I happened to googling for something at the Korea Herald and look what I found! I don’t know if this is new, and frankly, it doesn’t scare me — I use Linux, and have never encountered a virus for my platform. But, um, you know, someone at the Herald should probably look into this.
Over the last week, my students have been making a series of unusual presentations. In my bid to: make conversation classes more interesting, and get students to think about conventional problems in unconventional ways, … my second-most-recent homework assignment for them was to consider major potential problems like a possible influenze pandemic; global warming; peak oil; and the ecological collapse of certain areas of the world. However, getting people to just talk about these problems rarely does any good. Young people are aware of them, are used to their existence, and seem less than appropriately concerned about them. So having …
Sometimes it seems like folks such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling might be right in having turned to non-SF in recent years, since, after all, the world is just as surprising as cyberpunk was. Like, for example, with this orchestrated sabotage on the French railway system reported by BBC news: France’s high-speed TGV rail network has been damaged by a “concerted campaign of sabotage”, the SNCF state-owned rail operator has said. It said acts of sabotage overnight, including fires, caused huge delays to TGV services already hit by a long transport union strike over reforms. What’s unsaid is that …
… ‘zere is too much! I’m a little behind on grading, but not as much as I thought I would be a week ago. I have an unknown amount of textbook-editing left to go, but at least three full books I’ll need to proofread (possibly more than once for one of them) in the next few weeks. The proofing/editing requests are in the standard Korean mode: last minute, high-volume, jaw-droppingly short deadlines. I am unlikely to meet any more of those shockingly unrealistic deadlines: I’ve decided my health is more important than someone else’s panic. Chest pains are not a …
Somewhere along the way — probably in Japan — I picked this up, but it didn’t flare until a week ago. It’s been a busy week, so it took until yesterday to get to the doctor’s office. I suppose there might be a cream I could get over the counter, but I don’t know what to ask for and anyway, he is a good guy, and it doesn’t cost much to visit, so I dropped in to see my regular dermatologist. Dermatologist and urologist, actually. He does both, and this has indeed been handy. So anyway, I went to see …
(I would have posted the title in Korean but something about my Linux installation on my office desktop is ganked and I never managed to get the Korean language input interface installed.) I got the news this morning. It looks like, pending official approval by the Prez1, my contract is being renewed for one more year. I don’t know what the loophole in the new national labour legislation is, but I’m glad of it. Whew! That’s a huge relief! It seems I’m having a good week so far. 1. The President of the University… not Lester Young, “President of the …
With all of the allegations of corruption that have been brought up against him, I’m amazed that the right-wing Presidential candidate Lee Myung Bak is actually still pulling 50% in the polls. I’m wondering whether the new-ish evidence I’m told has surfaced of his implication in the BBK price-manipulation fraud will be the needle in his balloon. Lime says there’s still a good chance of him being toppled, even though he’s leading. She even quipped that if he wins, she’ll want to leave the country, which is exactly what a lot of Americans I know said about Bush. (And they …
A blogger who goes by Zocalo left a comment linking to a recent post about imperialist white male English teachers in Asia, and I started to type a reply. The reply got long enough that I knew it’d be multiple comments in the post, so I’m putting it here instead. Before you go on, you probably should read Zocalo’s post in full (as well as the post it links to). For those not click-inclined, here’s a snippet: I have mentioned a few times before that I read some blogs written by Caucasians teaching English in Asia. Some of these blogs …
I was recently interviewed by a student magazine on campus for an upcoming feature on English education in Korea. The interview is unapologetically opinionated, though some of my facts might be a little off — it was a kind of hurried thing, conducted by email. In any case, it ranges from the challenges faced by Korean students, and what I think would improve English learning experiences both inside and outside the classroom, to “English mania” and the adoption of required courses that use English as the language of instruction at many top Korean universities. It seemed a shame to only …
One of my classes was moved this week to the new building on campus. I was a little surprised, to be told that I’d be moving. My evening schedule is pretty odd, is why. The night classes at my university run like the day classes — each “hour” has 50 minutes. However, while the break between classes is 10 minutes in the daytime, it’s only 5 minutes at night. This means we can get five “class hours” in from 6:00 to 10:30, not just four and a half. Whatever you think of this, it’s really hard to get the schedule …