Those who are watching the world news are likely discomfited by the action North Korea took today, or, rather, as it is now 24 Nov., yesterday afternoon on Korean time. I’m finding it harder right now to get a bead on the mood here than at any point during the last eight years. During my evening class, essentially nothing class-related got done: we got together, talked about the situation, and students got calls from their mothers and friends who were trying to hash out plans for the night. Since a number of my students are from Incheon (the coastal city …
Month: November 2010
So What Next?
Given that I agree with most of this: … 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 …
Campus Damocles, and Regenesis
The internet has been off on campus for two days–not in professors’ offices, and mostly not in department offices, but in a lot of classrooms, and of course the wifi is off. One person told me her Wibro (roaming wifi-like service) even seemed to be blocked–or nonfunctional, in any case–on campus. The official explanation is that pigeons disabled the power and internet on campus two days ago, but the idea that they haven’t managed to fix it since then, is growing more and more, well… you read my blog, and you know that except for an outage on Wednesday, there’s …
Dominant or Deferential? Looking at the Brain
One of the interesting things about expats in Korea, and one’s interactions with Koreans, is how some things about Korean society can be so baffling to one. For example, if you look at the comments to this post at Gusts of Popular Feeling (to which comments thread I have contributed a lot, and contributed more today, though they may not show up for a few days, or completely) you’ll see “The Korean” presenting his argument as to why, though he thinks the older woman was out line for pushing things to the point they reached, the younger woman was at …
Less Than A Mazing
What a day. I had planned to get so many things done: brewing, mazing (meadmaking), shifting the sauerkrat to its new container, cleaning up, grading. Well, the power went out about 10:00am, and I called the office to see whether it was campus-wide. The girls in the office noted the Net wasn’t working, but they had power… and then realized that the new building (where most of my classes are, along with the office) has its own generator. They called the Facilities office around 11:30am… but didn’t call me back. I called after lunch, and was told they’d been told …