark — perhaps –
sings, beckoning, and she follows.

Safely preserved, like an ancient crown, or
the blade of some hero who slew some hell-thing
laid out like the robes of a forgotten queen,
safely displayed in a crystal glass case.

Safe as houses, safe as calm sweet death,
her hands, lips, and her breasts untouched:
eyes, gazing upon this terrified longing
the sun, trapped in noontime glory.

#

I suppose this is as good a time as any to say that I’ve seen some amazing, amazing stuff in these packets of fiction and occasional poetry. I’m glad we have a Creative Writing course going, and the amount of work some of the students have put into their stories and poems — and the fact they went to the trouble of preparing SASEs — makes me more than happy to type up feedback for those who request it.

My favorite stories so far include one by the same student who wrote the poem, about a woman who gets plastic surgery and then decides she wants her beauty to last… and decides taxidermy is the best route! There’s also a pretty wild story about a romance with an “older woman” (who turns out to be the stepmother of the girlfriend whom the guy is trying to forget!), and a story that made me pretty sure that insisting — pace Lester Dent’s Master Fiction Plot — that they continue to “shovel the grief onto their hero” (or heroine)… which, basically, is a story that starts with a guy smoking his last cigarette before trundling off to a bridge where he plans to kill himself… and then, his life takes a turn for the much worse! (But it ends up being a powerful, and in the end even uplifting, war story!)

There are also a few speculative fiction pieces: one is more slipstream, with people — especially businesspeople — turning into household objects because of some inexplicable disease, and another that I daren’t comment about except it has the weirdest (grammatically parseable) sentence I’ve read in a while:

“Did you clean your asshole with toothpaste?” she said to me on the bed.

Don’t ask me, I have no idea. (Not that it’s a bad story, but… WTF?)

While the majority of essays I’ve received use footnotes in the familiar way, there’s apersistent minority of essays where footnotes are applied not at the end of cited material, but in fact the opposite, like this:

There are, of course, many possible explanations for this particular type of argument. ¹ According to Miller, there is no difference between transplantation and assimilation. Furthermore, it is unclear what Brownhill is attempting to demonstrate with her example….
(…)
^{1) Miller, James. Arguments About Culture. (돼지꿈출판사: Seoul, 1999.)}

Or, worse (another concocted example):

¹ In the middle of the Great Depression, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker meet when Clyde tries to steal Bonnie’s mother’s car. Bonnie, who is bored by her job as a waitress, is intrigued with Clyde, and decides to take up with him and become his partner in crime. They do some holdups, but their amateur efforts, while exciting, are not very lucrative. The duo’s crime spree shifts into high gear once they hook up with a dim-witted gas station attendant, C.W. Moss. The three are joined by Clyde’s brother, Buck and his wife, Blanche, a preacher’s daughter. Soon a long-simmering feud between Bonnie and Blanche begins; the once-prim Blanche views Bonnie as a harpy corrupting her husband and brother-in-law, while Bonnie sees Blanche as an incompetent, shrill shrew. Bonnie and Clyde turn from pulling small-time heists to robbing banks. Their exploits also become more violent. When C.W., the get-away driver, botches a bank robbery by parallel parking the car, Clyde shoots the bank manager in the face after he jumps onto the slow-moving car’s running board. The gang is pursued by law enforcement, including Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, who is captured and humiliated by the outlaws, then set free. After a raid kills Buck, injures Bonnie and Clyde, and leaves Blanche sightless and in police custody, Hamer tricks Blanche, whose eyes are bandaged, into revealing the name of C.W. Moss, known in the press only as an unnamed accomplice. The Ranger locates Bonnie, Clyde and C.W. hiding at the house of C.W.’s father, who thinks Bonnie and Clyde — and an elaborate tattoo — have corrupted his son. He strikes a bargain with Hamer: in exchange for a lenient jail sentence for C.W., he helps set a trap for the outlaws. When Bonnie and Clyde are ambushed while stopped by the side of the road, the police riddle their bodies with bullets in a blood bath. This is a very exciting story with many criminal and killing of many peoples which is absolutely scary and titillation to America audience.
(…)
^{1. Wikipedia}

(Note the absence of quotation marks in the above, as well as the lack of even a vague hint at where the cited material ends, though it’s obvious in the immediate collapse of grammatical coherence. And yeah, that collapse is somewhat exaggerated for effect.)

The weird thing being that several people have told me this is common practice in Korean, except I’ve looked into a couple of Korean academic books I happen to have lying around, and they use some bizarre mixture of the MLA format  – (Miller, 1993) — and the Chicago style of footnote citation.

It seems bizarre to me that, as a few people have claimed, in Korean usage, footnotes would be moved to the front of cited material — especially since the footnote comes from Western academic writing and it seems unclear to me why Korean academia would have simply decided to reverse the usage instead of using the original form.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not decrying it, I’m just baffled. Maybe there is some sense to it, like, say, a grammatical reason where it’s easier to indicate the source of a quotation or paraphrase at the end of the passage? I’m just trying to understand (a) whether this is true, and (b) if so, why this would be the case.

I’m mostly asking because I am off-and-on working on a writing style guide for Korean students writing in English and would prefer to know whether to be noting that this is simply wrong usage (both in English and Korean), or specifically culturally different usage.

(Note: if I had my way, students would just use MLA format in my class, but I’m willing to read footnoted work, as long as it’s consistent and as long as the text is written so that I know what exactly is being cited — the beginning indicated by a reference to the author, quoted material in quotation marks, and the end of a quote or paraphrase indicated with a citation to the source.)

(It is, of course, based very closely on Larry Niven’s original story.)

I am not going to say more about superheroes, because I feel as if I’m a bit superhero-ed out, to be honest. It’s a huge genre, and there’s so much I don’t know about it… but I imagine it’d be fun to teach a whole course on the superhero figure. It’d also be a good excuse to go and read a bunch of history and stuff.

Not for now, though… maybe in some future Popular Culture course, or something. I’d like to get a Special Studies course set up, where we could teach some experimental course, a kind of sandbox for spinning out new course subjects. But I don’t know how hard it would be to get one set up. Another I’d like to teach is “Representations of African-Americans” or something like that, which, in fact, would be an expanded version of the first half of my Pop Culture course from this semester, which followed the track through to the present day instead of stopping at sometime around 1945. (We got to 1969 or so in terms of social movements, but also briefly discussed Madonna; we talked about her somewhat less than we discussed Josephine Baker, though.)

Anyway, I have five essays left from that class, and it’s my biggest course. There are a few other piles of things to get through — the most sizeable being a pile of creative writing submissions, only four of which included some sort of request for written feedback — and then I’ll only have calculations and stuff left to do.

One lesson I’ve learned is that, no matter how much disorganized students beg you, it’s better not to adjust the due date for their final essay/project/whatever to the end of exam week.

This is not just because one only has a week after the end of the exam period during which to grade, calculate, and submit grades into the system — it’s also because of the fact that too many students will simply procrastinate till the last minute anyway. If you let them procrastinate until the end of exam week, fewer students will manage to complete the project, and of those who do, a surprising amount will be of lower quality than it otherwise might have been. Which is not to say the essays are all horrible: I’ve genuinely enjoyed some, but I could see the strain of last-minute-itis clearly in many, combined with post-exam-zombie-itis.

But I also have at least four, and possibly five, students who failed to submit a final essay. After a semester of showing up to class — some of them participating quite well, I should add — I was baffled to hear that they’d decided not to submit any kind of final essay at all. (Scratch that: one student was going to fail anyway, and probably realized it. The other three, though, could easily have passed the class or even done well, but opted not to submit a final essay. Ah well… I told them about two months before the due date to get to work researching their next essay; I can only assume that they didn’t.)

That said, it seems to me wiser to have a hard-and-fast deadline for the final research project, at least a week, maybe ten days or even two weeks, before the final exam week begins. I get the feeling the earlier the deadline (within reason) the better the work I’ll be receiving.