::A Geek in Korea::

The reason the projects are held to the back half of the book is to weed out students who drop, impress upon the students that they need to prepare, and because half the book is very weak and needs something to supplement the time in class. One of the weakest of all the lessons in the book is the unit about describing movies. Movie genres and determiners. Yawn.

I would love to play a game like “Doug Loves Movies” with my students, but they haven’t seen anything older than 5 years ago, don’t watch lots of foreign movies that aren’t blockbusters, and can’t name any actors. That means we have to settle for a game of 20 questions. Students can’t make twenty questions on their own about movies, so there needs to be a worksheet or a structure to this sort of exercise,

Having discovered the extra materials for Jazz English to be helpful, the problem with a 20 question activity is that some obscure movie no one can guess takes up the most time, and it might just be something trying to be too clever by failing to give the right details. The students now sit in groups of four, so this semester I had students square off against the other people in their group. The students go down the list, question by question, until they can guess their group member’s movie title.

I had a “class round” where all the students try to guess the movie they’ve seen, but only if all of the other members of the group had to have seen the same movie. If four people have seen the movie, it’s a safe bet that someone else in the room probably has too. That way there isn’t anything too obscure that gets put to the guess in front of the class. Since this limits the class round to one or two movies, it speeds up the class and keeps someone from dominating the class with all the details when all the group members are responsible for answering. It also lowers the stress for participation, as any one of the group members can supply the answer to the question.

Things I’ve learned from my students:

One of my female students has a huge crush on Liam Neeson, and everyone in Korea has seen Taken except me.

One of my male students has a long running crush on Sandra Bullock, but all the teachers love her in Demolition Man and Speed.

Go figure.

I walk around with my children. That isn’t a particularly exciting or interesting thing to most people, but in Korea, that’s attention-worthy. A Caucasian man walking with children, sometimes without the obvious accompaniment of a Korean person? What devilry is this? How could this be?

I typically encounter two reactions.

The Cletus

 The Cletus is when someone needs to “point out” my children to others, usually in the stupidest way possible, to everyone around. When I’m at a stoplight waiting to cross the street, people will go into traffic and turn around and stare at my children to get a better look. This isn’t a subtle glance, but a “LOOK MA, WHAT’S THAT HERE THANG?” gawk. My daughter is old enough to know that this isn’t because she’s a precious darling child, but that they are trying to point out something novel and are dumb. She usually doesn’t bother to answer them, but she’s also very shy. If one of these people does get hit by traffic, I hope she never feels responsible for it.

They might try to cover this up with some attempt at a complement, “Your daughter, she’s so pretty,” but that’s just because they got caught staring. I certainly don’t go up to Korean children on the street, approach their children and say the same. Of course children are cute. That’s one of the reasons people have them. If I did what they had done, they’d be offended or weirded out. Why go out of your way to point out something obvious unless you are uncomfortable about a situation and need something to say.

People that come up and speak English to my daughter, and then Korean, then alternate back and forth, as if my daughter needs to pass some sort of language test before they can fit her into a “should I be racist?” rubric are the worst. It’s always followed by the comment, “She speaks [Korean/English, delete as appropriate] very well.” This isn’t limited to people on the street. Aunts and Uncles in my Korean family do this. They think they are paying a compliment, but all they actually do are marking someone as “other”. If I told them they were “quite good at Korean.” Do you think they’d take it as being sincere?

As my wife says, “Of course she does, she’s Korean.”

I usually just glare.

The Sherlock

The other group of people I encounter on the street are the people that are convinced that they are on the verge of national fame by deducing something about my family structure while we wait for an elevator. I had a guy literally do a “triple take” looking at me, then my son, then me again, my son, then me in utter disbelief. He was giving me the “Cumberbatch Stare”, trying to run through the scenario where this man has a small infant in a crib, but there isn’t a kidnapping taking place, and he just can’t figure it out. “There is a man here, and he’s pretending to be the father of this infant, but why would a man spend time with his son? I don’t see a woman anywhere. He’s probably already murdered the poor woman and is just keeping his cool. If I stare hard enough, he’ll crack under my glare and admit his crime! Perhaps he’s just out on a stroll to get some fresh air from where he is holed up demanding ransom. If I call the cops, I’m sure I’ll be a hero!”

I’ve never been stopped, but I feel like everyone over the age of 50 has this lingering doubt as to whether foreigners and Koreans can reproduce and want to stop me from walking away with my children. Getting stared at, head to toe, as I walk around any neighborhood with an elementary school is an added bonus. My family crossed a sidewalk after picking my daughter up at her new preschool and the crossing guard looked like he was trying to memorize my face and appearance so he could call in an Amber Alert if a child came up missing later. (What is the Amber Alert equivalent in Korea? As a parent, I’d like to know.)

Do I do ridiculous things that warrant this attention? No, but I am super-sensitive when my daughter cries in public because of it. Every parent in the entire store watches to see if my daughter is going to run away from me. They all tense up, like if they needed to they’d simply drag her away from me and it’d be the end to some national tragedy.

Why I do it?

If you asked me honestly, I do enjoy the attention of parading my family around when I need to go somewhere. If an act of rebellion was as easy as simply walking around it public not giving a shit, you’d do it too. Truth be told, If I had a car, I wouldn’t feel nearly as special. It makes me feel smug to see when people pay attention to me. I get a weird feeling of superiority because I know I am beyond their expectation of a father, foreigner, and man in their neighborhood. You don’t see fathers at home during the day, let alone spending time with their kids, or pushing a stroller. They might be staring not because I am a foreigner, but that we’re a family spending time outside the house.

In my mind, they are looking because they are jealous, they want to be me. They want to have the confidence to walk around and say, “I don’t give a shit about your conventions. I’m raising my family here, and I don’t care what you think of it. My children speak two languages, look cute, and you want to be us. Deal with it.”

However, whenever I see my children encounter this backward gawking, I just want to pick them up and fly away from the ugliness. The fact that they have to encounter any difficulties at all because of their life here is something that rarely happens, but does weigh on me. Right now there isn’t a huge problem, but as my children matriculate through schools, it will be, and that’s one of the largest limiting factors to my long term employment in Korea. If this becomes something they can not endure, we will need to figure it out, because it is unfair to them to have to suffer the stupidity of their neighbors  an unreasonable amount of time.

My daughter and I were given a task: Return a shirt that we bought yesterday. Buy some batteries. The shirt needed to be returned because my size is simply one fraction larger than the largest size common in Korea, but depending on the manufacturer I can sometimes find clothes that fit me. I usually try on clothes, but it’s very hard to tell if something is going to be close enough to wear, or just too small for me. This shirt was one of the later. The batteries were for my son’s “walker” stroller that has speakers for an Mp3 player and lots of buttons. Babies with sound systems. Hilarious.

My daughter and I were giving my wife a break, so she could focus on getting my son to sleep, and possibly get some rest herself. We took the bus across town and had no problems getting the clothing returned. We picked up some fast food on her request. She had agreed to come along if she got to have French Fries. Having snacked, we decided to walk across town to another department store that might actually have clothing in my size. We took breaks for playgrounds, of course.

We got to Uniqlo and found a few shirts and things I needed anyway, and I picked up a few other items I lacked. It was nice to comfortably be able to see sizes that fit, and that were nice. We were nearly home when my daughter remembered we needed batteries. We picked those up, and I’m in the process of setting up an old Android phone as a dedicated Mp3 player for the house.

My daughter’s behavior was excellent, and she did manage to remind me about the batteries I needed. We got everything done, spent a few hours together, did some shopping, and didn’t time in the house bored on my day off. Given something to do, and some general encouragement, my daughter is pretty fun to hang out with. My son would be too difficult to bring because of his young age and temperament at the moment, so being able to spend some time with my daughter was really a lot of fun.

Around a month ago, I started reading House of M, which is a long finished comic cross-over event in the Marvel universe. The basic premise is that a very powerful character has a psychotic break, but this particular character has a power that can “warp reality”. This macguffin allows for an elaborate “What If” story that takes popular characters into an alternate Marvel universe where the paradigm that usually reigns has been flipped on it’s head. I’m also a sucker for stories with Sentinels flying around in the background.

The core comics to this series are very fun to read. I’m a sucker for “flipped on its head” unconventional mainstream comic tales like this, so being able to read a story with characters in this scenario was cool. It’s not the most profound comic, but there is some serious tragedy in some of the character’s placement in this fantasy world within a fantasy world. There was also a “Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced” element of the story, where people in a “dream world” are being forced to face reality despite their wishes. The core story is good, but the spin-off stuff other than Spider-man can be safely avoided as superfluous.

Previous to listening to The Incomparable’s take on House of M, I also started listening to Roderick on the Line which is an amusing “Two guys chat” style unstructured podcast. Merlin Mann used to also be a host on the hilarious You Look Nice Today, which is now defunct, but worth a listen as a “Three guys chat with improvised bits” podcast. Merlin Mann is an opinionated guy that reads the occasional comic, and throws down a few interesting opinions with the regular “Comic Book Club” who also chime in on the podcast. The podcast has spoilers for the comics, so I’d advise waiting to read the series before listening in though.

I agreed with the sentiment of the Incomparable podcast, and thought this was one of the better crossover r events I’ve read. I think the observation that this was a “What If style Crossover Fighting to get back to Status Quo” was rather well observed. There are consequences to the event that continue on, which was a clever editorial move, but most of the tie in series didn’t need to exist at all.

I’ve got a student that has decided that his project is going to be to creep me out for the entire semester. This student’s English is above average after his stay abroad, but he’s got a weirdly measured tone that seems overly practiced and sets me on edge. He’s too nice, but it seems like he’s trying to be too nice to avert suspicion of something, which in turn makes everything he says uncomfortable.

His project for my class is entirely new, cosmetology, which would be interesting. I have men teaching yoga, and doing makeup this year (a first). I don’t have any gender requirements or restrictions in my class, so it is totally open, but I didn’t realize how this particular project was going to work. The class when he began his lesson was the first clue that while I thought he was creepy before, everyone else was clued in on what was going on.

He showed up with a black suitcase, a clamp, and a stain proof apron. The stain proof apron would be for dyeing hair, but with this student it looks like something a blood splatter analyst would wear. It’s looks like something you’d need to swab at a crime scene for prints or DNA.

The suitcase is for carrying around the dummy head. The cosmetology dummy is the creepiest thing I’ve seen in a class ever. Keep in mind I’ve been on a tour to Auschwitz and seen skulls from the Killing Fields on display. This isn’t “permanently scars your psyche forever” level creepy, but it’s “OH WHY DID YOU WANT TO DO THIS?!” level. This is a man’s HOBBY. I didn’t pay him, and he doesn’t have orders.

WHY does he have a vacant, staring dummy head? The dirt yellow hair is tangled, with the tips being dyed a light pink. The head clamps onto the desk, and the student have to practice manipulating the hair. The student told me the head was on loan from his mother, so he needed to limit his project to only tying hair, not cutting it because it was too expensive.

That’s right, he calls it “My mother’s head.” Worst possible wording ever.

His doll’s face has a deep scar where it was damaged by some previous user. I think curlers or an iron touched the cheeks and melted the face on the left cheek, which was then reconstructed with silver sequins and glitter glue, which makes it look like some sort of Terminator meets disco deep tissue wound. The neck also has marker labeling the name, which makes it a weirdly “named” object, like it has a neck tattoo and gives it a creepy personality that it should not have.

I can’t stand being around this doll. It stares at you when you enter the room. The student will absentmindedly play with the doll’s hair while other people are teaching their projects, which is extremely disconcerting. The other group members physically shutter when forced to touch this object, so he has to do most of the work.

Today, for example, when I was walking around the room observing the different presentations, he turned around and said, “Are you staring at me?” while clutching the head protectively. I told him, “I’m watching everyone’s project. That’s what I do during your presentations.”

All he is doing is twisting or tying the hair in different ways, which is fine. It’s just the doll, the demeanor, and the whole scene creeps me the hell out. If he was actually doing some sort of higher concept project where he revealed he was actually being as creepy as possible in a “happening” sort of “shake up the paradigm” display of rebellion, I’d probably given an A+ and tell him to get into acting, but right now he’s the Daniel Day Lewis of being super creepy and I don’t think he’s playing a role.

I’ve been working on how to teach vocabulary from the Institute’s reading materials for a while. Lists with connotations are presented, and usually that is a pretty simple concept to pick up for even low level students. I also do activities to strengthen word associations whenever I do vocabulary exercises, but those usually were a free associative “what do you think when you hear X” style free answers. Recently though I’ve tried to start breaking down word association types by their properties, which is what I needed to do for my first paper for my Master’s degree.

It was pretty interesting for students to learn about paradigmatic and syntagmatic word association, and teaching them how to identify the properties of each didn’t take long, so it really strengthened my lesson.

The easiest way to explain these in a classroom is by using a simple set of sentences as follows:

The girl kicks the ball.

A boy runs home.

Words like “Kick” and “Ball” often occur together in sentences. They are different types of words (kick is a verb, ball is a noun). Words that follow one another in a sentence in a logical order with different types are syntagmatically related. If our vocabulary was an adjective for the unit, and the word the student volunteered was not an adjective, it was likely they were syntagmatically related and you could put them in a sentence together. The example we had for the word “Bright” was “Light”, which was syntagmatic through context, but could have been paradigmatically related.

The words “the” and “a” are both determiners. “Girl” and “Boy” are both nouns, and “kicks” and “runs” are both verbs. These words perform the same function within the sentences, and are thus paradigmatically related. When the student replied “bright” with “light”, they were both adjectives. From context, I knew they were actually referring to “light” to mean an amount of visible electromagnetic energy, and not taking about the adjective meaning “not heavy”.

Being able to recognize, and strengthen word association types, specifically paradigmatic relations, is said to improve retention of vocabulary in a state more like native speakers. Native speakers are likely to have a more “stable” set of paradigmatic relations to any answer to a word association test compared to a second language learner. When I surveyed all the student’s word associations for my Master’s research paper, I found that students at the institute where I teach are not forming paradigmatically associated word relations, and now that I’m teaching lower level students, I’m curious if I can improve on this by introducing new ways to associate words together. Building upon different ways to associate words together to strengthen vocabulary retention is an avenue I’ve seldom thought about doing, and I could build a series of new worksheets based on specific pedagogic goals with actual research as a starting point to my design.

Neat.

Let me geek out about this for a little bit, and if there is anything here, I’ll get back to posting about it later.

I’ve been struggling for activities with my lowest level institute class. The students aren’t particularly low, but the book’s material isn’t as challenging. This requires more planning so that we don’t run out of things to say in class. The lower the level, the more students are going to equate “time spent learning” with “things learned”. Lower level classes watch the clock like hawks and will never walk out a second early.

I’ve been working on and improving a “Government Spending Activity” for years now. This is a list of 35+ programs that a theoretical new government could choose for funding. The students are supposed to decide on the ten items they want to pursue as an individual legislator, then try to build a consensus with their group using comparisons, loaded words, and any statistics they want to research before class. The activity lined up with a unit later in the book in the higher classes, and by the time I did it in class there were usually not enough people for large groups.

This time I did the activity independent of the book’s themed lesson, and simply used the grammar to build the required language necessary. Same goals, but larger classes. Because I did this in the third week of class, rather than the fifth, so I had two groups of five and six. In higher classes, my entire class is the size of one of these groups. This large number of students in two different groups fostered a really good discussion. I also gave the paper out over the weekend, so the students interested in politics prepared entire speeches to defend their favorite policies. One of the students had pages of notes and entire paragraphs of prepared materials. It was awesome.

The two groups diverged in their approaches to answering the policy questions set forth by the paper. Both had good ideas and supported themselves well, but had different ideas about what was necessary. After they had settled on the top issues for their group, I wrote down both group’s answers on the board and had them discuss each other’s policies. They got into an actual debate, going back and forth between different issues they shared, or were willing to add to their list. They even suggested new topics to include on the paper for next session.

This was the best activity I’ve done this session, and they met the goals I’ve always wanted for the project but never got with the smaller classes at higher level. My worry that the materials were too challenging for debate was incorrect, and now I’m worried that I’ll have to prepare materials of this caliber every week to keep them from being disappointed. This is my favorite activity every session, and it’s over!

My daughter and I are always using the Nexus 7 I bought. The thing is perfect for most of my media consumption, and rarely leaves my side when I am at home. I installed a few applications for my daughter when I first got it to keep her entertained. I can live with the clutter of some coloring applications and videos for her to watch. The collection of videos I put on the tablet was actually the largest consumption of the onboard memory! This was suitable for a simple single user install, because she was only allowed to use the tablet when I was there, and I controlled this by unlocking it for her.

She figured out my lock screen after watching me input things repeatedly, which meant that I needed to either lock her out, or change how I was using the tablet. I don’t want her sending out random emails, or accessing saved work materials via the cloud. Since she clearly wanted to use the machine to draw, I decided that rather than stop her, I’d just give her a smaller sandbox and I set up a user just for her.

The Nexus 7 has a built in multi-user mode which lets you have three active profiles at once. When you first log in, it creates the initial login experience, and you can customize this setting in any way. The initial user remains the “owner” of the machine, and can boot this new user off and has all root permissions, but otherwise it’s like starting a new tablet experience. I downloaded a few applications using my own account for my daughter to use, but I could have set up a parallel account just for her. I could also limit her access to online materials by removing some of the applications, or customizing the screen in such a way to prevent her from reaching more applications on the machine.

The only annoyance is that there isn’t an efficient way to share media between users. If I have a movie on my user space, my daughter would need to download the same file to be able to have permission to see it. So far from my searches, I’ve only been able to find one “shared” folder for all users, which is the “Android/obb” folder (for whatever reason, this is shared between applications, but media can also reside there.)

Using the /obb folder is a bit of a hack solution, but it lets me dump a file there so I don’t have to cut my storage in half by duplicating everything. Right now my daughter just draws and takes pictures of herself, but if she started using larger chunks of storage this would be an issue. Migrating to the cloud is okay for Wi-Fi friendly usage, but I’d rather control when my daughter gets access to the web. Right now the only major annoyance is when a paid application for children tries to sell her something with a banner advertisement click through to the Google Play Store. Inexcusable.

Eventually my wife will become savvy enough to use a touch screen interface for something she can’t do on her phone, and I’ll carve up the user space once again for her. She uses her phone for a little more now than just calling, and I think I’ve caught her with applications I didn’t even install for her, which is a step for her technophobic nature. She chided my purchase of the tablet as being unnecessary, but it’s far better than I expected. Teaching Glow basic computer skills is going to be fun (and scary!).

My Korean in-laws threw a birthday party for the matriarch of the family. We got invited along and brought the kids to a restaurant nearby the local reservoir (Daecheon dam). The food was outstanding. It was the first time I had Japanese style deep-fried ginseng and pumpkin with honey. We ate a full course of fish, rice, and side dishes, and then celebrated by singing “Happy Birthday” in Korean.

My brother-in-law picked us up, and took us to the restaurant, and after the meal he decided to continue on and spend some time with his niece at the dam itself. I haven’t been to Daecheon Dam in ages. When I went there it was for a school trip, or maybe when I knew someone with a car, which was nearly a decade ago.

The area near the dam has been very well developed. There is a separate (enforced with barriers) bicycle lane along the river to the dam the entire way, with lots of people. I think it would be a fairly long ride to try with the kids, but some day when they are older, or have a card, we might give it a shot. We spotted a place on the river with paddle boats as well, and were already making plans to check that out some weekend since that was more accessible for us.

The dam had a “rest stop” area with a convenience store and some water shooting fountains for Glow to enjoy. Her uncle took her around while I bought snacks to beat the heat. We also walked up the mountain to look down from the dam proper, which wasn’t a big deal, especially after he mentioned Niagara Falls in conversation. No sir, doesn’t compare.

We took a stroll around the “Water Museum”, which has a humiliating “How much water do you weigh?” exhibit. Ugh. My daughter thought I got the “high score”. Ha ha. (sulk)

We eventually set back for home and had a nice country drive through the mountains. It was almost nice enough for me to consider owning a car in Korea some day.