::A Geek in Korea::

We went to the poker night as planned. We arrived early and chatted with the host while the other couple were set to arrive. We had a nice conversation about the day to day things only people that have been in Korea a long time have to deal with on a regular basis.

It’s really nice to know a few people that have gone through the same things you have and are still around to tell the tale. I’ve been here a long time, but I’m still surprised when people stick around. I’ve gotten so used to seeing new faces all the time that it’s not often I make the effort to meet people. They are usually gone so fast that keeping up is harder work. I guess that makes me lazy.

We introduced the other players to the game of “GOPS” as a warm up to the poker game. This is the same game I taught my parents, some students, as well as my wife. In all cases, everyone that’s played it has loved it. It’s simple to set up. The rules are brilliant and easy. There is no luck involved, and you need to think about cards and the other players. It’s simple enough that anyone can play it, and the dynamic changes from round to round. It’s pretty much the perfect simple card game.

The rules to poker seem clunky and cumbersome in comparison. Learning the rules, and sorting out all the variations of the rules seems like a huge hassle. We played with two cards in your hand, five on the table, big and small blinds. There was checking. Raising. Bluffing. Folding. Lying. Dealing. I can certainly understand why it is a fun game, with an element of chance and some greed getting the better of people, but it’s not for me.

My wife didn’t understand the rules and didn’t want to put up the money to play. She watched, completely baffled as to what was going on. I was pretty mesmerized too, but got cleaned out pretty quickly. The other players admitted to playing a lot of poker in the past, so that’s no surprise.

Next weekend I’ll be playing a card game of another kind: Magic the Gathering. Some people have brought over cards from the States to share. There is a pool of cards, and you make decks and play casually. No one “owns” the cards, and I’ll give back the deck I make after the game’s over. I haven’t played Magic since freshman year of college. I’ve actively avoided it, as it’s a huge money sink. It’s the same reason I refuse to play MMORPGs. To be competitive, you have to spend the most time and money. It very rarely depends on skill. That’s the opposite of fun.

However, the “casual” pool of cards, and the relaxed nature of previous games leads me to believe this will not turn into a situation where I am pressured to spend money to have fun. At least I hope so. Even though poker is a popular gambling game, I’m much more likely to lose cash playing Magic.

I got invited to a “Poker Night” with some foreigners. I’ve never played cards for money before. The extent of my poker experience was when my parents, my wife, and myself went to a casino while we were all in the USA. I lost twenty dollars playing video poker, got sick of inhaling smoke, and eventually went home. I don’t get why it’s so popular.

Theoretically, I shouldn’t lose my house or anything. We shall see.

…in the Mist.

HOLY CRAP. That movie has an ending worth watching. Do yourself a favor and watch this movie if you haven’t been spoiled for the ending yet. WOW. I haven’t been to a nail biter like this in the theaters since “The Others“.

The problem with going to Costco is the large portions. While stocking up on “known” items is great, rolling the dice on something new is always dangerous. You might find something you like, but if you guess wrong, you are stuck with a lot of something you don’t like.

I rolled the dice and bought some “Sensible Portions All Wheat Crisps“. I’m not a fan of potato chips by and large, so I’m willing to try more than a few snacks to find something to crunch on.  The way that “Sensible portions” was highlighted made me think that this was being touted as a diet alternative. Why not give it a try?

The package had a few things to make me weary. They had “All Natural” mentioned on the package, which seems impossible because the package I picked up had neon orange “cheese” flavoring. It was also “gourmet”, which when combined with “diet food” means comes across as, “It’s not our fault if you think it tastes like crap. You have inferior taste buds.” Also, with the word “crisps” instead of chips, you get something baked, not fried, and also potentially British. That should have been the final warning.

I went ahead and paid the 10,000 won for this bag of crisps, hoping it would be good. I opened the package at home with Yoshi on my lap. After the first bite, I was resigned to eating a bag of crappy, overpriced pieces of packing foam for a month.

We never let Yoshi have “people” food, so whenever he gets a taste, like when we mix his medicine with yogurt, he goes crazy for it. Yoshi will hear you open a yogurt container and come running, thinking he’ll get to lick it clean. One of the crisps fell on my leg. Yoshi snapped it up and began to chew. Instead of trying to sniff out the source of the crisps to get more, he flopped over and looked up at me as if to say, “Man, my dog food is better than that.”

I told my wife that we’ve got a lot of crisps to work through, and I certainly wasn’t going to eat them alone. She promised to try some. Today she told me that when she opened the bag, Yoshi got an excited look on his face. The sound of crumpling plastic means “lunch” to Yoshi when we are home. He took one look at the snack crisp in her hand, gave a discontented sigh, and went back to sleep. He wasn’t even interested in trying to snag a crumb from her if he could.

My wife agrees that these crisps are a nasty snack. We’ve doggedly decided not to throw them out, but to complete the entire bag as a penance for being suckers. Still, you know it’s bad when even a dog won’t eat it.

The CRT monitor at work is a large boxy relic. The computer itself is functional for email and document creation, but the monitor is a relic. The screen is offset to one side, preventing you from seeing scroll bars. The buttons on the front of the monitor are broken, so you can’t realign, readjust, or change anything. It also produces an EXTREMELY high pitched whine that annoys me all day.

My desk is closest to the computer. I have to sit and listen to this dog whistle like whine. I can make the sound stop briefly by smacking the side of the monitor like Fonzie. The foreign coworker in the room can’t hear it, so he thinks I’m crazy for smacking the monitor a dozen times a day.

My coworker is around ten years older than me. The secretary, director, and accountant for the school all are unable to hear this sound either because they are older than him. My two younger Korean coworkers are busy on the phone, talking to parents most of the day. When the school is quiet, they said they can also hear it, but a quiet school is the exception, not the rule.

I asked several children to come into the office and verify that I’m not the only one that can hear this noise when there are students running around the school. 90% of the students polled could hear a high pitched sound when they listened for it. When I smacked the monitor they agreed the sound had gone away. They don’t spend enough time in the office to notice it, but once you “hear” it, you notice it right away.

I asked the director if there was any way to switch out the monitor, or to buy a new one for the office since it was driving me crazy listening to it all day. It doesn’t even have to be a nice monitor, just quiet.

You can’t teach a class about toy bears without talking about Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt. The reason toy bears are called “Teddy Bears” is because Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear tied to a tree. According to our textbook, that is why the toys got named after “Teddy”. The book uses this as a way to introduce abbreviations. “Teddy” is short for Theodore.

I told my students that the name they call me wasn’t actually my given name. They were in complete shock, as if I had been living a double life the entire time I had been working at the school. I told them I had abbreviated my name, and not only that, had a middle name I never used. They were fascinated by the idea of having a name you don’t need. Why was it there? Who knew it? Did everyone in the United States have one? Why?

I explained that I don’t like my full name because I never used it as a child, and my middle name is just not something I really think about as part of my “name” at all. I literally only use it when filling out papers at immigration or for my governmental documentation. I don’t care enough to change my name, but I don’t use it in any social context what so ever.

Several of my students have recently changed their English names. This is something teachers discourage, as parents can get annoyed and confused by it, teachers have enough names to learn already, and it’s usually done in waves. If you let one person do it, everyone does. I’d like to review the names my students proposed, and explain why I like, or dislike the names suggested:

One girl changed her English name from “Amy” to “Ally”. This is the kind of name change I support. They start with the same letter. Ally is more unique, as we have other “Amy” students. It still suits her character. I told her I’d call her “Amy” by accident for a while, but I was fine writing down a different name on her papers from now on.

Another girl wanted to go from Ann to “Jenny”. This gets a solid two thumbs down from me. While my current school has several “Ann” variants, the name “Jenny” is by FAR the most common English name in my school ever. If a girl starts the school without an English name, she’ll pick Jenny 9 times out of 10. Jenny is the name students default to for whatever reason.

The last student that tried to change his name was an exceptionally noisy boy named “Tom” who proposed many different names in the past few days.

He made the mistake of trying to go to the bathroom yesterday by saying, “Teacher, Me Toilet”. I called him “Toilet” for the rest of the day. This is my well worn shtick for getting people to ask permission with the words, “May I,” before a request. If I didn’t do it, they’d never learn.

Today, he asked if he could change his name to something other than “Tom”. I wanted to see what he would suggest as a name before I agreed. He said, “Stone Cold Steve Austin”. He wanted to go by “Austin”. That name is fine, but he wanted it because a wrestler had it. That makes it off limits in my book. I discourage all pro wrestling enthusiasm in the exact same way. Cruelty. I would allow him to change his name to a wrestling theme, but only if his new name was “Man in Panties”.

(Editorial note: Ultimately this is what Pro Wrestling boils down to. Men in silly underwear hitting each other. As soon as you can acknowledge this, the sooner you can move past it.)

He said he would accept the title of “Magic Panty Man” as a compromise.

(Cultural Note: Huggies Diapers runs an advertisement in Korea for “Magic Panties” which he was quoting, so he really wanted to be called “Diaper Man”. Yes, it’s far weirder and disturbing than you first imagined.)

We gave “Magic Panty Man” that a test run for today, but I don’t think it will stick. It’s too long a title, and no one else will use it as a title when talking to him. I kept with it, but no one else was going along with the change. By the end of the class, he was completely enamored with the idea of having a middle name too. He told me I could call him “Tom Jerry Lincoln.”

The “Tom” and “Jerry” part I understand, but why did he pick “Lincoln” as his last name? That’s so random.

A deranged madman (myself) tried to upgrade Wordpress only to fail spectacularly. Only through the patience of a complete tech guru were we able to save the website. Sorry for that unplanned little outage. The forum should also be up and operational.

The process of getting the website reconstructed and running is an ongoing one, but in the future it should be easier to prevent such outages. If anything is completely broken, send an email or add it to the comments.

If I’m really lucky, nothing else breaks. For now.

Once again, I spend a Saturday totally geeked out on the couch. Ever since I beat Paper Mario on the Virtual Console, I had been itching to download a few new classic console games to play. The unfortunate thing was the Wii Shop absolutely refused to cooperate. From Christmas to New Years, whenever I would try to connect to the Wii store, it gave me an error stating their servers are too busy, try again later. I would try again every few days, and get shut out over and over. I think Nintendo underestimated the demand on their services just a bit.

Today, I decided I’d give it another go. I connected to the Internet with no problems, but the Nintendo store refused to connect. Knowing it was on their end, not mine, I just reset the software and tried for a solid fifteen minutes or so to connect. I had no luck, so I went off to walk the dog and do some dishes. I tried again a little later, and still had no luck connecting.

Damn you Nintendo. You have my Wii Points, LET ME SPEND THEM!

Totally convinced I’d never get in today, I tried one last time. I tried connecting to the store, walked away to use the bathroom, and heard the Wii Shop music start up. Success. A watched store never connects apparently. Worried I wouldn’t get another chance to connect for a long time if this problem persists, I decided to go on a binge and snap up a few games to last me a while (Read: Until Brawl.). I’ve still got points to spend if something good comes out later, but now I have a few more games to keep me busy.

Current Wii Virtual Console Games:
Super Mario Brothers 3: (Level 4 kicks my ass)
Gunstar Heroes: (Every level kicks my ass)
Paper Mario: (I beat this. Actually, I kicked it’s ass. Huzzah!)

My new games today:
Kirby’s Adventure: (I’ve beaten this before on the old school Gameboy, and I’ll beat it again. It’s held up so well for a late generation NES game.)
Starfox 64: (”How do I barrel roll? Oh, now I’ve got to save Slippy, wait, what does this button do? Who’s shooting me? Argh, I died!” Holy crap this game is COMPLICATED!)
Super Metroid: (This is a classic. I’ve played the sequels, beaten some of the GBA games, but needed to play the game people were always talking about in middle school.)

Not to be satisfied spending my time trying to download old games, I also watched the documentary “The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters” This is one of the funniest documentaries I’ve ever seen. It reminds me a LOT of Trekkies but is better due to the subject matter. The King of Kong is a journey into the world of competitive classic arcade gaming. People involved in this documentary treats it as the most serious thing ever accomplished by mankind. I laugh at how ridiculous the entire premise of the documentary is, but it’s a good movie.

A challenger to the Donkey Kong high score fights his way to the top to challenge this megalomaniac who was holding onto his last record of past glory. Both of the figures in the movie are sad in their own ways. One guy is holding onto the glory of his youth as he watches his records fall before him. He clearly questions his worth and will do ANYTHING to hold onto the record. Even cheating it that’s what it would take. The other is a man that’s been dealt such a long string of bad luck in his life that his high score in Donkey Kong is the only thing pushing him forward in life. He’s just a guy that wanted to get into a record book to prove that even though he didn’t have a job at the time, he could still accomplish something worthy of worldwide attention. Even as you see the game taking a toll on his life and family, you can’t help but root for him.

As the documentary plays out, you see the depths of social awkwardness and idol worship that play out in this scene. People really take something like a score in Donkey Kong seriously. I never really got into that side of gaming. I’m a gamer, and I can recognize when I’m really “into” a game. However, I’ve never, ever, approached the single minded focus and obsession these people have for their game. They play this game for HOURS to beat scores when a single mistake means defeat. I would never want to make such a sacrifice of my time, and ultimately, I don’t care that much about a score, even if it is for a record book. I’m not, and never hope to be, a competitive gamer. If it’s not fun, I’m not going to play.

In my “All things winter worksheet related” quest to raid more of Boggle’s World of their materials, I stumbled upon another gem of a worksheet. This one is like a structured brain storming activity that takes place on a theme of “Winter”. The idea is that you link snowflakes with related words. I increased the challenge for some of my upper level students by stating that all the words had to logically follow from their parent snowflake, and that their child snowflakes had to logically derive as a subset of their parent.

If you started at the center “Winter” and then wrote “Activities”, you could connect “Sports” as well as “Studying”. “Sports” would be then “Winter Sports”, so you’d put “Ice Skating” as a child. Then as a child of “Ice Skating”, you could have either tricks, or equipment for ice skating. Whatever. The idea was for students to link words and ideas together in a logical progression.

The challenge was that some ideas needed to be stretched to fit the dimensions of the board, and they had to flow from each other so that they didn’t choke each other off. It was interesting to watch someone try to fill up a distant corner with a web of ideas. Some of the more advanced students could snake a word chain around the entire half of the paper. No two papers were the same, and they were more like Rorschach tests than cohesive ideas as the words began to finger into smaller ideas and more specific vocabulary.

Seeing what words students would associate with each other, and how lines would collapse back to themes like “Food” or “Homework” would probably tell people what is on a student’s mind most of the time. This is a better activity for older students with a large vocabulary. Otherwise, students will get stuck with short stumps of ideas that don’t let them fill the page. It might be better to print this on a paper larger than A4 and let the students draw more snowflakes if they can continue with a set of ideas even farther.

Tags: boggle’sworld, esl, teaching, mind games

In my solo tutoring class in school today, my student was learning about all the incredible things that blind people can do despite their inability to see. It is a rather amazing thing to think people can find their way, use money, or identify food without using their eyes. I wanted to show this student how amazing these things were.

Way back in my elementary school, there was a program called “Everybody Counts” that taught about political correctness and how people with different challenges in their lives survive. We learned about blind people, mental retardation, and all sorts of other things people have to deal with by doing activities to recreate their experiences. Living for a short time trying to experience shows how hard and different their lives must be to a small degree. The next time you are then confronted with such a person, the idea is that you’d have an open opinion about them.

One of the classic activities we did was the blindfolded navigation of a classroom. I blindfolded my student and told her to stand up, walk out of class, and then sit down in a chair in a room across the hallway. I led her follow the sound of my voice as she was navigating the classroom to make sure she didn’t crack her head open.

The next challenge was to make it across the lobby and go to the teacher’s room. The student was very bright, and used the other teachers in the school as audio references to make her way into the teacher’s room. She talked to the secretary until she was passed the reception desk, and felt the landmarks as she stumbled past them to figure out her location.

After she made it to the teacher’s room, I spun her around and had her try to navigate back to the classroom she started in. Eventually she bumped into a bench, figured out where she was, and headed straight back to the class without a problem. She had a really fun time, and thought it was amazing that someone could walk down a street and do the same thing. She said that she understood why blind people needed dogs to help them see.

She then challenged me to repeat the same course I gave her. I put on the blind fold. She started laughing and trying to throw me off course. She’d close doors, talk from other rooms, and try to lead me in the wrong direction. The only reason I was able to make it around was because I have a visual memory of the entire school from working their so long. If she had asked me to go down the stairs and out of the building, there is a good chance I would have fallen to my death.

When her mother arrived to pick her up, the girl was bubbling with excitement from the fun of trying to navigate around the school. She had a really good time with the activity, but if there were multiple people in the class, or a student I couldn’t trust, I absolutely wouldn’t have tried this activity. If someone did something while blindfolded and fell, it would have been a huge disaster. Also, students will try to lure you into the wrong bathroom if you don’t know the school well. Beware!

Tags: blind, activity, awareness, study, class, student, esl