Let’s see: Personal Stuff Lime got a job today! Short term (till mid-September), but she wanted that, while she studies for the Neverending Huge Giant Evil Big-Boss (for you arcade game fans out there) Exam. For two months she’ll be working part-time in a hospital near our home. We’re going to Hong Kong next week. Just for a few days, because Lime won’t be able to travel the rest of the summer. I’m bringing my computer and writing on the plane, and for at least an hour a day. But travel is still travel, right? Theere’s a Korean expression I …
Category: teaching in Korea
& Here Once Again Commences the Deluge. (Wherein Students Grumble Their Way to a Higher Grade… Not!)
The grades went up late this afternoon, and then I took Lime out to celebrate. She has a job interview next week, and I’m done grading. On the way home, though, I joked with her that my email inbox would be full of emails from students begging for a higher grade. This is a binannual ritual in Korea: professors enter grades into the system, and then students email pointlessly begging to have their grades increased by some modest, or immodest amount. Korean professors claim that this is much rarer occurrence between Korean students and themselves — that Korean students seem …
Only One?
There’s a student in one of my classes who got herself an unofficial final grade of 115.7% in one of the classes she took with me. The deal is that there’s a class blog, and students who post constantly during semester can do so at an unlimited amount, provided it’s quality stuff. They get one point per post, and one point per comment on others’ posts, or in response to comments made on their own posts. This one student posted fifteen times during the semester — a little more than once a week — and she left nearly thirty comments …
Using Technology in Classrooms
You know, I always find it interesting how people like to talk up the idea of using technologies in the classroom to help students “learn in new ways.” The fact of the matter is, learning in new ways is exactly what is making classrooms look increasingly obsolete. At least, classrooms as we know them today. Often enough, teachers seem to think so deep inside the box you sometimes wonder whether they even feel its cardboard walls anymore. For example, the computer in the classroom. Very often when I see computers in classrooms, I see them used either as a portal …
Hilarious Hermione Horror
One of my Media English students — I’m not sure which one, though I’ll find out on Thursday I suppose — uploaded made this hilarious trailer remix (link for LJers, the video is embedded below) as a final project in our class. (They’re doing media remixes, as a kind of break from all the studying of Lawrence Lessig we did this half of semester.) Normally, a short trailer remix is something I’d be so-so about for such a big project, but (minor English glitches aside) this is pretty damned good, if you ask me! (Good enough, indeed, that I had …
Fairness, Competition, and Roll Call (Plus Festivals and Sports Days)
Only one of the people who was supposed to lead a discussion in my morning Listening & Speaking class was there when I arrived to start class. (And I was a minute late myself!) I asked, “Are we having discussions today? Who is leading today?” And nobody said a word, so I went ahead and had someone take attendance, and then went off on a discussion tangent, about taking attendance in class. Earlier this semester, one of my foreign students wrote an essay about the abolition of roll call in University classes. Regardless of the essay’s strengths and weaknesses, some …
Stuff Going On
Been busy like mad, and traveling for the next few days, but briefly: I’m getting my students to release stuff (or let me release their stuff) online. The first in a series of projects is now up at YouTube: my Korean students considered popular stereotypes believed in Korea about foreign countries (like France, America, South and Southest Asia, China, and Japan) and then went out and asked people from those countries what they think and feel about those stereotypes. That’s how you turn a somewhat disturbing class discussion into a learning experience. More to come: remixes/creative work from my Media …
Dhuluma Proofs Done & On Tuckerization
Let’s see, today I: graded most of a huge pile of exams (some with quite a surprising degree of insight, including a few analyses of the peculiarities of American social anxieties as encoded in the TV show Lost; others, rather disappointing) critiqued a student article for the campus magazine (about the decline of open-air traditional markets in South Korea) wrote some content for an English textbook (essaylet title: “Spider Silk and Gecko Tape”) But most exciting, I: proofread the galley proofs on my second story to appear in Asimov’s SF in 2008: “Dhuluma, No More.” Yes, exciting! Really! It’s not …
Could I Get a Class To Do This?
I wonder. Saw a link on Boing-Boing for the product of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project, a graphic novel titled Shake Girl which is online for free here. Read it in one sitting. True story. Very sad. Good stuff. Make me wonder whether I could get my students to do something that good in a semester. Too bad I don’t have an elementary writing course anymore, it’d be a cool project. Perhaps I’ll pitch it for next semester, though I think it’s too late to get approval for such a thing, and this is my last semester here.
Romans and Pirates and Dental Hell
It’s quite a challenge to teach some of the stuff I’ve been covering in my Popular Cultures course this semester. We just finished with “The Warrior Archetype” section of the course, and it was funny how aware of World War II my students were, and how much less they knew about The Great War, aka World War I. We had a look at the first scene in the pilot episode of Rome — because I had a copy of it — and discussed the romanticization of warrior types in modern depictions of antiquity and the older verse depictions they’re mostly …