::A Geek in Korea::

John in Daejeon wrote:

I hope you have some backup plans just in case something happens that affects your position.

I bring this up because, over the holiday, my old boss informed me that 20% of the hagwons in the his association here in Daejeon are close to shutting their doors due to low enrollment, and that this was the first year in his 10 years of being a member that no new directors joined the group. So there happens to be quite a bit of nervousness even among those members whose academies are still doing well as to the “up in the air” future of education in South Korea. Some directors have even started using part-time native speakers who are married to Koreans to save money on E-2 visa processing, airfare, housing, and whatever other benefits that they can get away with not paying them to help save money.

At least at the university level, foreign (Chinese) students can be enrolled in greater numbers to justify keeping teachers. However, if there are fewer and fewer students enrolling in elementary schools due to the low birth rate here, what justification is there in keeping the current levels of public school teachers and hagwon teachers? [...]

This post started out as a reply to a comment, but grew too long and thought I’d share it as a post instead:

This is all speculation about the state of Daejeon ESL from the anecdotes of a long time teacher, so take my comments with a grain of salt.

Yeah, there is a noticeable drop in available students to go around between schools in Daejeon. It has been for the past few years with the larger chains absorbing all available students into huge academies and leaving the smaller schools fighting for scraps. That was why I was very relieved to get out of the academy game when I did. I felt like I rode the wave from small independent school to huge chain, and once those chain schools started popping up everywhere in Dunsandong it was the beginning of the end for this teacher’s relatively easy academy ride.

Now that parents budgets are being stretched even tighter due to inflation and the economy domestically, and countries economies abroad being in a widespread downturn, there is a sharp retraction in the number of Korean students enrolled in English education. I hadn’t considered the birthrate being below replacement levels, but this trend isn’t going to be reversible in future generations. There simply won’t be enough students to ever fill the standing capacity of current schools because there aren’t that many children being born. There was going to be a retraction eventually simply because there aren’t enough students, but the economy has hastened it.

To be fair, there are a lot of schools that shouldn’t be in business that were simply there to eat into the excess profits available. Whenever there is a bit of profit to be had, there will be someone sitting on the fringe trying to make a go at it even if the margins are razor thin. Even a well run school doesn’t make the money it used to. Those schools that don’t have the funding are going to be the people that get thinned out first when things go sour.

The fact that no one is willing to even jump into the game seems to mean that people realize that there is no longer ridiculous profit to be had with a fly by night operation. When the times get tough these less viable businesses will go the way of the excessive numbers of phone stores, or coffee shops that seem to pop up and wink out of existence with no relation to what is around them. The schools that are still around are either the best run, the best funded, or the most corrupt. If they can succeed in a tougher environment, they’ll have to provide better services to hang on to the few students that remain, and if that means fewer teachers working harder, or more qualified teachers working in each position to justify their existence.

Overall that’s not the worst thing to happen from the consumer’s point of view. As a teacher, it is a worrying sign that this whole Korean adventure might be coming to an end for a lot of people. The E-2 visa is the hiring choice of last resort, unless you have established contacts and references in Korea. Far too many unqualified teachers are in Korea, and with the economy retracting directors need to be more selective. They can also be more stingy because people are still lining up to apply since there is at least some demand and few requirements besides being a native speaker.

If I was an E2 visa holder, I’d be terrified at that 20% retraction! There has to be an excess of teachers hanging around looking for work anywhere they can, and that means employers have all the power. Of course benefits are gone. The days were an E-2 visa got you free housing and an airplane ticket home guaranteed are not coming back because directors know that not that many jobs are available if an applicant is shipped back to their country of origin. The only benefits you get now are a housing stipend that will hardly cover utilities if you are lucky, and a third of your paycheck going to rent if you don’t own your apartment. That’s rough for someone that’s been in the academy business in Korea for a while to swallow to accept.

There is still enough job security with an F visa status that I’m confident I can hold on a few years. People on an E-2 have no power to negotiate anymore because there are plenty of married visa applicants more than willing to cut that market out at the knees to hold onto employment for themselves. Get married or go home when times are tough for the hardcore English teachers in Korea. It’s risk and reward. People with the F visa status (married) are more exposed to risk if the entire English teaching experience dries up, but can hold on longer and remain more in demand up until the point where consumers give up on English and decides to dump cash into something else entirely.

I’ve been seeing the results of the decline on English on the higher end of the curve at the University for at least a year, with adult enrollment slowing down at the University level. Session after session of contracted enrollment has taken it’s toll on class sizes, and typically when parents aren’t enrolling, neither are their children. Maybe it is “Either/Or”, but certainly not both. The people that do still enroll are the upwardly mobile looking to hit increasingly difficult English fluency job requirements, people studying for entrance exam requirements, or those looking to travel that want to increase their chances at studying abroad still enroll, but casual learners of English that treat it like a hobby are rare these days.

Looking around the office, it is a worrying sign. There are far too many professors in my department and not enough classes to be be spread out among them. Who gets cut? How badly do we get treated before everyone decides to get out and look for other work? Being adaptable and flexible can get you pretty far, but everyone seems to be going after a smaller slice of the cake.

I got asked to do the farewell speech at the end of the camp for our winter vacation. This is the second time I’ve had to do this speech. I initially requested that someone else be asked to prepare the speech, since I’ve already had to stand up and talk about how much I enjoyed the camps. It isn’t too difficult a task, it is just one more thing to do over the weekend and I’d rather not have to write up a short speech and practice. The hour of work writing and practicing the speech before I give it is not that difficult, but a touch too stressful to be something agreed to without a little consideration.

Everyone else teaching at the camp is either too busy to be bothered, or doesn’t want to give a speech in front of an audience of a few hundred people. Public speaking is a powerful fear, even for teachers that are in front of students every single day. An auditorium with a hundred parents and lots of children can be scary. I’ve done lots of speaking in front of large crowds before, and while it is a little nerve wracking, it’s hardly worth worrying about in the moment. The only time I feel really nervous is the minute before I go on, where I know my name is going to be called, but not quite when.

Speaking in Korea isn’t nearly as bad for me as speaking in my communications classes in college. I had to work hard in university to put forth a point, construct a speech, and deliver with timing and humor. Most of the time when I am speaking in Korea, I am speaking to young students that only understand a small fraction of what I might bring it up, and I am done so4 quickly that it doesn’t really matter what I say. As long as I deliver some empty platitudes and talk about the fun things the students did each day of the week, I don’t understand why someone would turn this down.

My agreement to give the speech got an immediate “YOU ARE SO AWESOME!” from the organizer. That sort of gratitude from someone that can influence who gets hired or passes on a good word for me in a meeting with an superior in the department later on seems like it is valuable, even if the speech doesn’t pay directly. If you are worried about your long standing reputation in a community of potential employees, every person willing to go to bat for you and say, “YOU ARE AWESOME” is a strong thing to have on your side. Some people don’t view teaching in Korea as anything but a job, but I’ve been here a long time. Perhaps I’ve turned crusty and view the job as something it isn’t, but reputation counts for a lot in Korea, and I don’t plan on leaving here for the foreseeable future.

Of course, I still need to deliver a speech and make sure that the students listen, but I know I can deliver on my end. I’ve done this before, and if I couldn’t give a speech and not embarrass myself, I’m probably not going to be asked to do it twice in the first place. It’s not a big deal, they just need someone to stand up there and read, and I was the only person willing to do it. Maybe that makes me a sucker, but I’d rather think of myself as a fixer.

The special activity that takes the most preparation for me is usually the Golden Bell. I have to sort through units and pick out questions so that the students can play for at least 80~90 minutes. That means a lot of questions to write suitable for their level. I usually start by picking out vocabulary words, then comprehension ideas, then spelling words, then anything else we talked about in the course of the camp.

Last session I wrote and saved a very challenging set of questions since nearly all my students were perfectly fluent at English. This year I recycled quite a few questions from last year’s game, but I made them a lot easier. Even then I had a lot of blank stares when I asked something from the book. It’s clear these students weren’t up to the level of material asked of them as homework.

When I got about half way through the game, a folder appeared on my desk with a massive compilation of “Golden Bell” questions to ask the students written on Powerpoint slides. I needed to use easier questions, and this was a resource with several hundred questions that were much more simple, so I started using this resource too. I’d let the students tell me to stop as I flipped through random pages and then read the question on the page. There were a lot of  ”Who am I?” style riddles, some simple vocabulary questions, and some geography for them to guess about.

One of the weirder “Who am I?” was the following:

“I tried to make all the European nations into one nation.

The Jewish people, I hated.

I founded the Nazi Party. I was born in Austria.”

Yeah, Adolf Hitler was the answer for this question. I decided I’d just go ahead and skip to a question about “giraffes” or “coffee” instead. Students in elementary school learn almost no history about countries outside of Korea (unless to hate on a country like Japan or the USA when politically motivated) so I wasn’t confident any of my students was going to pull out “Hitler” when I talked about a person who “hated Jewish people”. WTF.

Little did i know that I would run into an inappropriate Hitler yet again. This is the “Knowledge Dictionary”, with a cartoon Hitler next to the Mona Lisa on the cover doing his salute…to Napoleon? This was on a bookshelf in Emart today. I saw it while we shopped. I don’t know what the entry on Hitler was about, but it is still weird to see a cartoon Hitler on the cover of a children’s book.

WTF Hitler, AGAIN?

When our family sits down for a meal, Glow and I will discuss the different side dishes and whatever we are eating for the day. I ask her questions about the different things she eats. “Did you eat some rice? Do you like rice? How about the meat? Do you like it? Is that water cold?”

All sorts of endless questions that she now nonchalantly answers with a “Yup”. This is a new response. It’s her favorite word. It’s a lot better than her saying, “NOOOOO!” all the time. Hearing that the past six months got pretty tiring. She’s a lot more agreeable to spend time with now.

One thing I’ve been working on with her is to have her tell me if something is good by indicating it with a thumbs up sign. I’ll ask, “Is that good?”, and she’ll say, “Yup!”, but she couldn’t indicate it by sticking her thumb up alone.

When I first tried to do this with her, she would stick out her index finger, not realizing it was a different digit. I would help her fold her hand into the correct shape, and then ask her something else to see if she could put up her thumb the second time. She would stare at her hand with determination, and then just wiggle her index finger at me. “Daddy! I did it!”

Being a positive parent, I just remained happy at the effort, proceeded to give her our secret fist bump hand gesture combo, and called it a day. It took a month, but she now has better finger dexterity and can consistently stick her thumb up when she concentrates. It is adorable. She has to look at her hand, stick up her thumb, then check to make sure it isn’t her index finger. “Do you like that rice Glow?”

“It’s g-o-o-d daddy!” (Double thumbs up!)

Heh.

I had no idea the milestone a simple act like sticking up two thumbs was. She’s learning to use child training chopsticks and can pick up things with some success, but I thought that would happen much later than a simple finger gesture. It’s still amazing to see how quickly she progresses, and the way she soaks up and mimics our language in the house is uncanny. I can catch expressions my wife uses creeping into her speech all the time with the same inflection and delivery. It’s really creepy actually.

(Two thumbs up!)

I’ve just learned about the Korean ”Ulzzang” subculture from this video explaining the “Uncanny Valley“. Being a video game fan, I was familiar with the “Uncanny Valley“, but I didn’t know what connection it had with Korean fashion culture.

I think I’ve heard my college students talking about or describing some of their classmates as having “The Best Face” or using this word, but I didn’t know what it meant culturally. If I remember it correctly, it was someone with lots of makeup that took their facial appearance very seriously, perhaps a student that taught “makeup” effects to their classmates as their hobby. These students were probably the ones either using this word, or being teased by other less fashionable students with it. I didn’t know this was an entire subculture, but I probably should have guessed, considering how much my students pay attention to those presentations and how often “makeup” is someone’s sole hobby.

Wikipedia Entry:

The word “eoljjang”, literally “best face”, is derived from the words eolgul (Korean: ”얼굴”) meaning “face”; and jjang (Korean: ”짱”) a slang term meaning “best”. The term is often used by netizens for contests competing for the title of “eoljjang”, but it has since developed into a subculture or style, rather than a competition event.

There are Tumblrs and fashion blogs dedicated to people that follow this “ideal” form of beauty. Warning, all links could potentially be [NSFW] depending on what they capture from the web: Ulzzang Cuties , Ulzzang Lovers, Fuck Yeah Uhlijjang, and UlzzangAsia all collect and promote this particular look. There are also tutorials available if you want to creep everyone else out too. I knew about “Lady Gaga inspired” eyes last year (video tutorial below), but I didn’t know there were so many fans.

The day all my students start looking like this is when I stop teaching.

There are problems with this alteration of people’s eyes. The lenses used to make eyes appear more round can cause serious problems. Ironically, looking like a Real Doll or Anime character might make you lose your eyesight. If you can’t be bothered to insert circle lenses and put on the tremendous amount of makeup required, you can also use Photoshop, of course. I think this Cracked article has it right:

Artificial people don’t need to make it out of the uncanny valley. Real people will just meet them there.

I think that having a unique style is fine, and trying to look strikingly attractive is good for people’s self-esteem too. I just don’t understand the extremes people take that pursuit, and risking your own vision to live up to an inhuman ideal seems disturbing. You aren’t meant to look like a doll, but if you want to try there are going to be consequences that are significant. If you are determined to risk those side effects and permanent damage to your eyes for the sake of fashion, you have more interest in your appearance than I think is healthy.

Now that I have a phone running one of the current versions of Android (Gingerbread), I can get back to trying out applications that make things easier and more convenient for me.

The first thing I did after getting my phone (Samsung Galaxy S II) was to get rid of the “Touchwiz” custom home screen and launcher that comes bundled with this model of phone and get back to using the Go Launcher EX. I wasn’t aware that Go Launcher had turned into a full fledged phone suite of applications with customized themes and lots of different new features to improve the Android experience. Once you install it and set it up, there is even a related application store that will let you use several “Go” related products, like the Go SMS Pro or Twitter widget apps. The applications that fall under the “Go” umbrella are typically free and well polished with tight theme integration. They work well, and I run several of them.

One thing I didn’t find in all of this was a suitable battery application. I like knowing, by a quick glance, how much of my battery remains. When I was running Cyanogen mod 7.0 on my Nook Color (R.I.P.!) I had a visual readout of the estimated battery power left by percentage on the screen at all time. The least intrusive battery monitor app I’ve found is T.E.A.M. Battery Bar, which sits above your status bar readout and has a color coded schema to let you know how much battery life you have left. As long as you assign different colors to the values of the battery, you’ll know roughly how much battery is left without needing to read any numbers. It doesn’t fill up my status bar with another icon, which I like, and if you make the “Normal” color the same color as your status bar (black) you’ll never notice this running until you start getting below a certain percentage you defined. Unfortunately, if you are running a non-custom rom, the stock battery monitor remains, which renders this a bit superfluous.

So, while I don’t run T.E.A.M. Batter Bar with a stock rom, let me bring up another application I use all the time: Doggcatcher. Doggcatcher released a “tabbed” update to the premiere podcasting program on Android that increases the usability of the interface tremendously. Swiping left and right gets you to the different menus and you can finally read the information on each program without worrying about hitting another listing by accident. It’s great, and the program’s stability hasn’t suffered for it. If you still haven’t purchased this application and listen to podcasts, you are doing yourself a disservice. My only quibble with the interface now is that I can’t get rid of unused tabs since I never use Doggcather to read news feeds, and don’t have the time to watch dedicated video feeds nearly ever. One or two fewer tabs on the list would make scrolling a little easier since I wouldn’t end up on dead menus with no info on them.

Anyway, back to playing with my phone!

I’ve been too busy with work and family life to have a regular game of Magic during the week. I’ve been playing the Duels of the Planeswalker 2012 edition game on Steam to keep my chops up, but haven’t touched actual cards in a few weeks. This afternoon I got invited out to play, and while I thought it was going to be a group game, everybody else bailed and it ended up being me and the “Magic Guy” of Daejeon that’s responsible for the informal organized regular meetings playing some games one on one. I like playing Magic whether there is one person or a half dozen, so it didn’t matter to me no one else showed up. I came ready to play.

Luckily for me, my constructed deck for the limited block format was able to hold it’s own successfully. I won some games legitimately against some of his always good decks, which made me feel proud. I had tweaked a handful of cards before leaving for the game today and all of those choices got praise for being good editions. I also got a bit of advice about common mistakes I make while playing. I’m getting better at my deck construction, and like my deck a lot for what it does.

My nearly Pauper deck (all common rarity except a handful of uncommons that could be swapped out to fit the limited power format) also put up a few victories against a deck that had much better cards (by rarity) in it. That’s like fighting with one arm tied around my back (with my hand squarely on my wallet, protecting all the money I saved by making a cheap deck). Rarity usually impacts the game because better cards just dominate cheaper ones, but occasionally the random swing of luck will help even a cheaper deck like mine win a few games they shouldn’t. Yay!

My EDH deck has gotten considerably better with the trades I made a few weeks ago. One-on-one I was able to stall the game out both times and make the game a lot closer than before. Just the luck of the draw determined a lot of the tide of the game today. It was all about the draws I needed to make, because I could put up a fight more or less perpetually and hold off attacks. I had the means to get the cards I wanted, and had the cards in my deck. I just needed to get them into my hand and the game was over.

Had I been able to draw one or two cards I would have been able to crack the entire game open and actually win convincingly, but I was unsuccessful since my deck has a few gaps in it still that are specifically about the ability to draw specific cards I need when I need them. My deck needs three specific cards that would increase its reliability considerably and prevent the board stalls from eventually turning against me, but unfortunately I’ve never been able to trade or purchase them yet. Once I track down these cards, I think I’ll have all the cards I need to finally win a damn EDH game. Any improvements I make on top of those purchases will simply be gravy.

I like the incremental process of building up a better deck for EDH, and I like seeing my constructed decks win against good players. Budget and card availability will always be limiting factors in the decks I play, but when I finally get lucky with a good deck design that straddles both the “Cheap” and “Effective” mark, I’m pleased. I don’t need to win every game to have a nice time playing Magic, but if I am going to build a deck and spend the time and money to look for specific cards, I want them to work. The decks worked, but could always work just a little better and give me an edge when the game is close.

The first Star Wars related thing that has made me smile in a long time.

Disturbingly accurate. Also, slightly racist.

I’ve joined the 10% of people in the country that own and use a Samsung Galaxy SII. My phone got activated this morning, and I’ve spent the day between teaching class, watching Glow, washing dishes, and customizing the heck out of my phone. Most of the applications I was running on my old phone have made it over to my new one without any problems, ave for my Magic the Gathering app, which is no longer in the market. Everything my old phone does this new phone does many times better. The dual core processing power removes the latency that I had using my Motoroi, and the refined features of the SGSII make it a joy to use.

My wife hasn’t owned a smart phone before. She has a matching phone that she’s been using for the last few days, so I’ve been setting up her phone and tweaking it for her. She mostly just wanted the background image to be our daughter’s picture, or to have a new ringtone. Right now she hasn’t started getting into anything very technical, and she isn’t demanding because she doesn’t know what her phone is able to do yet either. Glow drained my wife’s battery over the course of the day watching videos and poking at the screen. In retaliation, my wife did put the pattern lock onto her phone immediately to prevent Glow from getting at her phone.

My wife likes being able to check things while I am on the computer. She told me she used it to check prices to find deals while shopping too. I’m sure the unlimited data plan has put her at ease about using the phone a little, since she doesn’t have to worry about clicking something like I did when I was unaware it was using data in the background and having a massive bill show up. Once I figure out a few applications she needs, but doesn’t yet know she needs, she’ll be using her phone as much as I use mine.