Seoul, Again?

Yes. I am thinking I might as well just move up there next chance I get.

This time it was due to passports. I realized that, as of this morning, it was eight days until my departure for India, and I still hadn’t visited the Jeonju Immigration Office. Of course, I need my passport for that, and it was supposed to have been sent to me by now. But the travel agent goofed and didn’t send it. So I came to Seoul to get it.

After a quick stop to buy a travel guide to India—perhaps unnecessary but I feel better having one—I crossed town to go the the travel agency. I got my ticket but discovered a mistake… I was supposed to have a two-day-long stopover in Bangkok but Air India’s ticket deal was for a two-month ticket, and that made Bangkok impossible. Instead of changing both my departure date from India, and my departure from Bangkok, they simply moved my departure to the same day as my departure from India… so, no stopover in Bangkok. Well, I get an hour in the airport, but I won’t get to visit Lynn. Argh!

However, I did happen to meet a very nice young man from near Delhi who is studying the Korean language and Engineering in Korea. We exchanged phone numbers, and his is my cell phone. But then I promptly lost my pocket notebook, I think at the travel agency. Argh! Argh!

But then I met Sun Hwa and we had a great evening, chatting endlessly over coffee and dinner. So the day was very nice.

In other very nice news, I will be visiting Iksan on Friday, and when I do, Kimberley tells me, I shall be the proud and happy recipient of a lovely painting by my friend and the renowed artist Kimberly Hutchison. She’s won a contest in Japan, and has work hanging in Iksan city hall. Known as “That White Girl Who Paints In A Traditional Korean Style”, her works have been shown around Korea (I think) and soon one of them shall grace my humble abode’s walls.

Hoping also to hook up with Young Ja and Wendel when I get over there.

Things are acceleratingly busy as the departure date for India approaches. Is it silly to be a bit nervous? Must call my folks. Maybe now’s a good time. :)

Like Bladerunner

Sometimes life is like in Bladerunner. Here I am sitting at a coin-op public network access terminal in a bus station, waiting for my bus to Seoul. I realized that, considering I need to deal with the jerks at the Jeonju Immigration Office, I should probably go pick up my ticket and passport today so that I can get the work on my Re-Entry visa processed before Wednesday. I’ve heard that they purposefully dely things until the last possible day, just out of spite, and I have an appointment in Seoul on Wednesday, so I need to be able to go to the office tomorrow so that I can reasonably demand the paperwork be done for Tuesday or at the latest Wednesday morning.

Anyway, sitting here at the public access terminal feels somehow futuristic. I wonder if that’s a kind of sign of future shock, my feeling that something I am actually living in the middle of feels futuristic to me. How much more bewildering will the next ten years be for me, when I face things that I never read about in SF novels but which will be happening to us all? I suppose it’s my job as an aspiring SF-writer to be churning out the ideas that will prepare us for that&#151p;I even argued that in an essay on this site (but have no time to link to it for now)… but I am beginning to wonder what will happen when the boundary between SF and realism begins to dissolve. Hmmmmmmmmmm.

Something to think about on the bus…

K.I.S.S.: Keep It Simple, Students…

Last night I went for beer with some engineers I teach on Monday nights. It was an interesting talk we had, and I enjoyed it. Most flattering was when the students started comparing my teaching to that of their other instructors, both other foreign English instructors and also their Korean professors in their major department. As dubious as I am at taking such compliments at face-value (for flattery often seems to be a mere social grace here), their insistance and detailed comparison of my teaching style with other teachers made me feel good. I won’t name the others they mentioned, but I will say I was very complimented, because I know those others are very good teachers.

Sometims during this test period, though, I’ve experienced some powerful frustration. I sometimes find the hardest thing to do is get students to keep things simple. They so often seem to want to say things in as complicated a way as they would in their native language. Given how flowery Korean can be sometimes, I find this especially hard with Korean students. So all term I’ve been asking them to focus on keeping it simple: “Shipgae malhae! Shipgae sengakhae!”, (Say it simply! Think simple!) I would tease them once they got tangled into complicated sentences in pair work…

I try to model this technique of dumbing down one’s self-expression, giving up some detail and nuance for the sake of getting one’s basic message across, and sometimes it works, but often, students just mistakenly think my Korean is better than it is. (Or, maybe again, it’s just compliments out of politeness to an authority figure…)

But, in any case, sometimes it led to amazingly hilarious sentences. One of my students had no partner for his pair work so he wrote a dialgue and handed it to me during the test, with “my” parts highlighted in fluorescent yellow. Here’s a tiny excerpt, just one of four conversations:

A: Now, It’s time to taste special food I cooked.
B: Oh, god. I think it’s not a good.
A: How much turkey do you want?
B: I hope you give me so much.
A: Okey. I recommend you should clearly even eat dregs.
B: Oh, a few please

Now isn’t that interesting? It’s especially interesting because, after all of the practice we did, it should have been obvious to him that the point of this dialogue was to show he knew how to speak about countable and uncountable nouns… like this:

A: How much turkey do you want?
B: A lot, please.
A: How many carrots do you want?
B: Just a few, please.

But of course, that would mean keeping things simple. I don’t know how much more I can do in the way of helping students grasp this, really. I show them the main grammar point every time that we start a new one, and I have them practice it before we try the dialogues. But some students just don’t seem to get it.

Then again, there were a couple of girls who did the same dialogue not only with wild gestures showing they wanted a little or a lot (complementing their excellent pronunciation, rendering the test somehow very cartoon-like), but they also had props—little cardboard cutout vegetables to show me they knew which vegetables they were talking about. A little preparation counts, as far as I am concerned. (And there were no cheat dialogues written on the backs of the vegetables, either!)

I guess when one teaches, one simply has to accept that some students aren’t going to get it, and some rare students just don’t even stand a chance. But it’s a hard thing to accept…

Ariranging

Horrible, horrible sound quality, but here’s a clip of me messing around with my flute. I’m playing the most famous of Korean folksongs, “Arirang”, which is one of those, “My baby’s gone, what shall I do?” lost-love songs.

As you can hear, I still can’t really play the flute. But since it’ll be my only instrument for most of my stay in India (barring my buying something new to learn there), I shall probably be not-bad at it once I get back to Korea… as long as I practice everyday, that is!