I’m one of those people who can ignore annoyances for a little while, but eventually gets fed up with them and decides to do something. And of course, for this I get headaches, most of the time. For example, the mailbox for the Foreign Professor’s residence on campus. Over the last few months, I’d noticed that checking mail had become somewhat of a chore, an annoyance, and finally an impossibility. The reason is that the damned mailbox — a single cubby on the wall of the security office in another building on the other side of campus — was completely …
Category: teaching in Korea
Big Sigh of Relief
I was up until 4am this morning working on gradesheets and last-minute grading of a very leniently-graded set of creative assignments. Some of the stuff my Media English students did was really, well, as Lime put it, “Brilliant!” I wish I could post them online — I planned to do it on my class website, but I would need to get the files compressed much smaller than they are now. I’ll look into that later, and if I do, I’ll link to them from here. The variety was stunning: a silly parody of Saving Private Ryan with animal soldiers and …
Government Plagiarism
Lime came and ranted briefly about how some Korean lawmakers apparently plagiarised content from Korean travel communities after a investigatory trip to Vietnam. They got caught, of course, which is how it’s in the news. What can I say? I’m not surprised. In Korea, plagiarism is widely acknowledged to be rampant. Foreigner after foreigner has told me stories of how articles, essays, magazine writing — not just student work but supposedly professional writing and even sometimes (?) scholarly work is directly plagiarized. Hell, Hyori isn’t the only pop star to be accused of ripping off foreign pop songs. (Though, with …
Forget Rain, Forget Hakwons. Parents: Think Kim Sun Wook.
Like any other Westerner in Korea, I’m completely amused, and unsurprised, by the way 비/Rain’s so-called “World Tour” is turning out to be a collossal failure. (Inadequate stage setup? I have trouble buying that, as do many others.) World popularity isn’t a nationalist-netizen-driven thing, as Rain and his promoters — and hopefully the Korean pop music industry, is painfully realizing. But there are Korean musicians who are world-class, and one of them is Kim Sun Wook, whom Lime just mentioned to me. Here’s an article on him from 2006, at KBS GLOBAL: Eighteen-year-old pianist Kim Sun-wook has won the 15th …
Ironic Plagiarisms
This one takes the cake. On a recent exam, three students plagiarized wikipedia. This was an in-class exam. Instead of just learning the material, the students memorized vast hunks of text from Wikipedia by rote and then wrote them on their test papers. No citation, nothing. (And, as usual, the rote memorization made it harder for them to formulate and express an opinion. Just as I’ve always warned people it will do.) Why is it ironic? The topic of the question was copyright. Two of the three students plagiarized a public domain text discussing copyright. It just doesn’t get any …
The Lady Down the Hall
A lady was in the building the other day, and one of the Housing guys was showing her around, apparently to give her a choice of rooms. He actually opened my door to let her look around, and then realized we’ve occupied this room, and then hurriedly apologized — to her, not to us — and showed her the place next door. I popped my head out into the hallway, and looked around. What I saw was a middle-aged Korean woman in somewhat formal, classy attire talking to this guy as he let her into the room next door to …
Now I know why…
I was wondering why my students were all so aware of those shootings in Virginia. Turns out the susopect is Cho Seung-Hui, whom they describe as a “Korean national”. I had to wonder whether he did his military service in the recent past, since the reports said that he was a Korean citizen, and since I also read that he was apparently a pretty good shooter (though he’d only recently bought the gun). I’ve seen guys come back from military service, shall we say, not quite “right.” But it seems this Koreanness is more of a label. Nobody seems to …
All in a Day
I finished reading a really good book today. Happy happy.But you need to wait for my end-of-April reviews to hear more. I am finally deep into reworking my Korean superheroes story. So far, it’s just small edits and collating the comments from my crit group — the comments I happen to agree with, anyway — but much of tomorrow and Sunday will be taken up with shoulder/digital-grindstone interfacing. After that, we’ll see. I spent an hour this evening with a tiny class of mine, discussing the first page-and-a-half of the graphic novel V for Vendetta with my students, kind of …
Shocking (In a Good Way)
Today, during a break, a student told me that my class was shocking to him, in a good way. The reason? Basically, that unlike his other professors, I don’t ask a question with only one predetermined right answer in mind. I have the class entertain several different answers to a question, think about which one is important to them, and have them make decisions on what they want to focus. Sure, this is impossible in a math class, but this guy is a fashion design major, and he was saying my class was shocking because it’s different from his other …
Rubrics, Rubik’s
It always struck me as weird that EFL teachers, once they get trained, start using technical terminology that sounds silly. Like “Rubric”, which always meant “lesson” in the old days but now seems to be “ranking system” or “evaluation system”, especially one with explicit markers to measure competency level. Me, I’m growing fundamentally opposed to any non-crucial grading, since grades, as an arbitrary and artificial system of hierarchic ranking, mostly distract people from the more useful feedback they receive. It’s a pragmatic objection as much as a philosophical one, here, since in my experience Korean students are conditioned to focus …