Killer Mini-Campaign

I’ve posted before here about using RPGs as a learning tool with students. One of the things that’s important when you do this is to (a) choose a story structure that emphasizes communicative tasks: your students should have to talk a lot, whereas combat is something they want to avoid, or something that must be coordinated when it’s absolutely necessary. That is to say, pedagogically, it’s better for students to end up having to negotiate treaties or beg for their lives than it is to have them running around doing hack’n’slash adventuring, or dungeoneering of the type epitomized in the phrase, “kick in …

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TEFL RPGing Aplenty

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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“New”: Course Website

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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On that Stack of Essays I Got Through a Few Weeks Ago…

Out of a small stack of essays, I gleaned the following interesting insight that I’d never thought of myself: It’s possible to argue that the main difference in the conception of the uncontrollable in Greek Mythology and Bible stories is that, for the Greeks, human problems were often a result of the gods and their machinations, while for the ancient Hebrews, humans were just as often responsible for getting themselves into a heap of trouble, out of which God would sometimes bail them, if they were good. That’s it. Hours of grading, and precisely one idea I’ve never seen before. …

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Back to the… Wait, What?

Well, while Typhoon Bolaven does its worst out there–and it doesn’t have me particularly alarmed at the moment, though I’m not venturing outside or anything… our neighborhood is in a panic, though, and the local mini-marts were cleaned out as you can see in the featured image for this post–I’m thinking about what the hell to do with the course I foolishly agreed to teach this semester. That course is a Foundations in Greco-Roman Mythology and Biblical Narrative course. You know, the kind of thing you spend a summer preparing a course outline and readings package for? As with most …

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Talking Through Bigotry

Miss Jiwaku and I have an acquaintance, a Korean fellow we know, though I won’t say how we know him. (Anonymity will allow me to speak more honestly.) He is a fine sort of fellow, in general, quite professional and creative, easy enough to work with and even at times funny; she and I have learned many things from him, and I hope likewise he has learned a thing or two from us as well. However, there’s one thing that makes it hard for me to get along with him, something it’s hard to put my finger on exactly because, …

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쓰레기 같은 학생, or, Why You Might Need Pepperspray

“Grabage-Like Student” is the title I’ve written in Korean. But a better translation is, “Asshole Student,” I suppose. It’s a reference to the guy who threatened Jihyun today, when she took the city bus that passes by the front of campus. To make a long story short, she (very politely) asked him to stop cursing and complain to the bus driver about the change in route, if he was so annoyed. (After something like ten minutes of his cursing in the nastiest tone.) It ended with him standing over her at the bus stop, his friend in tow, calling her …

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Student Brewday: CUK APA / CUK Saison

Note: I am days behind on this post: it was written on Sunday. So all the yesterdays refer to Saturday, 8 October. *** Well, yesterday was a long day. In addition to both moving our new fridge and our new washing machine into the apartment (the fridge in the morning, and the washer at night), and moving my old fridge out to the common room (so I can clean it this afternoon, and start using it for yeast/bottle storage, starters, and lagering), I also hosted a brewday with my students. The brewing part of the day started at 10:00am, and …

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Student Brew

Note: I wrote this last night, but fell asleep before posting it. *** So I mentioned a while back how I’d be hosting a learn-to-brew session with some of my students, with the goal of producing two (approximately 5-gallon) batches of beer for a cocktail party being held later this semester. On Wednesday night, we met up and I pulled a bunch of samples of different styles for them to try, including a Belgian Dubbel, a pretty hoppy American Pale Ale, a hoppier-than-style Belgian Pale Ale, a bottle of Leffe (for a proper BPA), an ESB (commercial bottle of London …

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“Teach Me How To Brew!”

A week or two ago, we were planning out the events for the semester, and it turned out we have funding for both a “cocktail party” and a “movie night.” During the course of the discussion, I suggested that it might be interesting to brew up some beer especially for the party, and that this would be quite easy to arrange. The question was whether we could get funding for such a thing. I finally just got approval for the idea — funding for ingredients will be available, so all systems are go. But I figured I’d like to make …

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