Apologies for any typos you see: I’m still adjusting to the itty bitty keyboard on my Asus Eee and, well, you know… Someone I know recently told me how she has learned to take pleasure in refusing requests that make no sense. There will always be some people who will ask you to do something — often some work for them often unpaid. It’s all in how they ask, though. Sometimes I’m willing to do a favour for a friend, sometimes I’m glad to pitch in on a project for a good cause. When someone who is neither a friend …
Category: teaching in Korea
Rewrite?
When the first written comment on your essay reads, “This borders on completely unreadable,” and the professor stops writing editorial marks a few pages in after complaining of the paper’s incomprehensibility having given him a headache, then you should not be surprised — let alone shocked — when he expects you to redraft the thing completely when you resubmit it for as a final draft.
When Governments Are Quarrelling…
When governments are quarreling, The little folk get caught between: They say, “But wait! There is a way!” But none by bureaucrats is seen. “Fill this form out in triplicate, But no, not with that sort of pen. And this one was due yesterday, So now, you must submit again.” Submit, submit, papers and soul, Upon the desk the papers pile, And standing in the queue, souls wait, Submitting to the foul and vile. Like lice, they invade everywhere, And cling, and suck the living blood From institutions. We need them? Why? What official added to the common good? No, …
Things You Learn Grading Student Essays
No, really. This is not a litany of typos and mistakes and the like… instead, this post is made of meat… that is, of truly interesting facts I learned grading essays this week: Everyone knows that the world leader in sex-change operations is Thailand. But did you know that the runner-up is Iran? Wikipedia says so, therefore it must be, er… plausible? Now, why is Iran so big on sex change operations? For some reason, John McCain singing, “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” comes to mind. That’d probably be the biggest mass death of transsexuals on earth. And then, sadly, …
Forecast, Flash Update
UPDATE (18 Sept 2008): As Charles notes in the comments, the website now loads in Firefox, and even in Linux! I suspect this is a result of my having emailed a brief comment about it to the convention director, who emailed me just now to check if it was working for me after the fix. :) In any case, it was fixed impressively quickly, though the PDFs apparently remain inaccessible to on a Windows installation without Korean language installed. I’ll post here if and when that gets fixed, and pull my mirror file below. Forecast: scattered posting ahead. I’ve got …
골프 영어 학원?
(Trans. “Golf English Cram School”?) It could have happened. Responding to protests, the Ladies Professional Golf Assn. announced Friday that it would back down on suspending golfers who do not speak adequate English, reversing a controversial decision that had thrown the organization smack into the nation’s long-running culture wars. The LPGA Tour had announced last month that it would suspend golfers who could not speak English in media interviews, acceptance speeches and tournaments by 2009, saying that language fluency was critical to the sport’s promotion and marketing efforts. The action occurred as foreigners have increasingly come to dominate women’s golf, …
A Few Words About the Unsayability of Things Most Worth Talking About.
I assigned the Nora Ephron essay “A Few Words About Breasts” to my essay-writing class (Bulgasari helpfully provided a link to that essay in this comment), and the reaction was quite interesting. Some of the students claimed they were so shocked that teenaged American girls are so anxious about breast development, claiming adolescent Korean girls aren’t. (Lime calls bullshit on that, however.) Others admitted they were — and in a couple of cases, still are — anxious about it. Others found the myths Ephron discusses amusing, like this one about her friend’s response to the failure of young Ms. Ephron’s …
Yay For Vanilla
I decided the other day to install some kind of forum software for my students’ use, and I was looking for someone free, easy, and somewhat configurable. Given that I’ve never installed a forum, or maintained a board, I was a little nervous about how setting it up, but I went off and downloaded a copy of Vanilla and spent about five minutes setting it up, about half an hour grabbing some extensions and prepackaged themes and styles for it, and about ten minutes setting up those, and now I have a functional discussion board on my website. (Not this …
Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind by Gerald Graff
This is, basically, an excellent book. Make a gift of it to those you know who are decision makers in departments. Read it if you want to help make things better for your students. More for those who want details, as well as my reflections on a few of the things I learned reading it, but for most of you who are teaching in departments (in Korea) where students actually have enough English to learn, you know, academic stuff, or for those teaching in the mother tongue of their students: trust me! Order it! Go! Now! University EFL teachers in …
The Expattes Compleynte
Roboseyo and The Korean (of Ask a Korean) have teamed up to pose a question that really does strike to the heart of the corner of the Internet that deals with Korea in English: Why do expats in Korea complain so much [online]? Note that I didnt use the word “blogosphere” anywhere: though lately I’ve been spitting insults at The Marmot’s Fleas (as I call the commenters at The Marmot’s Hole) the way some cowboys (used to?) spit chaw, let’s face it, there are other sinkholes of negativty, the forums on Dave’s ESL Cafe being a prominent one, and Dave’s …