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 …