Me, as a Simpsons character. Made here, at the official movie website. I haven’t watched the Simpsons, apart from the DVD box set of the brilliant season 7, for years. I’ll go see the movie as a final farewell to the series when it comes to Korea.
I came in an hour early to work to have a meeting with my director. We’ll be talking about books, schedules, new contracts, that sort of thing. I was there plenty early, but she was having a meeting with Korean teachers at the time, so I wasn’t able to take advantage of my arrival.
Right as their meeting adjourned and I was about to go have my meeting, a girl walked out of the restroom wailing like a banshee. 99% of the time when someone cries, it’s more to get attention than for actual injury. The girl had her hand pressed to her forehead, and continued to cry. She hadn’t fallen or ran. Why was she so upset.
The director went to the girl. There was a puddle of blood in the girl’s hand, and she had started dripping onto the floor. Immediately all the younger students crowded around the girl. “Why are you crying? Why are you bleeding? What…what… what?!”
The director took the girl back into the bathroom while I diverted the crowds attention. The girl was hurt seriously. The last thing she needed was twenty annoying students asking her about her trauma. From what we could gather over the girls sobs, she cut her head on the wall next to the door. She just…ran into the wall with her forehead?
I didn’t take a close look at the time, but on inspecting the boy’s restroom, the only thing slightly head piercing on the wall would have been the towel rack. She smacked her head on the towel rack and peeled off some forehead. Ouch.
Instead of having the meeting, the director took the girl to the hospital. There is usually a lot of horseplay before school starts, but the students actually listened to us this time when we told them to keep it under control. Students that asked about the injury to the remaining teachers didn’t get any serious answers from us. We wanted to keep their minds off a bleeding classmate.
Luckily, the girl didn’t need any stitches, but she was badly shaken up and went home without studying. I rescheduled the meeting for later in the week. It should go as planned as long as everyone in the school is in one piece.
I teach my director’s son in an exclusive class for students that have returned from international schools abroad. It’s just him and one other girl from his school that come for special afternoon classes. I’ve becoming the Internet Based Testing guru around the school, so we wade through the 800+ page books with tips on how to score higher on this monstrous test.
Today we were going over “Paired choice responses” for the speaking part of the test. These are “you only have two ridiculous choices, which one is better? Why? Support it.” These questions are free, in that you can respond in any way you want to support your choice, but you should weigh in and choose a side. I’ve done some of these questions with other students before, and they tend to be a lot of fun.
The question that got everyone talking in class was, “Which would you choose, love or money.” The students had 15 seconds to prepare, then had to speak for 45 seconds on the topic. This doesn’t give a chance for a deep reflection on the topic. Instead, students must make a snap judgment and support it the best they can.
The girl in the class chose money (like every other girl I’ve ever taught), but said that if she could be happiest, she’d have to consider love too. We went over the “error of omission”, and how to segue from each of her paragraphs of support. It was a fine speech.
The boy went next. He said he would also choose money. His reasoning was that if he had enough money, he could have a house, a car, and everything else he needed. Then he would simply “buy someone” to marry him. He wouldn’t have to worry about anything.
I told him that “buying” people is a disgusting thing to do. People aren’t supposed to look at people as being “for sale”. What I thought he meant was that it would be easier to get married if he had a lot of wealth.
He meant that he’d simply get a foreign bride, and all that required was money. If he was married, he would have love too. How were they not for sale? He has a point. People in rural areas do that here.
I told him that if he really was only marrying someone he had “purchased”, it’s very likely he wouldn’t find love. People can marry for money and get a chunk of your cash. He learned the word “gold digger” and the girl in the class tried to explain why purchasing people doesn’t exactly endear yourself to a potential bride.
After class, I went out to speak to his mother. I asked her what she thought about his answer. She was shocked to hear his response. She said, “I want a Korean daughter in law! No! Don’t buy a foreign bride!”
The boy was extremely embarrassed, “Why’d you have to tell my Mom?!”
Despite our back packer ways, we haven’t actually bought any bags for our trip to Europe. Now, we’re looking for new gear to bring with us specifically for this trip.
Our last vacation in Cambodia, we brought my old bag and shared space. I had brought it to Europe before, but it’s more of a suitcase that happens to have back pack straps than an actual bag practically speaking. The old bag had rollers for airports, but the heavy supports for an extending handle caused it to be cumbersome for extended trips. It tried to be two things, yet failed at both, because the handle was long enough to be tugged around, but short enough to cause me to smack the back of my foot when I walked. It much too heavy to carry comfortably on my back for long too.
We need new bags. We went to an outdoors store I had found earlier in the week. I had done my best to try to explain the requirements of our trip to the owner on a previous trip. The gentleman at the store pointed me to some quality bags. Excellent, and very expensive, as they are all foreign made European bags shipped into Korea.
We looked around the store. The owner recommended some shoes, but nothing was in my size. I don’t have excessively large feet for someone my height. I’m just outside the Korean bell curve. Clerks usually gasp when I tell them my shoe size and shake their heads. Oh well, I’ll find something eventually if we go to Seoul.
We also need rain jackets and other “supplies” for our trip. The jacket prices were incredibly high! I had no idea a good jacket would cost that much. In total, if we went “top end” and bought everything we were looking at, we would have spent as much on gear as the plane tickets to get to Europe in the first place!
Eventually we’ll end up going to Seoul to see the mountaineering and travel gear neighborhood’s prices. I’ll probably be able to find the right shoes too. Then we can haul everything back to Daejeon as our first test of readiness for the trip. I’m terribly excited to buy all our gear. It’s only when the bags are sitting ready to be packed that I get serious about traveling.
I went to my local game shop. There was a crowd around the display, and someone was rocking out to American classic rock. This could only mean one thing: Guitar Hero had arrived in Korea. This is the first encounter I’d ever had with Guitar Hero. I watched a beginner strum out the Toadies.
I was tapping my feet along to the tune, but it was clear it was new to the person with the guitar shaped controller. While rocking out to classic rock tunes seems like a lot of fun, I’m not about to drop the cash for an X-box 360 with special controller for one game. If my Playstation2 still worked, maybe. (Scowls)
There is an alternative, if you don’t mind looking a little goofy. Frets on Fire is a Guitar Hero clone for the PC. It even runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac! While it doesn’t come with a cool guitar controller, it would work if you used an adapter and plugged in one on the PC. Normally you simply take your keyboard and use the F1-F5 keys, with the Enter key acting as a “pick” for the string.
Yes, it’s exceedingly dorky to use a keyboard as a guitar, however, Frets on Fire does have an advantage over Guitar Hero. You can download music and create your own “tabs” or the key presses that the game uses. Thus, if you wanted to import your own music into Frets on Fire, it would be possible! That’s really cool! There are also modifications available that let you change the backgrounds and the game mechanics.
There are music “packs” available where people have created the tracks for popular artists already available too. I haven’t done anything except play with the free tracks available with the game though. I’ve got carpal tunnel already trying to bend my arms and trying to use all five keys at the proper time. Game setup is an breeze in Ubuntu. Download and run. There is no .deb package available however that I could find.
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yhn_TDc1zk[/video]
There are a ton of videos available at video sites that show how cool both Guitar Hero and Frets on Fire are when played by guitar or keyboard gods.
I gave the game a few tries, but I’m hopelessly bad at it. Still, it’s a really fun concept, and another proof that there are games for Linux that people might want to check out.
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X76ZIGQgBWg[/video]
Those people at Samsung have a lot of time on their hands at their “rallies”. Awesome.
My wife pilfers kimchi whenever we visit relatives houses. Of course, it’s not technically pilfering when they offer it to us, but when we go to relatives houses specifically because we might be offered some fantastic side dishes cooked by the hosts, it’s nearly the same thing.
Last week, we got some spicy tofu, sweet fish jerky with peanuts, and some yul-mu kimchi (turnip leaf kimchi). Yul-mu kimchi is now my new favorite summer kimchi. We got a bag with the red soupy spice that contain the crunchy green leaves in a plastic bag. When we got back to the house, we transferred this into our own personal containers and refrigerated our new food stocks.
We don’t own a kimchi refrigerator, but I now understand why it’s something of a necessity for a well supplied kimchi household. The smell of really potent fermented vegetables has penetrated our refrigerator completely. Opening the refrigerator anywhere in the house will spread the smell across every room. None of the containers have been found faulty or leaking. It’s just an overwhelming funk that rolls out of the fridge these days.
I like kimchi, but it’s something that has a distinct smell that puts you in a mood to eat Korean food. When I have a craving for ice cream, or want to eat some yogurt, smelling some spicy fermented leaves really throws my senses for a loop. Some smells just don’t mix well.
The solution to the problem is either eating all the kimchi as fast as possible, replacing all the containers and cleaning out the refrigerator, doubling or tripling the baking soda inside, or simply buying a kimchi refrigerator designed to mitigate this sort of problem.
I’m awfully lazy, but until we start making our own kimchi and have these problems, I’ll probably delay putting off that big purchase for a while.
I have about twenty to thirty minutes every day spent with Yoshi walking him around the apartment complex and the nearby park. I normally spend this listening to podcasts from various sources organized through podcastready. I’m up to about twenty podcasts now, some daily, some weekly, all of them very interesting and entertaining.
While I tried out Librivox for free classical work, I found the recording quality highly variable at times. It was fantastic for finding old classical works, but sometimes it was difficult to listen to the people recording them. I wanted a more professional sounding set of books.
I stumbled upon Podiobooks around the same time, and while I found a few novels that sounded promising, I never made the dive and started listening to them. Sometime two weeks ago, I had finished all my podcasts for the day and wanted something to bring with me to work. I decided to download one of the books, Earthcore. It had been the most downloaded book at the time, and it was also the highest rated.
While there were good free classic audiobooks at Librivox, there were new novels from new writers at Podiobooks. I just had to find a few books I liked. Since they were free, what was it going to hurt to give a few books a try?
Immediately upon listening to the first installment of Earthcore, I knew I had made a good decision. The quality of the production was leaps and bounds better than most of Librivox. The story was interesting too. I was hooked.
I listened to Earthcore for the past two weeks, only finishing it last night as I came home from work. Upon completion, I found Heaven, another book I’m totally digging. This book is part of a series, and the third book isn’t even finished being recorded yet.
It’s not like I’m going to run out of material waiting for the Heaven series to be completed though. Every day I don’t listen to my daily news podcasts, my backlog grows. I’ve got a week or more of podcasts I need to catch up on. I’ll need to go exceedingly far out of my way walking my dog to ever get caught up on all of this new, free, professionally produced material on my mp3 player. This is exactly the sort of thing that keeps my mp3 player in my ears whenever I step outside on my own. I’ve always got something interesting to listen to instead of endlessly tracking down new music. This stuff comes to me instead. I’m totally gaga for this, as stimulating English language listening material outside of television or bar talk is at a minimum here. I just hope I don’t drown.
When I arrived at school today, I saw my director cleaning and preparing one of the storage rooms. The room had been covered in junk from around the school since the remodeling a few weeks ago. They were picking things up and organizing them for the first time. Over time, all the extra crap started getting handed out to students.
In my first class, my students all had balloons. Someone had put the balloon hand pump and balloon ties and sticks in one of the classrooms. The students had formed a line and were filling up balloons for each other. The earliest classes are the youngest students, so the children were overjoyed at getting balloons. They ran around the school hitting each other with balloons.
I have a hard enough time trying to control some of the students. Adding in balloons they can hit people with, or balloons to chew on means I’ve got more problems. Some students simply can’t handle anything more than sitting in a chair. Any stimulations beyond this sends them whirling out of control. Colorful balloons didn’t help me one bit.
The next hour of classes, I started teaching before I realized every student had oversize adjustable visors. All of the students were fiddling with the different Velcro settings and setting the visors on their head in different configurations. Oh boy, Velcro! That’s one of those pleasant sounds I never get tired of hearing all class! I told students to keep their focus on the books, not their headgear.
Since there was some value in snagging a visor, some of the girls in a class I used to teach took far more than their share. Other students complained, and soon there was a collection of extra visors. We were only to hand out the visors from the teacher’s room, and only one per student. As if I have time for worrying about who had a visor between classes.
The last new innovation for today was the installation of a cocoa and hot drinks machine in the school. What’s the best way to keep students studying? Pump them with super hot chocolate and sugar! Hot drinks in a classroom? Oh, scalding temperatures will just keep students on their feet as they run around the school. They’ll only bump into someone with a hot drink a few times before they learn. Mind the mess and try not to slip!
The machine is only 100 won, so children can afford several drinks between classes. Their pea sized bladders won’t hold such drinks for long! It’s best to let them out of class so they can run to the bathroom, careful to avoid the spills on the floor, and grab some more hot vending machine smack.
The more organized this school gets, the worse off I seem to be.
Two weeks ago, during my last class with my high level students, I promised them a game of Petals around the Rose. It must have made a bit of an impression with them, as they remembered it after their “Noodle Apple Tests“. They asked me to show them the game after we had completed their studies for the day.
I had been carrying some dice for the past two weeks for this express purpose, but had forgotten completely about the promise. I got the dice out of my bag and did my “Petals around the Rose” warm up activities. I wrote the words on the board, made sure the students understood the translation, then got down to throwing the dice.
One of the girls in the class is extremely sharp. She cracked another thought puzzle of similar difficulty in a manner of minutes. She was the first to figure out the game. Another boy followed quickly after. The slowest boy only took ten minutes, which is extremely remarkable. Previous years, students would take over a hour spread out over multiple classes. These kids are very smart.
My foreign coworker had never played the game before, so I introduced him to it as well. My students all circled around the box where we rolled dice. Every time he made a wild guess, they grinned and told him the correct answer. I didn’t let them reveal how to solve the problem, and they relished the opportunity to have one up on a fellow teacher.
I told my director I was extremely impressed with how bright the students in the class were. I might do the game in a few of my other upper level classes to see how well they fare. Some of the students in the class told me they’d find an excellent puzzle for me to solve our next class. If that gets them thinking and speaking English, I’m fine with any spare minutes it takes.
