School has started again. Apparently the start date was changed from Sept. 1st (which is what is has been for the last however many years) to the week of Sept. 1st, which this year began on August 29th. For some reason, not one of the foreign teachers I know (except one) was told about this, so when we got the text message on Friday — yeah, on Friday — we were all shocked. I’m sure it was on a calendar somewhere — in fact, I’m told it was — but as for actually communicating the change, well: communication is not …
Tag: teaching in Korea
This is Your Own Foot, In Which You Have Just Shot Yourself — or, Why TEFL Teachers Should Read The Inner Game of Music
Not long ago, I was riding the escalator up to the local subway station when I saw an ironic — but not very surprising — sight. I don’t know if it’s common outside of Korea, but around here, women who are wearing skirts — not even necessarily short ones — tend to hold their purse behind their legs, to hold the skirt down and, presumably, to fend off perverts trying to shoot upskirt images. (Yeah, it’s an issue here.) Well, on this particular day, a young woman doubtless acting on habit did exactly this. She slipped her purse behind her, …
The Don’t Talk About History Law
It’s really hard to talk about Langston Hughes in the context of the Harlem Renaissance without touching on not only his interest in the Soviets and their system, but also touching on why a number of African-American intellectuals (Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and many others) were drawn to “revolutionary” ideas, and to Communist ideology — after all, after hundreds of years of things not getting too much better, of pretty constant material, cultural, and social oppression and marginalization, I think it’s not hard to see why some African-Americans would have felt that a sudden, forceful reorganization of society would be the …
The Year in Review
I don’t think I have the strength to write a whole year in review, because I ended up staying up all night to finalize my grading, and then waking up early because I hadn’t heard back from the office assistant I emailed the gradesheets to (for system entry). I’ll give it a stab, though. Let’s see:
“90% of All Unsolved Murders in Kyeonggi Province Were Committed By…”
… is the beginning of sentence you know was written by a moron. It’s part of the sole comment on this article, about a Bangladeshi man who apparently killed a Korean woman half his age, which concludes with the police still trying to figure out why he did it. The comment is a priceless example of Korean netizen commentary. After claiming that Koreans need to start putting electronic bracelets on Southeast Asians in Korea–despite the fact that crime rates are much higher across the board among Koreans than non-Koreans here (this morning’s news had a litany of horrors, such as …