UPDATE (20 min after posting): Okay, the title of this post is probably a cheat for something much more complex I’m trying to say. This is a blog. Sue me. ORIGINAL POST: Today a student dropped by my office to discuss an academic project she’s working on, and we got into a discussion of whether we can lay blame for various patriarchal ills in modern Korea at the feet of Confucianism. During this discussion, I confessed that I don’t think we can. Or, rather, that I think blaming Confucianism is, like blaming Christianity, simply a lazy shorthand. This is not …
Tag: teaching in Korea
More Random Pop Culture Stuff
The more times I teach this American Pop Culture course, the more I begin to find other ways it could be taught. One way I’m thinking is that I could simply take seminal films — The Godfather, Annie, Tootsie, Do the Right Thing, King Kong — and then explore all the various cultural dimensions that wouldn’t be apparent to students coming at them from outside Western culture. But I like the way I’m teaching it now, with lots of readings and so on. I have a very interesting observation on one of the books I’m reading for the course, but …
Stuff of Interest (From Papers I’m Grading)
While grading essays, I always encounter things that are interesting. I’ve decided to make note of a few of them, for a record if nothing else. In my English & American Popular Culture course, we’ve been focused on early-20th century American pop culture, but the students have written essays about late-20th century pop culture. (This is a way of giving them a chance to attack issues we haven’t discussed, as well as a way of giving them more time to research what they want to discuss in their final papers.) Anyway, some of the interesting moments, ideas, and thoughts that …
Writing Double, Or Why You Should Try to Kill Two or More Birds With One Scene
So one of the things I’ve stressed a few times to my Creative Writing class — and I’m impressed, it only took a few times, now they’re calling on one another to try do it more — is killing several birds with one stone. If you’re writing a scene, you should always have more than one thing going on… something explicit, and something implicit. There’s the surface and then there’s the subtext. That’s the minimum. There’s a scene in the 2007 Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters1 where this is played out beautifully. One of the main characters, having just …
How to Kill Your Successful Business In Five Easy Steps: Step 4
For those just joining us, this is a series. There’s a series of links at the bottom of this post, so you can start at the beginning if you like. Step 4: When the Money Gets Tight, Screw Your Workers (Or Try Your Darnedest) or, Kick Morale in the Teeth Even Harder I’ve already traced through the process of bringing a company to the doorstep of ruin financially, and damaging morale irreparably. Now, the next step is much easier to pull off if your staff is easily divided in some arbitrary way — by race, for example, or sex. Another …