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 …
Tag: teaching in Korea
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. …