::A Geek in Korea::

My wife, ever on the quest to save money and treat our dog well at the same time, ordered a dog shaving electric razor from the Internet. The package came the next day in the mail when no one was home, so our security guard held the package for us. Since our security guard is very "dog unfriendly", the package was delivered with instructions. It had to be wrapped so no one could tell what it was, and the delivery person wasn’t supposed to say where the package was from. Our anonymous brown package arrived, and this was inside:

 

Note the cute long haired Shih Tzu on the package. This is exactly what we are trying to avoid with our dog.

Since Yoshi is a house dog, he spends most of his time chasing a ball around on a faux wood floor. Yoshi slides around when his paw hair grows too long. He also gets dirty when trying to use his bathroom mat, and when we take him for walks he picks up a lot of dirt on his paws. Since the longer hair takes a longer time to dry, he also licks his paws and has an increased chance of infections and skin diseases.

I was feeling a little under the weather today and couldn’t help out much. I had been teaching with a sore throat, and over the weekend I hadn’t gotten enough rest. I spent the entire night restless, and got hardly any sleep. As a result, I was far to tired to help with the shaving procedure. I walk the dog, and she takes care of the fur anyway. It’s just how the division of labor has broken down since we got Yoshi. Still, I’m thankful for her initiative, because otherwise I’d be walking around a mop with feet. I went to sleep in the middle of the afternoon while my wife had decided this was the day she was going give Yoshi’s paws and butt (in typical Korean fashion) a shave. She had already given him a bath, so all she needed to do was fire up the razor and get started.

I didn’t witness the shaving myself, but it went something like this: The razor would be engaged, and Yoshi would freak out. She would spent about two or three minutes trying to get a paw in the proper position, then grab the dreaded "Newspaper of Doom" to keep the dog from biting and running off. Then there would be about ten minutes of cooing and soothing sounds as she calmed the dog down and then the process would start again. Each time, I would wake up, hear the newspaper, the razor, fall asleep, then wake up again when the next cycle started again.

It led to some strange dreams.

Anyway, Yoshi looks good with his paws shaved. He has more traction to move around, won’t get as dirty, and has been calmer now that he isn’t getting chased after with hair cutting tools.

In other weird incident a few weeks ago, I got in a taxi to escape an quickening downpour on my way home from work. I got into the taxi late at night with an umbrella that I quickly stowed away. I told my directions to the driver, and he sped off to the location requested.

On the way to the destination, we were following a small white compact car. Eventually we came to a stop.  The white car got in left turn lane at an intersection behind another vehicle. For some reason, the vehicle was was stopped in front of the white car despite having a green turn light. The white car in front of our taxi then swerved out into the next lane in front of us sped through the intersection in front of us, then tried to turn left again in front of the stopped vehicle that wasn’t turning with the proper light. This caused us to be stopped in the middle of intersection and a large bus barreling down on us in the rear. The buses air brakes hissed, and everyone came to a stop as we waited for the white car to turn.

This sent my taxi cab driver into a fit of cursing. He bemoaned the fact that women drivers were allowed on the road. Sure enough, as we passed, the white car was being driven by a woman. He then went off on another tangent about how dangerous it was for people that drove that way. Never mind the fact that he didn’t obey most of the posted speed limits, turned illegally on a previous red light, and sped through another light.

I was simply happy I hadn’t been in an accident and was nodding along, dropping the occasional Korean phrase like, "That’s right", or a sympathetic, "Ung," a Korean "I’m listening, continue on" sound I’ve even picked up in my English speaking after being here so long. I had very little idea what he was actually talking about, but I guessed it had to do with the weather, the traffic, and whatever else pisses off taxi drivers. I was the confessional this guy never had, and he kept spewing out regional Korean with a dialect I could barely understand.

Eventually, when it came to get out of the taxi and pay, I handed over my money and the driver looked up in the rear view mirror. He was shocked and said, "You are a foreigner?! I had no idea!" He had been talking to me the entire time and didn’t bother to look up or realize I didn’t know what the hell he was saying. I don’t think for a second I could have passes as a fluent Korean in any other situation.

I happen to teach multiple classes of a particular level on a single day, all right after each other. Our school organizes mutliple classes of the same level in the "A, B, C, D…" manner, meaning that as you go down the list, the best students are usually in the "A" class, and as you go down the alphabet, the ablity of the students gradually decreases nearly exponentially. I see the same level three times today in different classes, and I teach them in a descending order of ability. Each time I teach the same lesson, and each time my students get worse and worse as I change classes. It’s actually quite a disturbing phenomenon.

When I start the lesson, I define the words we will see in our reading material. I don’t allow for direct translation, rather I force the students to put the meaning into their own words. In my level "A" class, they can either define a word with their own words in partial or full sentences, or know synonyms that mean roughly the same thing most of the time. My "B" and "C" class can usually translate a word into Korean, but lack to vocabulary to express what it means back into English. I give these students extra help and coax an answer out of them by slow reinforcement with words they already know.

My "D" level class wouldn’t even know the word, would translate it wrong, or thinks I’m talking about something entirely different.  They use gestures and shout random words in Korean and English that don’t have anything to do with the topic at all. They hear sounds and see words, but react to them in gut level response that defies all logic and knowledge.

When I give speaking tests, I look for pronunciation, intonation, stress, pauses, hesitation, and volume. In my "A", "B", and "C" level classes, the differences on a twenty five point scale from lowest to highest were no more than five to eight points. The worst student was no more than five to eight points from a perfect score. The "D" level class had students struggling with phonics, reading, and every other skill required to do well. The range of those scores was over fifteen points. The best student in the class was no more than average in another class.

The behavior of the "D" level class was just as bad as all their test scores. Every class clown, disaffected teenager, bully, and smart ass that needed to be tossed out during my intensive morning classes in the summer were shoved into a single class. I suppose we could call it a form of educational triage. Save the resources where they are best spent. Sadly for the students, since they are in a class with nothing but naughty students that like to mess around in class, it’s almost impossible to give them the individual attention they might need to do better. When all the bad kids are shoved into a single class, you can’t help them all.
They are a handful, and I’m glad I only see them only once. It’s my last class of the week, so even though I have to take the gloves off to get anything done, I can at least leave the class knowing I don’t need to see another student for the rest of the evening.

I teach a mischievous student that studies in a special English language elementary school. She takes classes entirely in English, then comes to my class to study with me for extra help. I act as a special tutor, helping her with some homework, helping with extra speaking, and we read stories she works on in school together. It’s a fun class, but the girl is really not very well behaved.

She’s excellent at getting me sidetracked and talking about something else. Anything other than her school work will get her talking. She doesn’t like to study any more than any other student. She intentionally asks me questions and plays like she doesn’t understand to keep me talking so we can’t work farther in her school books.

Her mother knows about her tendency to do this and told me that she wants to focus on her writing skills. Today that’s what we were doing when I happened to step out of class to pick up a journal paper. She needed it for homework. I left the classroom to see the mother sitting in the Director’s office. She had turned on the close circuit television in the room and had started watching her child’s behavior.

As I got back to class with the paper, I found the door locked, and the girl hiding. After she let me back into the class, I told her about her journal homework and how to structure her writing. She wasn’t interested, and tried to keep knocking me off topic. I was tempted the entire time to tell her that her mother was watching, but I decided to let her dig her own grave instead. Each time she ramped up her distractions, i told her to keep studying and writing. As the class started to wind down to the last few minutes, the girl started asking about the time, when she could go, and why I wasn’t letting her out a little early.

That is when I told her that her mother was in the next room and that she had been watching the entire class. The mother showed up after the girl had been in my classroom, so she had no clue. At first she didn’t believe me, but then I pointed to the camera in the ceiling and stepped out to see her mother rounding out the office.

My student’s expression said it all.

"I’m dead."

In all of my classes at the moment, I’ve got students that think they are much better than where the test results placed them. As a result, I keep getting into shouting matches with loud, talkative students that think they know better than me.

One group of boys was taken from another level and dumped into what was my smallest class, which only had eight students. Now we are at a near capacity eleven, and the boys I added were actually moved to join overachieving students from another class. What used to be a class of talkative girls and some quiet boys is now full of loud mouth smart asses. Of course, the students don’t know each other, and they don’t know their test results, but one particular loud mouth boy, who happens to be the oldest, has an ego to match his over-sized girth. He did no better than average on his tests, but often tries to lecture me on pronunciation, classroom rules, and homework. I can’t stand him.

Today, since the new boys were joining the class after I had explained some of the material had to take a test they weren’t able to study for beforehand. I told them that I understood if they didn’t know any of the answers, and that they wouldn’t be punished for getting everything wrong. All they had to do was try, be quiet, and let the other students take the test.

The new boy takes this to mean that he wants to waste class time arguing with me. As I hand out the test, he raises his hand and tells me he wasn’t in class last time to study. No kidding! I think I would have remembered who was in class, since I take attendance every day. I told him I knew his situation, and that he just needed to be quiet and try. He then explained to me again that he didn’t want to take the test. When I handed him the sheet of paper he whined even more. I told him he could sit in class and pick his nose for five minutes if it meant he would just be quiet so other people could study.

The problem is that one boy talking back sets the tone for class. The rest of the boys were emboldened by his actions. A student that wasn’t even brave enough to say his name in the first class was flicking me off behind my back. Luckily my other students caught him and ratted him out. I threatened to remove the offending finger the next time I saw it in the air. Blood was in the air at this point, and I was a viper. The loudmouth managed to keep his back talk to his nearest neighbors for the rest of class, and I invited him to share anything he had to say to me in the teacher’s room after class.

When I let out class, he bolted for the door. I informed my director about his actions and she wasn’t surprised to hear that the loudmouth had been getting under my skin. I think he did the same thing to Korean teachers, or just has an abrasive personality some people, like myself, get annoyed by having to deal with in class.

In the next class, it was a complete bit of role reversal. I had some awful students during my lowest level intensive courses that tested into a moderately high level reading book. The girls in the class have such nasty personalities that you can’t help but think they are always talking badly about someone. The boys have attention spans shorted by too much Internet gaming. Usually students such as these are a complete pain, but the topic for today was Online gaming. The boys knew nearly all the vocabulary, while the girls didn’t have a clue. The boys did very well on their tests, while the girls struggled and resented having been placed in a class where we could spend a class talking about video games and not be getting in trouble.

I caught a girl not reading along, and when I asked her to follow along, she got nasty about it. She wasn’t doing the work, and I called her out on it. She told me she thinks the book is much too easy for her, but she didn’t score well enough on her test to go any higher. I should know, I graded her work. She and I have never gotten along since I saw past her "princess complex" after a single day of class with her.

After the class, my director stopped all the students and asked me about their behaviors. Gave the abnormally well behaved boys praise while telling what happened with the sour faced girl. I don’t like the fact that my director asked me to basically chastise someone in my class in front of their peers. I would rather handle specific problem students individually to prevent shame and tears. The girl that was singled out probably lost a lot of respect from her peers, and pride since she thinks she’s so special. The rest of the students left while she got a more personalized talk from me through the director. She was in tears. If it knocks her down a few pegs, it might be for the best. I was unmoved.

Wikipedia defines Sadism as the sexual pleasure or gratification in the infliction of pain and suffering upon another person.

While I’m not sure my Head Teacher and Director get their rocks off on how much homework they give, they certainly get some gratification and some cash out of the amount of pain they cause students.

After work today, I had a late meeting with my Director and Head teacher. We had to go the planning of my classes now that I had taught each level. I wasn’t given a syllabus to know how quickly or what I needed to do each class, so I had been really on my own these first few days of the new term. I basically followed the mantra of "as much homework as I can assign before the student threaten to slit my throat", which is what I’ve been told this school deems a "moderate" amount of work.

An average student that has just learned to read must do at least two of the following each day:

• Read the unit story or phrases ten times a day.
• Listen to the tape of the story or book ten times.
• Write the vocabulary words at least ten times.
• Memorize some expressions for testing the next class.

These are the students that have just started reading!

We went through each of the levels I taught and worked out the approximate levels of homework that should be assigned over the course of a week depending on how many times I see the students. One level to the next, the work would generally increase. As sentences and readings got longer, things got scaled back, but other work was brought in. The goal was for me to be assigning about one hour of homework for ever day of class. I see students anywhere from one hour to three hours a week.

An hour a class would mean lots of work, if I was the only teacher they saw. However, most students are in class at least five to six hours a week. Every teacher will give the same hourly amount of homework ideally. If students stay two or three hours in one day, they have just as much homework each hour as a student that comes every day for a single hour. They might have a day or two do it, but that’s still a lot of work for a little kid to do at times.

Add to the fact that all of my students still go to Korean elementary or middle school, as well as multiple academies in other subjects. Some of my students study three or four times at different places after school. It’s no wonder that most of  the students that do all the work look like they are unravelling at both ends. We have "intensive" courses in the summer when they have breaks that eat all of their free time, and when they get back into full time classes we simply shift our times and keep the work load at full steam.

My highest level class has four books for our school alone. Bringing all of them to school everyday will probably cause them hernias by the time they get through the course work. Their weekly homework is an intensive dictation lesson. They also have to define about thirty words. My Director and Head Teacher asked why I was hesitant to give them even more homework, since there was potentially about one hundred or more words they could be learning in a unit.
I was worried with the level of work already required, as well as how much I was going to be pushing them, that they might actually quit from all the stress.

They actually admitted that while some of the students had dropped out because of stress reasons, the majority of parents were very pleased with the level of work we had been assigning, or at least the goal of trying to do an hour of work each night. It turns out that I can actually increase what I used to think was excessive homework to make it up to my Director’s promised "minimum levels" and still not have people complain to me.

That’s astoundingly cruel to me.

Friday, I was given a gift from a student. It was a bag of sour candy. I don’t eat much candy these days, so it was lying on my desk when I went into work this afternoon. I had forgotten to pack snacks since I left my apartment in a hurry, so decided to give the candies a try in the teacher’s room between classes. One noisy student came running past the room and detected the candy approaching my mouth with that candy radar all students have.

He yelled out, "Candy! I want candy! Me too! Me too!"

Since not sharing food is a little rude, even if the child was younger than me, it would be considered "nice" to share. The boy in question is already bouncing off the walls, and if I gave some to him, I would have to give it to everyone else that knew about it. I lied. "Oh, what candy. I don’t have any more. It’s all gone."

He bounced away to tell all his friends I had candy. Before he got far, I called him back in the office, gave him a piece of candy, then did the international, "Let’s keep this a secret" finger to lip shushing motion. He nodded understanding and began to skip away again.

The students were confused today, since they were getting new books, new classrooms, new classmates, along with new teachers. The boy and his classmates were roaming around looking for where they were supposed to go as I prepared for my class. I heard the boy tell the others as he pointed to me, "Oh, I got candy from him today…WAIT! NO, NO I DIDN’T!" He actually put his hands over his mouth as if to shove the words back into his mouth.

I said, "Smooth," as I handed out the rest of the candy to the classmates that overheard him. Loose lips cost candy.

All my life I’ve been a gamer. As long as I’ve had free time, I’ve always had a game or two I’ve been trying (or failing) to get better at playing. Beating games or being a completionist isn’t something I pride myself on. If I stop having fun with games, I stop playing them. If I get burned out of a game or a genre, I give it a rest. I’ve been fairly lucky to have enough money to support my hobby for a long time. I’ve never grown bored gaming for long. If I am ever in a rut with a particular game or genre, I look around and try something new.

One of the things about gaming is how it changes the structure of your day. When you have a really good game sittng at home that can’t be played during work, I get excited and the day seems to take forever. I think about what I’ll be doing in my time off, and look up strategies or hints as to how to play better. (Spoiler free!)
When I get a good game that holds my interest, any free time I might have could potentially spent playing the game. This can get me in trouble when I have a portable game that gets in the way of things I should be doing. In the past, I would be known to play a game at work when my attention should be focused else where. Not so much anymore, however I do still occasionally bring my DS lite to work when I know I will have a break.

One of the dangerous things about MMORPGs is the fact that they are persistent, they are meant to be played for a long time, and they have people playing them constantly. This is a dangerous combination for a person like myself that would spend a lot of free time playing the game if there was something to do. In MMORPGs, there is always something to do. You can always level. You can always grind out another level. You can always play another level. Pretty soon, when the rest of your life whithers away, that’s all you have to do anyway.

I loathe games that are basically competitions in time spent or money spent. I don’t play collectable card games (anymore) after I learned (the hard way) that it’s not about the money you spend on the game (significant) but how much your opponent has spent (always much, much more.) As a result, games that are money or massive time investments come down to who has the most time to waste. While I enjoy playing games, I don’t play them for the "shiny loot" factor of having more stuff, or having better stuff to brag about as I play.

While I do play a variation of the MMORPG genre, Nexus War, it’s a less cruel sort of beast. It’s inherently self-limiting. Not to say you can’t play it how you want to. You can, it’s just that  my time is limited to about 100 or so actions per character, per day.  This means that even if I wanted to play it as much as a typical MMORPG I would simply be wating around for time to pass before I was allowed to do something in game again. People can fill their time worrying about raid politics, chatting in IRC about the game, talking about it in the forums, or creating fan art, but I don’t do these things.

That isn’t to say that playing the game hasn’t changed my habits. I now get up in the morning, shower, and turn on my computer. Instead of surfing news sites or watching television, I level my characters. I get about thirty minutes of game time in the morning before work, and let my action points accrue as I work through the day.  Then, at night, I return for some more leveling before I go to bed. Another thirty minutes to an hour and I’m done. This has been the pattern for a few weeks now. I might peek on a character at risk on a break at work, but I don’t do any power gaming.

The basic game is about killing others, but I also have secondary sources of getting experience like books, or crafting new materials. It works to fill the boredom of my day and hasn’t impacted my daily schedule too much. I’d probably be on the computer anyway, and when I finish leveling my characters at night, I simply turn it off since I know there isn’t anything more I can do until time passes. In some ways, that’s better than constantly having access to my characters on a Nintendo DS.

I know I am addicted to games as a way to fight off boredom and keep me in touch with other English speakers I have something in common with. It has both negative and positive impacts on my life. I spend to much time in front of the computer and not with my wife and dog. I spent too much time thinking about things of trivial importance. Such is life, and we all have our little vices.

Unlike our last apartment, our current apartment posts times when services will be doing things in the building. According to a sign on the wall, there was going to be a preventative extermination spraying sometime this week. Since we didn’t want anyone to know we had pets, we needed a way to hide the evidence of our dog in a hurry. Since exterminators tend to show up at surprising times and also want to go in every room we needed a solution other than, "Throw the dog in the closet".

Just as I was about to leave for the afternoon, there was a knock on the door. The time had arrived. The plan was quickly set in place. First, I ran out and grabbed the dog. Next, I hid the box of dog supplies. The water bottle was put behind a box, but I don’t know if it mattered or not. Then I huddled inside the bathroom with the dog while my wife answered the door. I turned on the shower to hide the sound of the dog panting and walking around. Yoshi was happy to be in the bathroom and not get a bath.

I can’t imagine that we fooled anyone. Unless the exterminator thinks I drink from a dish and have problems that require diaper pads for the floor I’m guessing she could figure out that we had a pet. In that regard, the plan was probably pointless. We don’t know if she is required to tell the security guards something if she has to, or if the security guards even care about pets now that the warnings have been taken down.

It’s probably best that we did put Yoshi in the bathroom for the spraying, as he likes to sniff everything and everyone, and whatever this lady was putting down on the floors was not something we wanted him eating. Even if the exterminator didn’t care, we prevented her from having to fend of our dog’s curious nose.