I’m busy grading but I thought I’d share this crazy stuff. Despite what it looks like, it was made a couple of years ago. Looks like the 1980s are finally back. I am both horrified and amused: And some more videos for you, by the same weirdoes: Bizarrely, I find these videos way more “authentic” in some way than mainline K-pop. Maybe because the people in the video look like normal Koreans — by which I mean, not plastic-surgeried beauty queens — just like in old K-pop? And because there’s an exuberant cheesiness in it. Now, some real old K-pop …
Category: KOREA
Korean Use of Footnotes?
Could someone out there please do me a favor and explain the proper use of footnotes in Korean? While the majority of essays I’ve received use footnotes in the familiar way, there’s apersistent minority of essays where footnotes are applied not at the end of cited material, but in fact the opposite, like this: There are, of course, many possible explanations for this particular type of argument. 1 According to Miller, there is no difference between transplantation and assimilation. Furthermore, it is unclear what Brownhill is attempting to demonstrate with her example…. (…) 1) Miller, James. Arguments About Culture. (돼지꿈출판사: Seoul, …
Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex (video), and Grading Adventures
Interesting thing: I am typing up the response sheets to the final essays for students in my Understanding English & American Pop Cultures course, and I actually had occasion to pass along the link to this video to one student who discussed Superman: (It is, of course, based very closely on Larry Niven’s original story.) I am not going to say more about superheroes, because I feel as if I’m a bit superhero-ed out, to be honest. It’s a huge genre, and there’s so much I don’t know about it… but I imagine it’d be fun to teach a whole …
On Teaching Writing in a Korean University — Part 4: Finding Your Own Way to Live in Rome
[Note: You’ll probably get more out of this if you start at part 1.] So: how to make Rome livable, without doing as the Romans do? Redefine Realistic First off, I’m no longer going to take it upon myself to try and teach my students how to write in contexts where it’s not part of the course. After all, I have a heavier classload than lots of profs who give no writing work to begin with — and the writing courses usually end up in the foreign profs’ courses , though I think it’s debatable who’s better equipped to teach Korean …
Random Linkage
I didn’t know until this week, but both Corey Haim and Gary Coleman died this year. Which means little to me, except that when I was searching for other things, these two cases came up in Google again and again. Zenkimchi on the internationalization of Korean food, and how the guys claiming to spearhead it are going wrong… all a case of not knowing their market, and having things backwards. My rule about Korean restaurants isn’t quite the opposite of his title — the best Korean restaurants aren’t always the cheapest, though he’s right that the worst are usually the …
On Teaching Writing in a Korean University — Part 3: When in Rome… Stop and Ask Yourself: Why Do Romans Do What They Do?
[Note: You’ll probably get more out of this if you start at part 1.] So, we’ve established that Korean humanities programs — or at least a number of them — seem not to prioritize writing. We’ve established that this conflicts with the normal Anglophone idea (or at least, a common idea from the Anglophone world) of how a humanities education works. I want to emphasize, though that this is not just a philosophical difference. The philosophical difference has profound effects, down to the level of budget, the level of resource allocation, and more — and that this is a self-reinforcing …
On Teaching Writing in a Korean University — Part 2: A Little Context For You
[Note: You’ll probably get more out of this if you start at part 1.] Last time, I noted that the normal approach to undergraduate university humanities education in Korea seems to involve far less writing than in universities I’ve attended in Canada, and what I’ve heard from friends who studied in England, Scotland, America, Australia, and other places. Allow me to elaborate: as a music student, I did almost no writing except in my elective courses. This is problematic, but I will defend it slightly by saying we did a lot of submitting of work — but they were music …
On Teaching Writing in a Korean University — Part 1: Sarcasm, and a Recognition
I just been working through the final articles submitted to me by my Journalistic Writing class, and I have to admit, I’m mostly pleased and impressed. Even though there are a few pieces that have me baffled — how could someone hand in something that was obviously not proofread, was written at the absolute last minute, and so on — I am overall quite surprised by the quality of the work I’ve been reading. One thing that’s especially interesting is how a number of students have taken it upon themselves — yes, after urging from me — to find some …
Save the Classroom Time for Discussions (Why to Lecture by MP3)
A few weeks ago, I bemoaned the fact that so many classes were canceled on Tuesdays this semester — Tuesdays being the two-hour sessions in a few of my content-focused classes — that I’d either have to hold make-up classes or drop some content from the course. (And holidays seem to sort of contradict the point of a holiday, right?) A former co-worker, Allison Bill, pointed me at a concept I’d never encountered before, in this interview with José Bowen (the video in the linked page), in which he explains ideas expanded upon here; but one idea not explored deeply in the …
Boyran, a novel by “World’s Youngest Fantasy Writer Wonje Song”
UPDATE (9 Feb 2010): Yeah, I know he’s not really the world’s youngest fantasy writer. The book was marketed this way, though, and I wanted to include that in the title of the post. It’s exactly the kind of hyperbole one sees in Korea all the time, absolutely not fact-checked or anything. Anyway… ORIGINAL POST: On Friday last, my friend Nick and dropped by that jazz festival I mentioned. I’ll post more about that soon — I have some pics I want to add to the post, but it’s already written up. On the way back to the subway station, …