::A Geek in Korea::

A few days ago, when we went out to work, we decided it was too hot to leave Yoshi out on the veranda like we normally do. Since the veranda gets direct sunlight most of the day, it heats up faster and stays hotter than the rest of the house. It was already scorching hot, and Yoshi would have been sitting out on that hot veranda all day. He likes to sleep on the cool tiles in the little shade he has, and we give him plenty of water. We also give him some ice if it gets really hot. Even those comforts weren’t enough.

We had few options. Either a “hot dog” when get got home, or bringing the dog to work to sit in the office. It was either that, or let him in the rest of the house for the day. No one could bring him to work, so we were going to have to “Yoshi-proof” the rest of the house.

Since Yoshi is trained to go to the bathroom on the veranda, we kept the sliding door open for him. His water and bathroom remain outside. We shut all the doors in the house and try to tuck away all the extension cords. Yoshi doesn’t chew shoes, but we put all of our extra slippers and shoes away, just in case. We also blocked off access to the garbage can, which he occasionally likes to sniff.

I was the first home when we left Yoshi to have free reign over the apartment. I personally expected a mess. The couch cover would be on the floor, Yoshi sitting as if a king on a throne (his normal posture). Instead, I got greeted with a few yaps as I opened the door, and a spotlessly clean house. No problems whatsoever.

Every time we’ve let Yoshi into the house with the bedroom, bathroom, and computer room blocked off, he’s caused no problems whatsoever. 90% of the time, if someone isn’t paying attention to him, he’s lounging on the couch. When my wife and I take a nap in our bedroom, he’s sleeping on the couch. If he has enough food and gets his walk, he’s very content to sleep there all afternoon it seems. I don’t blame him, it’s a really comfortable couch.

This is a great surprise to us, but we had gotten a good report about Yoshi’s behavior while we had been in Cambodia. We had left Yoshi in the care of a coworker, and she lives in a much smaller apartment. She slept on the floor, and Yoshi slept next to her on the blanket. When he was thirsty, or needed to go to the bathroom, he would go out to the veranda, do his thing, then return to her side. Yoshi also does this when I take a nap on the couch in our apartment.

It’s pretty cool to have a good dog. I wish he wouldn’t bark when the elevator opens or people walk by the door. Then we wouldn’t ever need to keep him on the veranda at all. We’re still trying.

My manager called a meeting for all the teachers. She had arranged standardized testing for the past two months. This happened during class time, which means the teachers get to hang out while the students run through some multiple choice tests we didn’t need to prepare. I was told they were using the information to decide who was going to be advancing in levels for the next great syllabus realignment scheduled to happen next month. (About the time I go on vacation.)

It turns out, they had taken earlier tests that had also been tabulated. The goal was to show the students making progress month to month. It turns out 95% of our students did better on the second set of testing.  My coworker and I waited till the director was out of the room, then searched the list for the names of students that had bombed and or stayed steady and wouldn’t be advancing with their classmates. One student did significantly worse, and a handful of students remained about the same. The student that bombed the test was one of my students.

She’s remarkable in the fact that no matter the help you give, she shows no signs of improvement. For example, today, during a dictation test, I wrote a difficult spelling word on the board for help. She still spelled it wrong every time. She has glasses, and was sitting in the first row. She’s just not very bright or doesn’t concentrate very hard. However, she is really nice to me and doesn’t annoy me, so I don’t mind.  One of her classmates, and her best friend in the class, showed no progress despite being very bright for her age. I was shocked. This might be an affect of goofing around too much with her in class.

All the students I thought were going to bomb had shown modest improvements. Several students shocked me with their rapid advancement. There was very little in the way of a reliable predictor as to who was going to better.

Anyway, my director was very happy with the test results. We are doing something right! Pretty soon the students are either going to be getting perfect scored on the tests, or we’ll have to move up to the next difficulty across the board. Still, it’s good that we can pull out some tests now and again to prove the students are moving in the right direction.

Truth be told, one of the reasons I’ve been interested in seeing movies at the theater again is because of Rifftrax. What’s the danger of seeing a complete bomb of a movie if there is almost a near certainty that it’ll end up being mocked by the old MST3k cast? When I went to see 300, I was kind of bored. I sat through it, but walking out of the movie I thought “Well, I’ll buy THAT when it hits Rifftrax“.

I was an early adopter when it came to Rifftrax. The first time I bought a movie commentary from them, they were still using Paypal to handle all their transactions. These days, you can pay with a credit card directly, or muddle around with Paypal services. This time, I decided to try to pay with my wife’s credit card. I had been using my own for a while, but I wanted to try something different so I could get a quicker confirmation of payment.

When I first went to try to buy the 300 rifftrax, the drop down menu for addresses listed “North Korea”, but not “South Korea”. I sent a note over to the tech support forum and they had the issue fixed in literally a few minutes. Now that I could actually tell them where I lived, I went on to the second step of the process.

I hadn’t used a Korean credit card to shop online before, so when I went to process the order for the Rifftrax, I hit a snag. My order didn’t process completely. I went to the forums for support again, and they told me it might have been a problem with my address. Since I had written the address in Korean, I decided to try again in English. Also, there were a few security measures I might have done incorrectly. After the fourth attempt, I was finally able to get to the download screen. Perhaps I should have kept up with using Paypal. At least I ended up with the mp3 file on the last try.

Anyway, my wife’s phone receives and update whenever we use her card. An hour later, we got an update. The processing was complete. We got one update. Then another. Then another. Then ANOTHER. Yes, we got billed for each time I had tried to purchase something, even though the item was made available until the very last attempt. My wife was unbelievably cool about it. She said since Rifftrax is so cheap per track ($2.99? For that much entertainment? Forget-about-it!) that she’s not worried. I dodged a bullet there. She did give me a good ribbing about it just the same.

Yet ANOTHER post in their tech support forum, and now they’re willing to either credit my account for some more downloads, or do a charge back for the amount I paid. Their responses are minutes after my postings, so even if I had a few problems for this download, as long as the refund/credit process goes well, I’ll be using it again when another riffable movie comes along that I have to see with the Rifftrax treatment.

Verdict: The 300 rifftrax was alright. They pointed out some of the absurdities of the movie, and there were a few good jokes, but there were a bit too many fart jokes, even for a Rifftrax commentary.

In preparation for our trip to Europe, the wife and I decided that this morning we needed to break in our hiking boots. We got ready for a trip to 수동골 (Sutongkol), which remains one of my favorite places to say. There is a bus that goes by our apartment that terminates it’s run through the city in the parking lot to the mountain. This way we didn’t need to hitch a ride with my relatives, and I could avoid having my heart explode while they run up the side of the mountain without taking a break. We did leave Yoshi behind, to avoid any threat of a fine this time though.

This particular mountain is part of the National Park service, but had much less development spent on making it a climbable, safe sort of experience. There is basically a “dead zone” around the trail where people walk up the mountain. Since there are no steps, scrambling up the mountain requires people to grab the nearest tree from time to time for support. There are snapped off limbs, exposed roots, and lots of erosion of the trail. Walking this mountain is taking your life in your hands on a rainy day, I’m sure.

We took a different path than last time, because we ended up descending only after a short period of time. There were a few places with guard ropes for a safety, but the trail was rough with lots of exposed rocks. We saw someone who had climbed the roughest, rockiest area of the mountain barefoot! He was ascending on the rough rocks as we were struggling past on the way down. Amazing.

We worked up a tremendous sweat on the way back down to the bus stop. When the air conditioned bus arrived we were very pleased. We returned to the house, walked Yoshi properly, then went back to our normal routine. While we shopped for food, we picked up a solar powered scale. We are both trying to lose some weight. We also need to make sure we don’t go over airline restrictions and get charged excessively with our bags. Some of the supplies we bought online for the trip also arrived today. Things are finally getting organized.

Ashley: Mm hmm.  Do a little housework and you can play for five
        minutes.
  Bart: No way.  [turns away, but has to turn back] Argh!  Yes, 'm.
Ashley: See, Lisa?  Males aren't hard to tame.  They all follow their...
        video cartridges.
         [swings it towards wall, Bart follows and smashes his nose]
  Bart: Ow.

Homer, Bad Man

My students in my last class were very uppity and excitable today because one of the students had successfully gotten his mother to buy him a Nintendo DS. I’ve had one going on three years now since the Japanese launch, but the Korean school childen haven’t really paid attention to the game device until the “Nintendo DS Lite” got an official release in Korea. Now that it’s advertised on Korean television and there are localized titles, it’s starting to really take off here.

Now, all my student envy my claim of having two units. Several of my students study for the express purpose of saving enough smile points from our reward system at school to eventually win the game system, which is a truly Herculean task. (Think winning a prize at Chuck E. Cheeze with Skee-ball tickets, only with more memorization and testing and less “Carny”.)

Since the student in the class had brought his new Nintendo DS lite with him, all the students were abuzz watching him play Super Mario Brothers 64 DS. I beat that game years ago and sold it back to the shop, but I offered some tips before class started.

During class, students kept clamoring on and on about buying a DS while I was trying to conduct a dictation test. They annoyed me so much because they couldn’t stop talking while the rest of the students shushed them repeatedly.

Finally, after class, I grabbed my own DS and challenged the newcomer to a game of “Grab the Star” in Mario 64. The download process on that game is a bit funky, so we had a problem setting up the game before they had to leave. The other students in the class that had a DS promised to bring it with them the next time we will study together on Monday.

I plan to use this as a reward system. If the students are good, I will bring my extensive game library for them to pay with me between classes. If they are bad, I will ban them from playing while I am in the school. The students in class have a deep, burning desire to play all games multiplayer, and this will be the first opportunity they, or I, have had to play with 3 or more players at the same time. I’m fine with kicking all their asses in download play, even if they don’t own the carts.

As much as I want the students to do well for their own well-being, I also want to have a reason to reward them for hard work. Since they are the last class in my day, if they do well, I’d be willing to stick around, but if they aren’t leaving won’t bring me to tears. It’s been a long time coming where the DS is common enough to see people on the street with it, but now that its time has arrived, I plan on enjoying it.

In my “must improvise” class today, I was fighting hard to come up with a project that would take the time needed to fill up the class. I scrounged up a sheet of unlabeled food related pictures, a few sticks of glue, scissors, and some paper.

We never, EVER do crafts or projects in the school. There isn’t any manner in which to do them easily. Yet today, I did the impossible and managed an art project that kept students busy and entertained.

Part of this was luck. The students in the class, besides the lazy boy, are self-motivated, driven children that love to show their creative ability with the language. I exploited this desire by making a more open ended assignment than they are used to completing.

I told them to take the food sheet and select foods from the different categories they would need to make a restaurant menu. They needed to choose a meat, vegetable, fruit, snack, and  drink. Which they chose, and how they arranged their menu was up to them. All it needed was a picture, a label and a “price” of some kind.

Students wanted to know the details. Could they fold their menus, or would it be okay to have it as a sign? What were they supposed to call the restaurant? I told them it was their restaurant, not mine. I told them that after they finished the menu, we would use it to “order” a meal, so if it didn’t look good, we wouldn’t eat at their location. They also got to set prices and whatnot. Some students went on to offer “set” items and illustrated their entire menu.

I went for a theme restaurant. I would combine any two foods on the menu to make something disgusting and monstrous. “Unhealthy Fat Man’s Restaurant” featured delicious menu items such as “donut pizza”, “fried cake with French fry candles”, “chocolate milk noodles”, and “honey pancakes” (which I would actually eat, truth be told). I had a lot of fun cutting out the pictures and modifying them to make nauseating food. The students kept trying to get me to one up myself too. They seemed to have standards about the food they would serve at their mock restaurants, so no one put “poo” on their menu.

For an entire class, they worked on getting the best menu to impress their classmates. They even asked to be allowed to bring the project home so they could have their mother’s help. I declared there would be a prize for the best menu in the class, and one boy said his mom was going to help him color the entire thing. Awesome.

I’ve developed a bit of a summer cold. This is due to a few reasons, but we’ve got a source for some better medical advice this time around.

Between the bouts of rain, it’s been very humid. We don’t have an air conditioner, so our fans keep us relatively cool in the day as long as we stay in front of them. The walk to the subway station is scorching, but the station itself is cool. The hot again, cool again weather, as well as the rapid cooling when I go to work and sit in the air conditioner all day means my body is always sweating or freezing.

Yoshi has been whining a lot in the mornings. He can’t be let out to walk a lot, so he wakes us up extra early. Sleepless, hot nights, then early morning classes. I haven’t had a good sleep since the morning intensive classes started back up this month.

Also, my healthy diet has been hard to keep with since my wife has been busy a lot of nights with late night art classes. Too much instant food, not enough home cooking. It messes with your help.

I can feel a cold coming on. I know what the symptoms will be in a few days. I’ve had the same raspy voice I always get, the headaches due to lack of sleep, the excess phlegm. Luckily for me, I had a day to rest due to Korean Independence Day. No school today meant I got to take a nap during the hottest part of the day and rest my voice.

We went over to the pharmacy that gave me the proper medicine last time I was sick. We didn’t bother visiting a doctor. I’d have to wait to get really sick, then show up and get over prescribed with lots extra strength medicine. I’d rather stop from getting sick and remove the need for the extra pills altogether.

The pharmacy we went to is near one of the poorer apartment complexes. I don’t know if he gives the same advice to everyone that stops by, but he’s told my wife a few times what foods compliment the medicines to help ease my symptoms. That sort of advice is really nice. He told me to take a rest today and eat lots of comfort foods. I guess I need energy to fight off the cold.  Sit around and eat food? Take a rest? Well, if you insist!

Tomorrow is going to be an extra busy day. Several of my students are going abroad to study next week, and they are trying to squeeze in several more cram classes on essay writing and debate with me. I think I got enough rest today to show up without being a drug addled zombie.

Last week, I talked about the boy that “got my goat” by being annoying and dismissive about his English work. Today was my first day to turn the tables on the boy and show him that his annoying ways weren’t going to work with me any more.

Due to a major paperwork mistake, I found out that the class this annoying boy was in was going to be finishing their work far earlier than I had anticipated. I still have five classes this month to fill, but I only have a few pages left in the book to work with. Today, I had to be creative.

I made a page with several different questions I took from our book. I asked the questions in different tenses, or asked subtly different things. The students had to go through and pick out the differences between the questions, and how it affected their answer. It turns out they hadn’t learned the past tense before, but by looking at the patterns I included, they deciphered the proper response on their own. Way to go, smart kids!

Of course the students that tried were able to do it. That really is all that distinguishes a good student from a poor one. The little effort they put forth. The lazy boy wanted me read the questions to him and basically do his work for him. He said he couldn’t read. I’ve SEEN him read. He’s got some of the best reading skill in the school for his age. Unless he went blind, or forgot how, this was a lie.

I told him it was his paper, and while I’d answer any of his questions, he was responsible for reading and writing his answers. He refused to lift his pencil. When other students tried to explain the work, he huffed, sighed, and rolled his eyes. No one but the teacher was supposed to help him, and he wanted my full attention for the entire class.

After all the students, except the lazy boy, finished their work, I told them to pair up and get ready to play a game. I had printed out a picture based board game. They would use the sentences they had just made as a way to ask students questions about the food tiles they would land on. If they landed on a square with a carrot, they would ask, “What’s your favorite vegetable?” and the person would respond, “I like carrots.” They could also use other, more complicated questions from the sheet to try to stump their friends to make them have to move back places as well.

Our school has no dice. I had to improvise. I grabbed a piece of paper and a few paper clips. I drew a series of circles on the blank paper covering it completely, then filled them in with different numbers. When the students tossed the paper clip down, they got the number they had to move on the board game. This was as good as dice. I’ll do this from now in a pinch.

The girls in the class asked if they could play together instead of being paired with one of the two remaining boys. “Of course! That would be fine,” I replied. The girls were so happy they posed no problem for the rest of the class. They were drilling each other’s English and using the different expressions perfectly by the end of the exercise.

The lazy boy and his hyperactive classmate remained. I told the lazy boy he could join our game as soon as he got his question paper finished properly, and that he should ask me any questions he wanted. I then turned around and joined the only student without a partner and started playing the game.

The lazy boy was shocked that he hadn’t derailed the other student’s plans, and was very dejected to see that everyone else was having fun while he was stuck doing the work. Since the other students had worked together to get the question sheet done and accepted my help, they could have fun with the game. Because he hadn’t accepted anyone’s help, he was now alone. Everyone was having fun, and forget about the downer in the corner sulking to himself.

The class went so well, I actually forgot to check to see what, if any, progress the lazy boy had made by the end of the class on his question sheet. I know he can read. When he takes homework home, he comes back with it mostly correct. If I thought he wasn’t capable of doing the work if he really tried, I would have been more inclusive. Trying to snub out his poor effort is what this lesson was about.

The boys and girls that got to play the game had so much fun they asked to take a copy of the board game home to play. I think my first lesson getting the better of the boy was a roaring success judging by the laughter my students were having.

I didn’t even have to try hard to come up with a way to punish his poor effort. The structure of the class came naturally, and the way the students worked together was perfect. Had other students had the same bad attitude, it could have been a disaster. Luckily, the other students in the class are actually excited about learning English. This helps a great deal.

The “New” Seven Wonders of the World have been chosen by people all over the world. Since I haven’t been to all of them (yet), I’ll pick my own “Seven Wonders of the World”. This list will only count places I’ve been. One of the reasons for this is to get things down on paper so I can revisit this AFTER I’ve toured Western Europe. I will then likely update the list to reflect the things I’ve seen that change my mind.

Without further ado, I present MY personal list of the Seven Wonders of the World that I’ve visited:

1. The Great Wall of China- (Visited in 2006) Okay, so I’m cheating a little bit. This is already ON the “Wonders of the World” lists. It’s still awe inspiring and mind boggling. I saw one tiny sliver of this HUGE monument to xenophobia, but it’s just too incredible to leave off the list, even if it’s hardly a new thing to rave about.

2. Angkor Wat (Visited in 2007) The ONLY reason this isn’t on everyone’s list like other entries is because Cambodia hasn’t been free and independent long enough for tourists to discover this beautiful, wonderful place. It’s still an undiscovered treasure to most of the world. Really spectacular.

3. The Forbidden City (Visited in 2006) China, again. This palace complex is ginormous. Even if we didn’t have much time to explore, and everything was being explained by a Korean tour guide, the sheer scope and enormity of this enclosed city was impressive.

4. The Glaciers and Mountains of Alaska (Distant Childhood memory) This isn’t the first vacation I’ve been on, but it’s one of the most memorable. 6 weeks in a RV with my family, touring numerous sites in the distant wilderness. Being able to listen to a single radio station between cities was a treat! This is some of the most beautiful scenery in America, and it won’t last long before it’s exploited and ruined. See it while you can!

5. Bulguksa (Visited in 2003, 2005) This is a place I went with my parents to show them the beautiful architecture of Korean temples. It is my favorite temple in Korea to visit, especially in the winter when there are no crowds. It can’t hold a candle to The Forbidden City in scale, but it’s still very impressive.

6. The Subways of Tokyo- (Visited in 2003) It’s the only modern location on the list. This is one of the few places in the world so utterly bewildering that you feel like an ant trapped in a cruel maze. I rarely get so hopelessly lost that I have no clue how to get out of a structure, but I literally had no idea how to “escape” from the masses of tunnels, stairs, and gates that required tickets. Some kind Japanese person finally rescued me and pointed me in the right direction. If it wasn’t for that, I might STILL be wandering around in there.

7. Fjords of Norway- (Visited in 2004) Talk about an impressive geologic feature? These HUGE features carved by glacial ice, and these tiny, isolated houses in the middle of nowhere only accessible by ferry.

A couple that we are good friends with had their first baby girl. We were very lucky, as they live in Seoul, but came to Daejeon to have their baby. It turns out the hospital they chose was behind the apartment I lived at two years ago! It’s very odd. The last time I saw this couple, it turns out the woman was a few weeks pregnant but had no idea. Now we’ve skipped through the entire pregnancy and they’ve already got the baby delivered!

We saw the baby today. It had been delivered yesterday. She’s a healthy baby girl, but doesn’t have a name yet. A long time ago in Korea, parents of newborns asked their paternal parents (the new grandparents) to name the children.

This can be a bad thing. I knew a student with a name that made Koreans burst out laughing. His name was “Cheon Won”, which means “1000 Won”, as in, the smallest denomination bill available in Korea. Imagine naming your kid “One Dollar” or whatever handy denomination you have in your pocket at the moment. What an awful name. When I asked the mother why he was named this chuckle worthy name, she grumbled that it was her husband’s parents choice.

There are plenty of terrible Korean names when written into English as well. The syllables “Suk”, “Bum”, and “Dong” are far, far, FAR too common in parent’s naming choices judging by my class rosters. Whenever a name invokes images of sodomy in another language, it’s probably a bad name. (I throw that ‘probably’ in there only to be culturally tolerant of non-English speaking parents not knowing what they are getting into sometimes.)

Nowadays, parents can name their children too, it’s no longer an expected tradition between generations. However, this couple has let the grandparents choose a name. Right now they aren’t sure if the name the parents chose is what they are going to stick with. I don’t know what their objection with the name was, or if it was simply they hadn’t decided on anything due to a lack of sleep.

As of now, it’s up in the air as to what the baby will be called. It’s not actually a problem in Korean anyway, as people don’t address each other with names unless they have to for some specific reason. They use titles most of the time. For now, it’s just “baby”.