Category: teaching in Korea

Back to the… Wait, What?

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Well, while Typhoon Bolaven does its worst out there–and it doesn’t have me particularly alarmed at the moment, though I’m not venturing outside or anything… our neighborhood is in a panic, though, and the local mini-marts were cleaned out as you can see in the featured image for this post–I’m thinking about what the hell to do with the course I foolishly agreed to teach this semester. That course is a Foundations in Greco-Roman Mythology and Biblical Narrative course. You know, the kind of thing you spend a summer preparing a course outline and readings package for? As with most …

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The Wow! Moment and Teachers’ Responsibility

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Creative Writing teachers sometimes — not very often, but sometimes — experience a Wow! moment, when they see student work of a caliber that is simply way beyond the majority of the class… a student whom they feel moved to encourage to keep writing, in some capacity or other. Or at least, a student whose talent and hard work deserves recognition. That Wow! moment is even more powerful when you’re teaching Creative Writing in a foreign language. I just finished grading my last pile for the semester — aside, perhaps, from a couple of late videos submitted to Youtube — …

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So-Se-Ji

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Today, just a funny story from my first few months in South Korea. When I first arrived, I was teaching at the Foreign Language Center at Wonkwang University down in Iksan. That is a small city, but it was okay for my first year or so in country. At the Language Center, our teaching duties were split between kids and adults, with a usual pattern of one morning class with adults, then two afternoon classes with kids, and a final fourth hour with either kids or adults. Eventually, I settled into a pattern of teaching two adult classes in the …

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Note to Brewer Self: CaCl in the Mash/Boil, and a Student Brew

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So I’ve sampled some of the Mild ale I made for Miss Jiwaku, and my impression is that it’s not bad, but could use more… more of the maltiness, which is supposed to define the character of the beer. I was looking up some mash chemistry info to reply to a query by another homebrewer and realized that I hadn’t done any water treatment in making my Mild, but that adding Calcium Carbonate (CaCl) could help emphasize the maltiness of the brew. I shall have to remember that next time. My use of Windsor yeast certainly helped (the wort stopped …

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Ze Art Off Traduction…

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Earlier this semester, I noticed a senior student had signed up for an intro-level conversation course. I asked her what she was doing there, and she just kind of shrugged. When I told her that she and I both knew she didn’t need the course, she told me it was a requirement for graduation. Now, a sensible administration would provide a simple test for students to qualify for a waiver on this particular course… which by definition makes it impossible for us to have such a system, because our administration is useless and intractable. So I told her, point blank, …

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