Making fair exams can be really, really hard. Evaluation of students is sometimes difficult. In fact, I’ve mentioned in several classes that I think the quality of University education would skyrocket if grading was abandoned. Now, instead of grading, they’ve said, you need something. They’re perhaps right… but maybe not. It doesn’t exactly matter how well a doctor does on her exams throughout school — if she flunks the licensing exam, she flunks; and it doesn’t matter whether a doctor flunks every exam going through school, if he gets 100% on the licensing exam (and then goes home and forgets …
Category: teaching in Korea
A reminder to all weirdoes… clean out before you move out…
So I was trying to figure out the reason behind the weird action of the drawer on the desk I inherited as part of this apartment — the same desk I’m intending on no longer using soon, because, as Lime put it, “It’s for middle schoolers…” — and I discovered a whole cache of weird detritus under the bottom drawer that had been mucking up the action of the slider. I can’t believe that in six months here (I was away for two months out of the last eight), I’ve never noticed this junk, but then, I had to slide …
Okay, okay, I’m a bad person…
Yesterday, I didn’t just get T-shirts. I also got two Chuseok presents, one from Lime and one from the University. (The one from Lime was a set of high-capacity rechargeable batteries for my camera, which is a great present and which I’m charging up at the moment.) The present from the University is the one that made me think of myself as a bad person. You see, it was a gift-pack of Bertolli Olive Oil, with three bottles of the stuff — two bottles of “Original”, and one bottle of “Gentile”. Now, in Korea these days, people are thinking about …
Research Your Choices!
I had an interesting talk with a student today, who was considering a career in a foreign country. (Go figure, she came and asked me for advice.) The thing I asked her, since she was clearly asking me for advice, was whether she’d researched either choice — the career, or the foreign country. Now, I started out just dubious about the career, because this particular career was one that has long been (and is still widely) considered a “damn good job”©right; by surprising numbers of Koreans, and a rather-not-so-good one just about everywhere else I’ve lived. But later, it turned …
Man Can I Relate…
Sometimes I want to do this in class, too, when kids think that answering a phone and chatting is more important than a lecture, or that it’s okay to text-message during exams, and so on. Not that I would do this to a student’s phone, but I sure want to, sometimes. (Usually, instead, I ask, “Is this a life-and-death emergency?” when the phone rings, or, with repeat offenders, I take the phone and speak into it in English, or, once, in somewhat-simple but all-the-same-comprehensible Korean words, I informed the person’s girlfriend that he was in class and unavailable to talk. …
Mother Tongues Collapsing Around the World
Mutant Frog Travelogue posted about some Japanese conservative who’s trying to cut English from the curriculum in Japan. Now, what the Japanese choose to study is their own business, of course, but what I find interesting is why he has proposed the cut: The reasoning is that Ibuki (as do many conservatives) believe[s] that students’ Japanese language abilities are going down. They should work on their native language, hone that to a good level, then work on English. Studying a foreign language at such an early age a) apparently confuses the kids, and b) takes class time away from good, …
Jazz Chords and Student Essays
Some writing about music lately on various blogs brought back a memory from the first week of University. I was enrolled in the Department of Music, and all first-year music students were required to study music theory. My professor, the very theoretical Naida Archer, had this test that everyone had to take. I can’t remember whether she, or one of the TAs for that semester, administered it, but I do remember trying my damnedest at it. The test was full of questions like, “Sketch out the harmony for this melody,” and the like. Well, I had trained in jazz, for …
이지로보틱스
If ever there was a good example of what my students’ writing looked like at ym old University, it’s here: 이지로보틱스 Repeat after me: Machine translation doesn’t work. Machine translation doesn’t work. I’ll let you know when it does work. Till then, keep repeating that phrase to yourselves. (via Culture list)
I don’t want to know what “lingerie piercing” is.
Honest. I wanted to respond to a long and thoughtful comment today, but instead, I ended up redrafting an article for the campus English magazine. The kids, their hearts are in the right place, and they do have some interesting things to say, but… well, there’s a lot of rewriting involved. I know more about cosmetic surgery, foot-binding, gender-reassignment surgery, scarification, branding, and all kinds of other forms of body-modification, much, much more than I ever wanted to know. Including a horrifying newfound familiarity with the term “lingerie piercing”. I’m almost scared to google that. No, wait, I googled it …
The Minstrelsy Lecture
Yeah, they got it. What was interesting was just that they missed layers of stuff. After I lectured a bit on the history, we watched a segment of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, and then watched it again with them noting “stereotype” characteristics, and then, when I noticed that most students had only listed a few, we went through it bit by bit and I excavated things like the watermelon stereotype, why a certain comment was sexual humor and sports humor and jailhouse humor all rolled into one, and some of the iconic characters and types in the lineup of dancers accompanying …