::A Geek in Korea::

Right around spring, there is a time where people want to bring out their bikes for the first ride of the year. Exercise, saving money on transportation, or even just the fun of riding a bike might be the reason, but usually there is a problem. The tires are flat because someone had pulled the valve that keeps the air in the inner tube. Around that time each weekend here is a person that just happens to be selling very tire valves you need outside the gate of the apartment. They operate out of the back of their truck as a fix it shop for bikes. That always struck  me as a very odd coincidence.

My valves have been lost or stolen twice this spring already. Every valve in the entire apartment complex had their back valve stolen or removed at least once. The security guard’s building faces away from the bicycles, and he doesn’t do anything but sleep anyway. This is going to be a recurring problem as long as there is profit to be had. I can’t prove anything yet, but I’ve stumbled upon another possible scenario.

We walked to the nearest bike shop and bought a few extra valves just in case it happens again. These simple little items cost 1000 won apiece (~$1UDS). They are overcharging quite a bit. It seems if you bring valves to the bike store, you can sell them back to the shop. Perhaps it isn’t the bike store that is stealing the valves at all, but someone trying to cash in on the used part sale. Someone steal bike valves and get paid for it. Then the bike store has an increase in the number of people that need valves. They overcharge enough to cover their profit, as well as pay all the people that caused the demand for bike valves to increase. Seems like it’s a bit of a cycle (pardon the pun.)

The only solution to the problem would be storing our two bikes in our apartment. If you knew the size of the apartment, and the logistics involved, it’s basically not possible. I’m on my own. All I can do is to catch someone actually stealing the valves, and I don’t have a direct line of sight on the bicycles from my apartment anyway. Looks like my only solution is to stock up on bike valves and hope no one steals mine to get their own bike fixed.

We went to my local game shop to trade in a few of my Nintendo DS games I haven’t played in a while. I traded in some of my games for some cash that will be earmarked for more games, of course. It’s a vicious cycle, but the New Super Mario Brothers game isn’t going to purchase itself, and you can better believe it’s going to be in my game collection when it’s released.

While I was at the store, another guy was there looking at games, new and used. He wanted to trade in his copy of Mario Kart DS (an act not unlike heresy), and was looking to pick up either Tetris DS or Metroid Prime: Hunters. I had Tetris in my DS with me at the time, and I gave him a free demo. I later ran into him on the subway and see he followed my recommendation on Tetris DS. We tried to get a game going between stops, but had connection difficulties.

I also got to witness the Nintendo DS lite on my own in person. The screen can only be described as: Glorious, like heavenly gaming light sent from above. Everyone in the store went "Oooooh," when we could see the screen light up for the first time. I’m pretty sure the setting I saw it on wasn’t even the brightest possible, so it may be possible to signal people from outer space when the DS lite is turned to full.

My first impression: Holy crap, it’s small, bright, and pretty. I wasn’t allowed to pick it up, (seriously) so I don’t know how comfortable it will be to play, but I’m guessing the decrease in weight (like 50% lighter and smaller) will help with the dreaded "numb hands" I get holding the DS on extended gaming sessions.

I’m not sure when the new 220v Korean plug friendly models will be released. This was an imported Japanese model with a 110v plug, which is more USA friendly, but since demand is so high, being sold at a premium price that is tough to swallow. The price is something like $70 over the retail price, which is only $20 over what importers are getting for them in the United States before they are officially launched there (sometime in May?). If I can hold out for a few months from the temptation of picking up this model, maybe I can get a Korean 220 volt model, or new color instead. Besides, I like my DS "phat" anyway.

My wife wanted to do some spring clothes shopping, and I wanted to go looking for some new games. I’m usually the big spender in the house. She hardly shops at all, so it’s not like I minded. We got to go out "on a date", which is basically impossible during the week.

She was looking for some T-shirts. Korean T-shirts, 9 times out of 10, will have crazy English written all over them. It’s harder to find correct sentences on T-shirts than in my basic English classes notebooks, and even harder to find anything written in Korean. I have no idea why.

I was given the job of proof reading all the shirts she liked. It was tough telling her if the stuff written on it made no sense at all if she really liked the shirt. For some reason, incorrect grammar on shirts bothers my wife more than me. Eventually, I found a shirt with correct English that she and I liked, as well as the design that was suitable for what she wanted. We picked up a few things for her today, which was nice for a change.

So, it seems all the speculation about the name of the new Nintendo console was for naught. They ended up announcing the name prior to the big E3 gaming convention where the majority of games and systems are announced. It seems that the new Nintendo console will be dropping the code name "Revolution" and will be known simply as the "Nintendo Wii". "Wii" is pronounced like "We", as in "Wii are ready to play".

My Thoughts: Initially it was, "WTF?!", but then I started to ponder things other than juvenille jokes.

Theories abound as to why they chose the name.

• Short. No need to abbreviate.
•  No need to translate it to different languages. Sounds just as strange in all of them.
• Rumor: ii in Japanese means "Good". I heard this from a gaming message board. Who knows if it’s true.
• A clever use of language (Wii=WE) to point out the social aspect of gaming.
• Trendy. Uses lower case "i", which served another inspiration for the console well.
• Obscure numerological explanation: (W-i-i = E) or (23-9-9 =5). This is the fifth Nintendo Console! "Wii" cracked the Da Vinci code!
• The "i" sort of looks like the controller

Give it some time. It’s starting to grow on me.

This is what greets you on the door in the restroom at work. The English says, "Your ass is dirty," under which is the Korean onomatopoeia for the sound of vomiting. (something like "Yu-ueak"). On the top right hand corner, there is a curse that means, "Eat shit!"

Why did I share such crude writing? Well, the English is actually a complete sentence, which impressed me in a weird way. It was completely unexpected. It’s the longest correct sentence that I’ve ever read in any bathroom ever. Anyone writing something so crude on the wall of a school isn’t likely to be able to make a complete coherent thought and express it in a grammatically correct manner in English easily. Who could have written this? A dumb student with a penchant for cursing, or a smart student venting his frustration?

I was trying to think of the few students I thought capable of writing such a sentence on their own. The smartest students are actually some of the most polite in this school. I don’t think they would write something as crude as this. If I confronted them, they’d probably deny it, then get curious about it and learn more bad words in the process. That’s unacceptable.

One boy I used to teach last year was my immediate suspect. The boy that I did think did it uses the vomit word written on the door constantly. He also curses a lot in Korean, and would probably be able to figure out what to say in English as well. When his current teacher and I asked him about it, He claimed he didn’t know what we were talking about. It’s not like we have a crime lab to figure this out with, so if he is lying, we’ll just have to catch him in the act some other time, which would be bad, because it’s written on the INSIDE of the door and I’m not watching people do their business in the name of catching some underage graffiti artist.

Another possibility would be that it was copied from some other source by any other level of student. I don’t know who would be do this either. Too  many potential suspects. Eventually someone will get around to cleaning this up, but for now I’ve got the displeasure of looking at this every time I use the facilities.

Today my manager called me in for Y.A.M. (Yet Another Meeting). This meeting was about some "complaints" my kindergarten mothers have lodged against me.  I never happen to get feedback directly from parents, but somehow I don’t tend to believe this is actually something they would said. According to my manager, the mothers of my kindergarten class students feel I am using too much Korean in class and should explain everything entirely in English all the time. Wow, it’s almost like the parents are reading my manager’s mind and repeating the exact thing he wants them to say.

Yes. My students are in English class. We study English. We speak English. We practice English. Korean is the functional equivalent of glue that keeps the students in chairs and focused on doing the task at hand. I speak Korean when it’s clear the students don’t know what they should be doing and want help. The students he is asking me to speak only English to know only a few hundred words, mostly nouns. Try controlling a class by shouting out the colors or numbers from one to twenty. What else do kindergarten students know? That’s nonsensical.

I’m the only teacher in the school that has requested that I have no Korean assistant in the class for the exact reason that I am trying to limit the amount of Korean in class. If I had a Korean assistant that would help me with the tasks like bathroom breaks and other kindergarten tasks, my students would be looking to an assistant instead of me for help. They know that if they want something, they have to express it to me somehow. English, Korean, whatever works.

The first step to getting students talking is to get them talking to me in any language. Once they can ask me, "Can I go to the bathroom" in Korean, they can repeat after me in English. If I had a Korean assistant in the class like the other teachers do, they wouldn’t even attempt this. They’d go to the Korean assistant to ask instead. My students are the best behaved kindergarten class in the entire school. I’ve never sent students outside for discipline problems. This alone means they are getting more English because I don’t have to stop the class to deal with bad students or children crying. Time wasted is not time well spent.

Do I need to use Korean in class? Yes, at times I do. When students start freaking out, or running around, I can either ask them the same question ten times in English and get no response, or say it once in Korean. Is this cheating? Perhaps, but damn, I’m not going to pull my hair out in a class just because I’m supposed to use English in a situation in which it makes no sense. 90% of what I say is in English, and that other 10% is when I can’t get a child to do what I want in English anyway.

My manager has been sitting outside all of our classes, listening this entire week. I’ve caught him peering into my classroom multiple times. He’s been listening in to see if my students are talking, and what we are doing. Today he actually poked his head in and asked why all my students were quiet and working. Since we were having a test, I’m not sure if he expected me to be shouting English at them or something. My students know that Korean in my class isn’t for conversation. It’s for practical reasons only.

Whenever he has a problem with teaching style, he uses his "The mothers say this," excuse. What he wants is blatantly clear. He wants me to spend the entire day speaking English all the day, confusing students, lowering overall comprehension. He wants to increase my stress yelling at students that don’t understand why they are misbehaving. He wants "only English" education to the point where it’s moronic.He just doesn’t get it. I’m not going to make my life more difficult just because he thinks my students aren’t having a difficult enough time understanding me in class.

I’ve heard of teachers that get fired for this very reason. Schools will go after people "fresh" off the boat since  they can’t speak any Korean. They only use English in class because they can’t speak any Korean. Cut the old experienced teachers with higher salaries for the cheap, fresh out of school teachers that come over each year. If students learn less, that’s okay, because it’s all about the English in class, not if the students are actually getting anything out of the class. It’s all about profit and appearance, not the education. If I ever forget that, I’ll end up on my ass unemployed.

Please forgive my rudeness.

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This week is the lovely time of the term known as "test" time, "report card" time, as well as "re-enrollment" time. The feeling that everyone is a little tense before our vacation next week is obvious. My manager has been calling meetings every single day this week talking about the same things he’s been saying the entire month, but now in rapid fire between class sessions. I’ve been told so many impossible things that each meaning has started taking on a sort of comic tone.

Of the students I teach, I only think two are at risk of quitting. If more left, I’d be very surprised. Both students are clearly in the wrong level, have been recommended for a move to a different class multiple times, and have failed every single task given to them in class. One of these at risk students told me he was quitting this week, which I told to my manager. Since I had told him multiple times that this student was in the wrong class for his ability, I can’t really be held responsible for his quitting.

From what I’ve been told from my manager, we are losing a lot more than just two students per teacher. I got called in and asked if I had been assigning homework. I told him I’ve given homework every single day for two months straight. I check homework from my students every single class. I know who is and who isn’t doing homework. It’s the parents responsibility to sign the homework paper every day to say that their child is doing the work. The two students I think will quit are the only students that never do any homework. That’s because they are in the wrong level and can’t do the work I assign. I’ve made it plainly aware to the management in the school that this is the case.

If someone is quitting over a lack of homework in my class because they think I never assign any, it’s the student being tricky. They must be lying to their parents, and forging their parents handwriting to fool me. Unless I call and check each with each parent manually, I can’t know if it was the parent that really signed the homework or not. Anyway, I think I have enough full homework sheets filled out and signed by parents to prove I’ve been giving out enough work to my students.

The solution offered to by my boss was for me to manually write down the homework in every students book. If the parents didn’t see what the child wrote before, how would this matter? As if I don’t have enough to teach each day, I have to sign 12 students books too? Stupid. I write the homework on the board. They copy it. I check to see they wrote it. I check to see it signed the next day. The system works as long as the parents know to look in the book, which would be the manager’s job to tell them.

I’ve got dozens of more report cards to write, tests to make and grade, and I get called into meetings like this when I could be working on something much more important. I’m too busy to hear lame solutions when I’ve got so much to do.

Remember magic eye pictures? That horrible fad in the 90’s where people would print out blurry shaped blobs and claim that if you went cross-eyed and stared long enough you could see the image of something inane. Usually what happened was you could see it for a few seconds before your eyes started to water and you got a horrible headache, or it didn’t work at all. Remember those?

Yeah, they sucked, didn’t they?

I never really liked the things as they never really worked for me. People at my high school claimed they could seem them instantly, but I never could. My high school year book featured one on the cover that I never got to see properly. Even if you tell me what the image is I could never see it. Usually what would happen is I’d stare at it like everyone else, ask what they were seeing, then say, "Yeah, I see it too." I’m convinced 90% of them never worked.

Imagine my surprise when I stared at one of the new Korean 5000 won bills and saw a magic eye picture (autostereogram) built into the bill to deter counterfeiting. I had never noticed it before. Not only that, I could see what it was without even trying. In fact, even if I looked away and looked back, I could STILL see what it said. It’s the first time I unintentionally found such a picture "in the wild" so to speak. It was a mind blowing experience, as I was in the back of a taxi on the way to school. I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating or not. I just kept staring at the bill and wanted to make sure I wasn’t crazy.

When I went to school, I showed some of the teachers. They did the same "stare" I did 1000 times before when I looked at a magic eye picture but couldn’t see it. Due to the metallic ink on the bill, if you look at it from an angle, you can see the slightly different color of the area where the effect takes place. Still, it’s cool. I think taking a picture of the bill sort of ruins the effect, or makes it more obvious, but for those of you that don’t live in Korea and have no idea what I am talking about, check out the picture below. It’s very clear here.

One of the most intimidating aspects of learning Korean isn’t learning Korean at all. It’s learning the Chinese characters (called Hanja) that Koreans also use occasionally. You’ll see Chinese characters on things like subway stations, newspapers, and in other public places. They also use them in dictionaries occasionally when multiple words have different meanings but are spelled the same. For example, the word "Bae" can mean  "Stomach", "Ship", and "Pear". It’s the context and Chinese character that let’s you know which it is you are talking about.

The Korean method of learning Chinese character is basically brute force memorization. Books with little squares, directions how to write the character, and lots of places to repeat the word until they know it. The amount that students learn now for middle school and high school is in correspondence with the college entrance requirements. My wife only took one year of mandatory Hanja lessons, which was all the was required at the time.Things seem to be different now, as I know of six year olds that study Chinese as well as English. There are dozens of Chinese language institutes that help students memorize the pesky characters. Korean people have told me the popularity of Chinese language schools is based on the hedging of their mutli-lingual bets about their country’s economic future.

Whatever the reason Koreans study Hanja I wanted to give it a chance on my own. It’s a bit of a casual exposure to another language that also lets me learn something that I’ll occasionally be able to use here in Korea too. People that study Korean and Japanese in university always complain about the amount of effort required to learn the borrowed Chinese characters used in those respective languages. I’m not planning on spending time studying Chinese characters used in Korean intensively, as I’m not enrolled in any language programs at the moment.

I’ve bought the book called "Learn Hanja the Fun Way". I have to agree with the linked review of the book, as it’s not aimed at people with no Korean at all. Sounds, as well as the vocabulary connected to the lessons is written in Korean, and the written practice requires you to know a fair bit. The reading comprehension dialogs at the end of the units seem like they’ll be a good challenge too, although it’s far more Hanja than I’ve ever seen written at one time on a Korean document.

There are great English explanations and pictograms that really help me. Each word in the book has the Chinese character, and it also has a cartoon drawing that encapsulates the meaning but also gives me a second way to remember the shape. I’ve actually been able to look at words, look at the Chinese and "get" the meaning without looking at the explanation at all. Since Chinese is a visual language first this seems to makes sense for some reason. Since Hanja is completely abstract for me, anything that lets me remember meanings without having to count lines and completely remember the shape is a great help. The sounds that accompany the words will have to come second for now.

I’m only learning out of curiosity, as well as a desire to improve my Korean. Plus, I find Chinese characters really mysterious and interesting for some reason. I think it has to do with the fact the the entire language is just so different. Korean has lost a bit of its exotic mystique after being here a while. I’d really, really love to meet someone with a Chinese tattoo and be able to read it on my own and see if they got it right. This is, of course, the cautious optimism I’m displaying now before I start learning the 400 or more characters in the book. I’m sure I’ll post later about my progress, or lack thereof in deciphering these characters before long.