A blogger who goes by Zocalo left a comment linking to a recent post about imperialist white male English teachers in Asia, and I started to type a reply. The reply got long enough that I knew it’d be multiple comments in the post, so I’m putting it here instead. Before you go on, you probably should read Zocalo’s post in full (as well as the post it links to). For those not click-inclined, here’s a snippet: I have mentioned a few times before that I read some blogs written by Caucasians teaching English in Asia. Some of these blogs …
Tag: KOREA
On The Ever-Raging English Teachers in Korea Debate
One of the best posts I’ve seen to date on the ongoing Foreign-English-Teachers-Are-All-Sex-Maniacs mediafest in Korea can be read at Scribblings of the Metropolitician. As for me, this crap is old news. A few weeks after arriving in Korea, I was accused of being a sex maniac and a tempter because I was having a conversation with a female Korean bartender, who was explaining the names of the various bar snacks to me. Which says a lot about the idiot who was saying that to me, much more than it says about me. Most human societies are obsessed with sex …
Islands
Note: To all those seeing this for the first time, it’s a post from years ago. I have been adjusting the settings on my blog and it caused this post to be released as if it were new, but it’s actually very old. ORIGINAL POST: Lime was recently in Thailand with a friend of hers, a Korean woman about her age. When she got back to Korea, she had some interesting things to say. Korean people are like Islands, she said. She said that when she got to the airport, she found it stressful to be among Koreans again — …
Those Percussion Groups
If you’ve ever seen a really tight percussion/performance group, and wondered how they got to be so damned well tight, so deeply in unison, I can tell you. They practiced like mad. Like absolute mad. The dance steps and everything. Outside my window. If I had more time, I would grab some audio and post it. Maybe tomorrow. They’ve been practicing for hours every evening and I’m sure they won’t suddenly stop tomorrow. I’m not complaining, by the way. I can always put music on, and it basically drowns it all out. But it is quite amazing how singlemindedly dedicated …
A Cappella and Other Thoughts
Yesterday I attended a concert on campus. There’s a shy girl in one of my writing classes who came to me, ticket in hand, and asked me if I would come and see her sing. She’s a nice kid, and a diligent student, so how could I refuse? Well, it turned out to be a cappella music concert. You know, where vocal groups sing without instrumental accompaniment (aside from a little beatbox work by some of the guys in the ensembles, and that’s still not really instrumental). Now, it may seem strange to those of you who think of groups …
Botox for Mom
If I gave my mother a coupon for plastic surgery, I think she’d be rather upset. But, once again, it seems, things are a little different here in Korea. (via Weird is Relative)
Plagiarism Update
Let’s see.
Dog Soup and Someone Else’s Lessons
I made a small tactical error. I let my best writing class — which is one of my Elementary Writing courses, by the way, not the Advanced course — suggest topics, and hastily I chose the most controversial ones. Of course, this included “Dog Soup” and “The Yellow Dust from China” and a few more very commonplace topics. Commonplace if you’ve taught free-talking or writing courses in Korea before, anyway. The interesting thing is how diverse the views were on certain topics, such as the Yellow Dust phenomenon, and how shockingly homogenous the arguments were about a topic like Dog …
Not the K-blogger…
Go to early Korean apartments and marmots to learn about other marmots in Korea.
Spiders and Marking and a Maddening Cabbie
This is a general update of blather. The other night I had a horrifying dream that I was in a hot apartment, and sleeping, and awoke to see a huge — I’d say four-foot legspan, tip-to-tip — spider descending on a thick line from the ceiling. No possible way it could have gotten into this room that I was dreaming, but I yelped in horror and it ascended and escaped. Then, in dream-time, what felt like about twenty minutes later, another spider descended. This one was furry and striped black and white, and I tried to kill it with a …