So I have one duty left for this semester — to input the syllabi for next semester by next Friday. I said to the office assistant who reminded me of this, “Okay, but if I enter it later, it doesn’t matter, right? There’s some time closer to semester when this is possible, right? Because when I started working here, [previous previous office assistant] told me it was no big deal and I could enter my syllabi later on…” “Oh!” she said, with wide eyes. “But that has a negative effect on your evaluation.” “Huh?” “Your points. You will have fewer …
Category: teaching in Korea
The Endless Semester Is Almost Done…
Well, other than an official grade change form — one of those grade-change requests was actually valid! — and handing in some official forms, I’m done with my work for the semester! I’ll be handing in the last of my paperwork tomorrow, including gradesheets and attendance forms, paperwork to collect my pension money from my last job — apparently you have two years to do it — and a sheet notifying Academic Affairs that I’ll be out of the country for a month this holiday. (Lime can’t travel, so I’m going alone.) I’ll be in Laos for two weeks, and …
“Grade Grubbing”
It strikes me why Korean profs so often get their grades into the computer system so quickly. Yes, now, after so many years here… My grades went into the computer system at the Uni only a little more than 24 hours ago, and already, my email inbox is bursting with pleas. Last night — get this, New Year’s Eve! — I got 12 emails in total. Today, another 3 or 4. Of these, exactly four have been valid (in my books) inquiries. One was from a student who was wondering why she got an F when she’d done all her …
37.6 MB
So like I mentioned, Friday I was told that I was expected to submit what I’m currently calling a “teaching dossier” — I’m sure there’s another term I’m supposed to use, but I can’t remember it and I’m too tired to look. Late last night, I finalized my grades, so I had all of today to compile all of the handouts, evaluation forms, syllabi, and other materials I’ve created in the last two years, plus write up a letter describing what, besides my teaching duties, I’ve been doing to enrich the campus, so that someone somewhere will process my department’s …
The Nightmare is Over, Well, Mostly
I’ve finished my grading. It took hours and hours, mostly because I was so busy this semester that all the grades were on scattered pages, listed in different things, and so on. Happily, I don’t need to deal with little attendance papers because attendance isn’t (really) a part of the grades — though I use it as a tie-breaker, on the basis of the notion that people who care more about their grades come to class more. And, as I’ll mention below, I also use it to track and adjust peer-evaluated class participation grades, since one cannot participate if one …
Grading and Submitting Documents
I’m happy to report that I’ve finished the large majority of the grading work I need to do. I have some calculating of numbers, and so on, but I really only have two classes left to enter the data for — unfortunately, my largest class is one of them. I hope to finish that tonight, leaving me all of Saturday to do the calculations. But I will need to collate a bunch of grades that students assigned to one another during the peer evaluation segment of the “discussion leadership” section of my conversation class. Which is very important and useful, …
Um, Thanks, Guys…
I’d been having network connection problems for a week or so — the network booting me at random intervals, anywhere from ten minutes to 40 minutes — and finally, when messing around with the installation of Internet Explorer I can run under Wine on my Linux installation, I figured out that it was indeed the campus network blocking me because I hadn’t installed a virus scanner and some kind of weird Korean firewall app. Which only exists for Windows, of course, because Windows is the only OS in Korea, right? Oh, the DRM! Anyway, I had the network guys come …
How I Got Out of Retail, Classroom & Workplace Management, and An Idea About Task-Based Leveling Systems in Classes
An office dispute going on in the life of one Korean person I know, and the way that she tells me it was handled, reminded me of how I got out of retail. Well, really, after a few months, I’d made up my mind to get the hell back to University the next year, because those first few months of my “year off from school” opened my eyes to the way people without University degrees — and people with only a BA — live. That is, I worked in a record store. I actually did relatively well for myself, considering …
Go, Mo-Sa, Go, Go!
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past day thinking about how my story “The Broken Pathway” needs to end. Mo-Sa, the focal character, has been coughing and sniffling rather impatiently as I’ve struggled to figure this out, and finally, looking through older drafts, and at what I did with what was once his cat, Nabi (“Butterfly”, a common name for cats in Korea, for who knows what reason) — now it’s a shabby little brown thing, an apparently stray mountain cat who leads him right to the big what-the-hell-is-that early in the story — and at one other …
Chapbook and The Broken Path
I spent time today on two projects. One is a chapbook of poems written by my poetry course students. Some people haven’t mailed in their poems yet, but most have, and it’s now at almost 50 pages. I’m guessing 60-72 pages when it’s done. I’ll see what the costs are at the printshop, to get enough for three copies for each student, plus a few spares for me and for other profs in the department. (Plus mailing a few to friends.) Since I cannot do the layout for staple-bound texts, they’re going to have to be perfect-bound, and that costs …