I’ve been ill, and it didn’t occur to me that the office would be closed this afternoon on account of the fact that tonight is New Year’s Eve. So whileI generally managed to total up all my grades by early yesterday evening, I didn’t think to stop by the office until the afternoon. When I got a call at 12:30pm informing me that if I wanted to get help entering my grades, I’d better come to the office now, I hurried over, because we’re now using a new, and much more complicated system, and I didn’t want to mess things …
Month: December 2008
A Few Words About What?
I had my students read and respond to an essay of Nora Ephron’s titled “A Few Words about Breasts” at some point early in semester. Well, now the semester is over and I’m finalizing grades, which means checking my gradesheets against the homework just to make sure everything’s right. I stumbled once again upon a really funny little error that totally changed the meaning of the title of one essay. It should have read: A Few Words About Nora Ephron’s “A Few Words About Breasts” … except the student seemed to have felt as if the repetition was objectionable (good …
Fascinating Paper
This post is primarily about teaching writing in an EFL context, especially in terms of using templates and modeling various writing “moves” or “techniques”, and the use of group crit sessions in essay-writing or other writing courses. If you’re not interested in that, you’re best to skip this post.
And the Bells Were Ringing Out
Not quite too late for it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwHyuraau4Q
Happy Christmas (or Whatever)
I’ve always been a little suspicious about wishing people a happy Christmas and then following up with a list of holidays that they might be celebrating instead. Especially when someone is saying it on the 24th or 25th of December. So I’m just going to say, whether you’re celebrating this particular holiday or not, that I hope you have a good one. (And if you can’t have a good one, well, you’re not alone, but make it as good as you can.)
Válka s Mloky
“Nowadays we simply cannot wait a few hundred years for something good or bad to happen in the world. Take the migration of peoples which used to drag on over several centuries: today, with our present organization of transport, it could be accomplished in three years; otherwise there would be in profit in it. The same is true of the liquidation of the Roman Empire, the colonisation of the continents, the extermination of the Red Indians, and so on. All these things could have been accomplished incomparably more speedily if they had been put in the hands of entrepreneurs with …
Korean Who?
No, Korean Rush. You know, the horrid prog-rock band? Actually, I haven’t sighted a Korean version of the whole band, though, doubtless, somewhere on the peninsula, such a thing exists. But I have sighted a Korean doppelganger of their lead singer, Geddy Lee. (Incidentally, I know someone who saved Geddy Lee’s life, by the way. They were driving along in a van, if I remember right, and they sighted Lee up ahead, crossing the road with his arms full — with boxes, I think. This person I know stopped his friend from driving over Lee for his sins against music.) …
Five Essays, Calculating, and Some Paperwork To Go
Final exams are over, but I’m still grading essays and need to update the tracking sheets for the assignments in a couple of my classes. I have five essays left from my Essay-Writing course — someone failed to submit a final essay, I suspect — and I need to tabulate how many people completed how many homework assignments in that course. (I’ve skimmed them all, just as I skim the discussion board where the students were supposed to be writing regularly, but I haven’t tabulated the work yet.) My Listening & Speaking course, which was essentially a Conversation course with …
XY Column Installment Up.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned my column installment about the sociobiology of the Internet Troll a few weeks ago. The column was “inspired” (or at least, my thoughts about the problem of Troll scum on the Internet were inspired) by recent experience. It’s up now, and you can read it over at Cahoots.
OVER~~!
I find myself wondering why overacting — vast, wailing reactions of protestation, incredibly fake outrage, and the like — is the norm in comedic “acting” in Korea. (EDIT: Actually, it also seems the norm in movies, but in a different way: long brooding shots, action scenes five minutes too long, and hyperemotional crying is something we see both on TV melodrama and in films, but I’m particularly thinking of comedy at the moment.) Or, rather, not “why” but “how it became the case that…” One example is the various gag TV shows like Uchassa and Gag Concert. These are, roughly …