Category: teaching in Korea

Expatriates and Creative Bitching

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I’ve often got this song on a loop in my MP3 these days when I ride the subways: Before you read the following, seriously, listen to this song, check out the lyrics, of which the following passage grabbbed me (hard, by wrist) when I first heard it: I understand the culture’s Of a different kind, But here [the] word celebration Just doesn’t come to mind! This resonates with me in the context of the story the song tells: a band that describes itself, in its early days, as “a bunch of immigrants jamming” who met at “a Russian wedding in …

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I’m in a Meeting

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I didn’t write that last post at 9:00am today, but rather last night. Scheduling posts to be published at a later date is cool. Neat, and it’s new to me — I couldn’t do cron jobs before in WordPress on my webhost’s space. I love it! And yes, by the time this gets published, I’ll really be in some kind of orientation meeting. I don’t know whether any of it is going to be in English, or how much point there is to me being there. (Most of the other new profs are bound to be Korean, and those who …

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Miss Yum and Mr. Bum Suck

gordsellar13 Comments

Okay, okay, I know, it’s a cheap joke, and one all too common on cynical expat blogs. But please, wait, wait, hear me out! Sometimes you really do end up with students in your class, or friends you meet in other ways, who have these names that are just, well… they’re things you can’t help but grin at, because you’re an Anglophone and because people should just not be named that sort of thing. Like Miss Yum. Okay, really, it was Miss Yeom, but it was pronounced yum, as in, what people say when they see food they want to …

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Professored

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Contract signed. I’m now on the tenure track, and somehow, subtly, professor describes my job title and not just my job. I’ve just came back from having coffee with the two other foreign profs who got signed on at the same time I did, and we had a good talk about the whole thing. It’s a two-year contract, but while my teaching duties won’t change much (and without going into details, my pay stays close to what it has been), I will have some more duties within the department (webmastery ones and some curriculum stuff, so far), opportunities for bonuses …

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A Few Words About What?

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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 …

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Five Essays, Calculating, and Some Paperwork To Go

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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 …

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The Future of English?

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Brian’s post — and Roboseyo’s comment appended to it — reminded me of a subject I haven’t yet posted about but have sometimes thought of discussing here. That is, the way SF authors imagine the future of the English language. This is a subject of particular interest to me, since I’m kind of working my way over to looking at SF in non-Anglophone societies, where the role of English-as-medium and English-as-culture impacts what non-Anglophones do (or don’t do) with SF as a literary genre. Of course, for a long time, many Anglophone writers simply assumed that the dominance of America …

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Purty Good Day…

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Why? Some much-needed documents are on their way here. I received my copy of Interzone 219, with some very fine art illustrating it., and a cheque for my story, too. My students in one class — the graphic novel class — volunteered to work during the first week or so of post-semester break, in order to do a good job finishing up their project, rather than rush through and do a so-so job before exams. I was quite stunned. They jokingly asked for extra credit, but the best I can do is give them a pizza party or take them …

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The Leak Continues

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Those who were reading this blog weeks ago a couple of months ago will remember the leak in our previous apartment, which culminated in our moving upstairs. I still have a key — I haven’t gotten around to moving the air-conditioner upstairs, though I surely will by the time holidays come — and I ended up going downstairs to search for the humidifier, which I figure will help with my cold. Guess what still hasn’t been fixed — not in nearly two months!?!? Yup, it’s been leaking, unaddressed, since we moved out. What method of maintenance is that? The, “Let …

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