I’m grading at the moment, and I ran across something so priceless I couldn’t NOT share. (I am not mentioning the student’s name, so it’s anonymous, but as a piece of observation by someone from another part of Northeast Asia, it’s fascinating and made me laugh aloud!) It’s from a paper discussing the hybridity of Korean popular culture, and what foreign influences have affected Korean popular culture. It’s written by a foreign student who had the following to say about her experiences of “culture crash” (ie. Culture Shock) and the shock of coming into contact with real-life Korean culture, in …
Tag: teaching in Korea
The Rip-Off
Some weeks, things really do raise my hackles. It’s the concatenation of all kinds of things that are probably universal, but which in Korea are much more in-your-face or more, I don’t know, commonly accepted. What’s hitting me more and more is how the atmosphere of acceptability impacts negatively on individuals and on society in general. That’s what I’m focusing on now, here in this post.
Student Culture & Student Expectations
I recently posted about student expectations with regard to course difficulty. Students — the same ones — have been mentioning, again, how difficult my two content courses are. This is not surprising, really, since in one we’ve been discussing the contribution of African-American popular culture to mainstream American (and really, global) popular culture — in terms not just of tangible contributions like to the musical language, to language itself, to style, to abstract ideas like “cool,” but also how African-American culture (or certain understandings [and misunderstandings] of aspects of it) got taken up consciously by, say, the beats, as an …
Brain-Cardio: Should University Be Easy?
(UPDATE: I’ve reflected further on student expectations and culture here, in part as a response to comments to this post. If you want to read it, you’ll have to log in.) Today, I was discussing next week’s work in one of my classes, and the third student in a row commented that the book I’d assigned for reading is not easy. I said, “I know. It’s difficult. It’s weird. It’s about stuff that happened before you were born, or when you were little babies. It’s about technology, and cops, and weird stuff that feels like it has nothing to do …
Anyone Seen It?
I have a feeling that the Season 1 DVD of this show (video below if you’re not reading this on LJ — a promo for This American Life, the TV version of the show) would be an excellent resource for courses in Intercultural communication or even just listening and discussion. (Even if I’d have to go to the trouble of ordering it myself — word came down from the office that one of the DVDs I’d requested couldn’t be bought because it’s not available in Korea, and just this week, the Essay-Composition textbook I settled on for my Essay Writing …
A Little Piece of Heaven
It’s the first day of the semester, and things are a little chaotic but mostly fine. The students in my Monday morning 9:00 am class seemed to get most of the jokes, or at least laugh in the right places — humor is a great test of comprehension, you see. The office is still a little frantic in getting the disorganization reorganized into, um, a semblance of organization, but things are going. I haven’t been posting because I’m working on several things at once (a rewrite, a draft, an article, course preparations, website template stuff, and domestic stuff), and haven’t …
A Shift
I got a significant surprise the other day when checking out the enrollment in my various classes. (Actually, I got a few, but one especially big one.) For certain core classes in my department, the class limit is 30-ish, but for a number of content-course electives the class limit is 80 students. (My impression is that this isn’t actually a limit, so much as a split point — 85, 105, or even 125 students technically can enroll, but above 80, the class can be split in half, at the professor’s discretion. Unfortunately, this means the class will be split and …
Love Detector Phone Test and Voight-Kampff Job Interviews
So there’s a new service available in Korea through cell phone operator KTF that will supposedly analyze voice patterns to see whether a lover is honest, attentive, passionate, or whatever. The first response most people have is one I share: yeah, right. As in, I doubt we’re quite at the point where such an analysis can reasonably be made from a single cell phone call. But that’s not such an interesting observation. I mean, someday we doubtless will be at that point. We’ll be able to analyze voice prints (and other peripheral sound, like breathing patterns, for example) and compare …
The Past Week, and Praise for Pat Condell
It’s been a whirlwind week, meeting people from the textbook gig I had this year for a dinner party (complete with karaoke and a stop at a wine bar), frantic syllabus-drafting and a meeting with fellow teachers to discuss the new Listening & Speaking Course guidelines, followed by Indian food and beer, an end-of-semester lunch meeting with my department, where we wished the department head a good year off on sabbatical in San Francisco, followed by a meeting with Charles and Jeffery at Carne Station, and lots of meat and drink. Last night, Lime and I went on a futile …
Passports and Immigration and “Low Quality Foreigners”
Well, headaches averted, really. So far. I’ve been a bit of an ostrich, not paying attention to the whole Korean news/expat blog scene, and it came up and bit me in the back end last night. I came across these posts — like this one — that bespoke a big change afoot in Korean visa renewal procedures. The last I’d heard, those living here didn’t need to worry about that, but this sounded more complicated. Things like having to fly to Canada every time I get a different job, for example, or needing a criminal record check for March 1st. …