The Wow! Moment and Teachers’ Responsibility

Creative Writing teachers sometimes — not very often, but sometimes — experience a Wow! moment, when they see student work of a caliber that is simply way beyond the majority of the class… a student whom they feel moved to encourage to keep writing, in some capacity or other. Or at least, a student whose talent and hard work deserves recognition. That Wow! moment is even more powerful when you’re teaching Creative Writing in a foreign language. I just finished grading my last pile for the semester — aside, perhaps, from a couple of late videos submitted to Youtube — …

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The Danger of A Single Story

It’s been a busy day and I have miles more to go before I sleep… miles of grading to do, that is. Tomorrow, I’ll be making an attempt at sauerkraut, inspired by The Mad Fermentationist’s attempt (making, bottling), but for today, I’ll be digging into student work. Thursday night is the session of the Presentation Contest that I and a colleague will be judging, but tomorrow I’m off. More grading, some mazering (yes indeedy, that means meadmaking) and sauerkraut-making, and a trivia contest with some friends. Might as well get as much fun in as I can prior to the …

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“Where Did I Lose Marks?” & “I Got a C+, But I Expected a D+”: Conversations With Two Students

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series On Teaching Writing in a Korean University

[Note: This is a coda to a series of posts titled “On Teaching Writing in a Korean University. You’ll probably get more out of this if you start at part 1.] I had an email exchange the other day with one student, and a phone conversation with another. Both threw some interesting light onto the problems I’ve discussed in this ongoing series and in other posts about teaching in Korea, so I figured I’d share. (And my next post, maybe later this week, will touch on the question of what I have to say about essays and alternative projects after having done …

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Darwin’s Shockwave: On Violence and Human Nature

Last semester, I think it was, one of my students asked me what I thought about “나영이 사건” as an article topic for the campus English magazine for which students write articles in my journalistic writing course. If you haven’t heard about it — and you probably don’t live in Korea if you haven’t heard about it — “The Nayeong Incident” was a case in which a 57-year-old man raped a 9-year-old girl in a church. Brian in Jeollanamdo has the basics and some links, and all I can add to that is that there were a lot of variation …

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It Carefully Proofreads Its Work…

… or else it gets the hose again. Ah, yes, I’ve been editing articles for the English Magazine, which is now a course. Actually, a lot of them are pretty good. But I just wish we’d had more time for proofreading, editing, and so on. However, I have stumbled on a near trick I’m going to get students to try. That is, I’m going to have them take the edited files and do “compare files” using MS Word or whatever word processor they use. Then they have to pick out all the edits and formulate a checklist that can double …

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