Category: KOREA

Lesson Plan: The Caper!

gordsellar0 Comments

Back when I first came to Korea, there was a lesson I created on the spur of the moment, after observing how little security there seemed to be on the little minivans that drove around in Iksan putting money into bank machines. (I had such fun talking over strategies for robbing one of these vans with a group of expats that I thought I’d see how my students fared.) Over the years, the exercise has shifted and changed slightly. Finally, this past year, after a brush with Jason Morningstar’s wonderful Fiasco RPG, I expanded it a little to include an …

Continue Reading

What I’ve Learned About Crises, or How My Vaguest Shadow of a Doubt Died Today…

gordsellar4 Comments

It’s been snowing heavily the last couple of days in my area. The thing about snowstorms–like other crises–is that they reveal a lot. It’s difficult to gauge the stability of a system in normal times, though of course you can guess. But a crisis, that lays bare a lot. Now, when I say it’s been snowing “heavily” allow me to adjust that comment: I don’t know what’s fallen so far, but the prediction for was 10cm, which just barely qualifies as heavy. (And today’s snow certainly was not heavy, though it was constant.) So… why did one of my colleagues (wisely) …

Continue Reading

A Bizarre Underground Industry, or, When Good Restaurants Go Bad

gordsellar8 Comments

So, I’ve long wondered why, outside of Seoul, so many good restaurants were able to stay running for so long while in the big city, it seems like good places almost always either shut down or drop precipitously in quality within a year or two. Now I think I know why. Now, I’m not a food blogger, and I don’t know if they’ve discussed this publicly. If they have, I’d be curious to see a link. One of the reasons I don’t really read food blogs is because they mostly just review restaurants, or talk about the politics of marketing …

Continue Reading

On Modernizing/Adapting Myths, James Bond as Odysseus, and On the Undead Archetype

gordsellar6 Comments

Sometimes, when you’re teaching, you learn things. The other day, in my Greek Mythology and Biblical Narrative course, we had a discussion interesting enough that I feel like I learned a few interesting things. Figured I’d share: On Modernizing/Adapting Myths: In class, I was discussing the idea of archetypal figures with students in my mythology course, in the context of adapting ancient Greek mythology to a modern setting. We were specifically discussing their homework from a week before, which involved writting up synopses of their own for an imaginary adaptation of The Odyssey to a modern (post-1950) Korean setting. (They’d just …

Continue Reading

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, and Some Thoughts on Culture-Specific Modes of Reading

gordsellar2 Comments

Last semester, a student of mine gave me a paperback copy of the English translation of Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin. It was a very kind gesture, and I appreciated it very much. This whole culture of gifting professors–sometimes before exams, which is a little uncomfortable, but more often after–is rather nice. I’ll be honest, though: while some mainstream Korean literature I’ve found enjoyable, a lot of it leaves me kind of cold, for reasons that remind me of things my own students say when I ask them to interpret texts. I find that the standard mode of …

Continue Reading