Month: December 2006

iMac G3, Strawberry Flavour

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Well, now on the desk in my office there are two computers running: in Intel Jooyontech PC running Ubuntu Linux, and a Strawberry iMac G3 — you know, the blobject kind of thing like the one pictured on the right. The former I bought several years ago from a Korea-blogger named Shawn, not too long before his unfortunate suicide in China. The iMac, the more recent addition to my roomful of PCs, was given to me by another professor down the hall named Nico. I plugged in my wireless laptop and keyboard to see whether it’d work for me, and …

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Dozens of Hours Down, Three Hours to Go.

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I have precisely three classes left this semester, each one hour long. Well, actually, fifty minutes, but you get the idea. This evening, a final-exam postmortem with my English Through Drama class, and a final meeting with my evening Intermediate Composition class, where the students will write me a letter, at my request, about what they’ve learned in the last 15 weeks. Tomorrow morning, I’ll have another one-hour meeting with my other Composition students and they’ll do the same thing. From then on, it’s all just about assigning final grades, marking one written final exam, and wading my way through …

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Ogallala Rewrite Continues

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I’ve just hit 2300 words in my rewrite of Ogallala, which puts me at just under halfway for the target wordcount. (I’m going to shoot for 6000 words, though 7000 will be okay too if necessary.) One of the things I learned at Clarion came into play in my rewrite, which is about characterization. Yes, some pretty strong objections were issued regarding the poor handling of science in the story. But of course, aside from some of my own goofs, I was also aware that some of the science involved was messed-up, because in one way the story is about …

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청연 (Blue Swallow)

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I just saw the best Korean movie I’ve seen in years, a biopic about Park Kyung Won — the first civilian female Korean aviator — but before I talk about that, I want to tell a story which might help explain why I think so highly of the film. I have many excellent students. By excellent, I mean intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, and compassionate. I mean hardworking and relatively critical-minded. One of my moist outstanding students — someone who’s been abroad, who’s got an excellent handle on English, who gets Western culture just that little bit better than her classmates, in …

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What Have You Learned in This Class?

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There was a chorus of amused laughter today when I handed out the preview for the final exam in one of my classes. The text consists of two questions: one, mandatory, and the other a choice from three possible topics. I decided to mention only the possible topics for the questions of choice, but to reveal the whole question for the mandatory one. Which, in essence, was the same as the title of this post: What have you learned in this class? This question was, of course, followed by two paragraphs of elaboration, but none of it too challenging: just …

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