Category: KOREA

On Trust

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I just made my first real, serious edit to Wikipedia. I’d been reading about Yu Gwan-sun the other day, so I couldn’t help but notice something interesting mentioned in he book I’m reading now, Donald Clark’s history of foreigners in Korea from 1900-1950. In passing, Jeanette Walter is mentioned, and if that doesn’t mean much to you, that’s not surprise. But if you do know who Yu Gwan-sun is, then you will realize the significance of the woman’s testimony: Walter was one of the missionaries working at Ewha University who (reportedly) pressured the Japanese into giving back Yu’s body, and …

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TEFL RPGing Aplenty

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So, a while back I posted about using an D&D-like role-playing game as part of my teaching with one of our students. (See: Youngmin and the Magic World.) I recounted the story, and promised an update, but I haven’t followed through… Not for want of RPG action, of course. Youngmin has since rhyme-battled a forest ogre the size of a high-rise, teamed up with a goblin and a dragon to beat his nemesis, then teamed up with a mysterious capoerista girl (yes, capoeira has made its way into the game) and the goblin village’s witch to take on the dragon …

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Two Disconcerting Trends: Korean Kids, School Systems, and Parental Appraisal

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This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series The Bloom Effect

When we are contacted with inquiries as to our tutoring services, we always hold a preliminary “interview” before agreeing to start lessons. In fact, it’s not any kind of an organized interview: whoever is being requested as a teacher sits down with the student or students in question, and we chat for about half an hour. We sort of try to get to know one another, and along the way try to figure out of the kid is right for the way we teach, among other things. When it comes to kids, normally the parents come along, and it becomes …

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Links You Should Check Out

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Today, I was reminded of why I stopped doing these link roundups: they’re time-consuming to produce. I’ll probably switch to just tweeting or linking on Facebook, like almost everyone else I know, and this is probably the last post like this I’ll do. But anyway: Typhoon Haiyan: We were lucky: it was much-diminished when it hit Vietnam, and on top of that, it landed nowhere near us. Folks in the Philippines were nowhere near so lucky, and pretty desperately need our help. Climate change is apparently making storms (and other extreme weather events) worse, so events like Haiyan are likely …

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Rankings and Ratings for Beer: Lessons from the Classroom, and Lessons On the Classroom

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I posted earlier today on Facebook regarding the topic of ratings collection design systems for beer ratings websites like BrewAdvocate (below, referred to as “BA”), based on my experience designing grading rubrics for teaching and student evaluation purposes. I was posting in the context of others arguing that the ratings systems on various enthusiast rating websites were relatively less meaningful in the fine gradations; that a been with a 97% quality rating may not be “better” than a beer of a 95% rating. I responded as follows: Yeah, also because people’s rankings are affected by others’ rankings, and by reputation. I …

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Observations on South Korea

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Tyler Cowen (at Marginal Revolution) linked an interesting and pertinent article on the cultural dimension of development and “success” in South Korea:, which sounds a lot like what I’ve been saying over the years: South Korea’s success has been deep but not wide. Almost half of its population lives, works and competes in Seoul. Its occupational structure is also narrow. The number of professions in South Korea is only two-thirds of the number in Japan and only 38% of that in America. This striking statistic is not lost on the South Korean government (few are). It has appointed a task force …

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“New”: Course Website

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I’m still busy sorting out the CPU minutes/spammer problems on my website, though I’m getting closer by the day to sorting it all out. Part of sorting it out has involved converting a bunch of old installations of WordPress that I’d set up for students into static html webpages, so that I could delete the WordPress installations, which is time consuming and, if I didn’t want to keep the blogs for the sheer point of keeping them up–later I can say, “See, I hosted blogs for my students!”–then I would have just deleted them. But, well… I didn’t. All that …

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The Terror Live (2013) and Killer Toon (2013)

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I’ve seen a couple of Korean movies lately worth commenting on. Those in Korea are probably too late to see this on the big screen, and those outside Korea may not get a chance, but anyway, Mrs. Jiwaku and I saw the 2013 Korean film The Terror Live this evening. My general thoughts on The Terror Live were very positive, despite having to make do with my iffy (and waning) Korean-language listening skills. (Probably seeing it at the cinema where we saw it–the Lotte Cinema at Lotte Mart–was the mistake; when I watched another Korean blockbuster a week ago at a …

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On Building a Makkeoli Market

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Zenkimchi wants Korean promoters to stop calling makkeoli “rice wine” for the very obvious reason that it’s actually not a wine. Of course it’s not rice wine, it’s rice beer (or, yes, specifically “rice ale”), as any brewer can tell you. Of course, he sort of bolts past the point that is very obvious in this picture: If you look at that image for a moment, you’ll get why there’s not a hope in hell Korean makkeoli-promoters are going to consider branding makkeoli as “rice beer” or “rice ale.”

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