Category: KOREA

A Positive Change

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There’s an exercise I do in my writing class. It’s actually designed to give students practice working with modals like “should,” and “must” and “might” and “can.” One of the places where we use these kinds of modals a lot is when we are giving advice, since of course using the imperative is less polite and bears a higher chance of offending the recipient of the advice.  So I’ve devised this “Dear Abby” type exercise. Students choose one of five letters requesting advice. The situations are all different: Someone is feeling depressed in general and burnt out from work After months …

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Show Me Your Work

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This post is mostly working through the challenges that Chat-GPT pose for a general-education TEFL writing instructor. As Stephen Marche noted, “nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.” Well, almost nobody. I kind of am, since I’ve been dealing with analogous issues for decades now. So anyway, these are my thoughts, for anyone interested in them. 

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A Lovely Discussion of a Lovely Story

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This entry is part 73 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

I’m late catching up—it’s been one of those weeks—but on the radio a few days ago, Paul Matthews (@ajosshi) discussed our translation of Bae Myung-hoon’s lovely short story “The Peppers of Green Scallion,” which originally appeared in Clarkesworld a few years ago.  Listening to Paul read from and discuss the story was a delight for both of us, and he definitely hit on a lot of the things that made us love the story and want to translate it in the first place.   You can check out a recording of the discussion over on Arirang’s Check it Out podcast. (Or …

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Old-Fashioned Korean Cinemas in the Early Oughts

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I’ve posted here only irregularly for years, but for various reasons I’ve hung onto the site. I had actually reached the point where I was starting to wonder whether I shouldn’t just port everything over to a free blogging site online. However, as I write this, Twitter is being strangled to death by the decisions of a single nimrod, and it’s reminded me that I don’t really want to be dependent on some large corporation for the continued availability of what I’ve posted here… but if I’m going to keep this site, I should probably post more here than just …

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Grade Grubbing: An Update

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So, something I would have thought impossible happened, and I thought it would be worth noting for posterity: grade grubbing has dropped to almost zero in my classes.  There are a few reasons why this has happened.   1. The Kim Young Ran Law got passed. Hands down, this is the main thing that has helped. A few years ago, the Anti-Graft and -Corruption Law was passed. (It’s also referred to as the Kim Young Ran Law sometimes.) The effect among university administrators was immediate: they stopped being willing to accept even the smallest thank-you present from anyone: one guy helped …

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