::A Geek in Korea::

My “socially promoted” student showed why he is the bottom of the barrel yet again today in a hilariously over the top manner. I was teaching the class he is supposed to be in, yet he hadn’t arrived at school today. I know some of the students go to the same school, and some of them know each other, so I casually asked if anyone knew anything about the whereabouts of the missing student.

One of the students mentioned he had seen the missing boy walking off with a friend, and had heard that they were going home to play together. The boy had remembered it because they were walking home the same time he was going to school to study. He wasn’t really ratting anyone out, just telling me what he had heard they were up to.

I passed this information on to the secretary when I turned in the attendence sheet. “Oh, a boy in class says that one of our students went to play games with his friends instead of coming here. I don’t know if it’s true, but the boy isn’t here today.”

The class was winding down with ten more minutes to go. I had explained the last part of the lesson, and was about to start reviewing and assigning homework when the socially promoted boy threw open the door.

“WHO SAID I WAS PLAYING A GAME!?! WHO!?”

He was shuttering and crying. It was pretty clear that the boy had run to the school, and that he had been severely scolded for skipping class. He wasn’t ashamed to admit he had been skipping school. He was angry that someone had said he was playing games with a friend while he was skipping school, which is swore wasn’t true. This seems like a trivial distinction to make, and since he was highly agitated, I had to wonder why he was so insistent. “I wasn’t playing games!” he repeated while he sank down in his chair, sobbing, covering his head in a book.

Whatever, you were still skipping class, dumbass.

The secretary came into the class, as she must have heard the violent eruption of tears when he ripped open the door. She told him, “Settle your problems during the break, this is study time, and you are late. Get your stuff together and get ready to write down the homework right now!”

I did my best not to laugh. I got the students to get their homework written down, then dismissed the class. The boy was still upset, and the two students who had a disagreement walked out of the room talking. The angry boy pulled the other boy into the bathroom and posted guards at the door, which means “fight”.

The other boy was slick enough to get out of his beating. He agreed to a different version of the story. He explained, at length, to the secretary, then to the other teachers, that he must have confused another boy who also goes to our school, but skipped, wearing the same clothes, said that he was going to play games instead of studying, and that he must have CONFUSED that COMPLETELY OTHER PERSON with his classmate. It was this ENTIRELY OTHER PERSON that looks EXACTLY like the boy that had skipped and played games, not the boy in his class, and that he was very sorry, and very wrong to have EVER implied otherwise.

This is SUCH the Korean solution to the problem. The cognitive dissonance was palpable.

Kim Tae Hee’s V-Line Face

We’ve got a new phenomenon starting. The “V-Line” is referring to the jaw and facial structure of young women. I’ve most often seen this bit of marketing in relation to the numerous amounts of healthy tea drinks on the Korean market. When you go to a 7-11, you see more health tea drinks than anything with sugar else these days. This is FANTASTIC, but all of them promise to reshape you body into various letters of the alphabet.

Korea will latch onto a marketing idea and pummel it to death in every single way possible. A few years back, everyone sexy was being referred to having a “S-LINE” shape. Models, television personalities, advertisements, everything was telling women that it was the new measurement that all beauty was based on. S-line this, S-line that. Anything that gets you into that shape is what you need to spend ALL your money on.

Beauty had now worked it’s way down the alphabet. The “new” thing is a “V-line face”. The advertisement features Kim Tae Hee and…someone else. I don’t watch Korean television very much, but even I can’t escape the marketing CF queen Ms. Kim.

Just like the “Well-Being” fad a few years back, There are even new products that people use to try to reshape their facial muscles to achieve a “V-line” face. Imagine a stethoscope looking device. Where the doctor would put the ends of the device into his ears, there are plastic rollers. Kneed these rollers over your face, redistributing the facial fat temporarily. Make it in plastic, sell if for 1000 won at all the stores that stock up on cheap crap, and you’ve got a tie in that students buy and use in class to everyone’s embarrassment.

The apartment we currently live in, and the apartment across the street we are moving to are currently next in the city to be scheduled to have their building wide heating system converted into an individual apartment controlled heating system.

Right now, when it’s cold, the boiler down in the basement of the apartment kicks on, and everyone has a warm apartment. While that’s nice, it’s hardly fair. If we’re gone during the day, I don’t want to pay heating expenses to keep some housewife toasty.

Our last apartment in a more popular, richer part of town had an individually controlled boiler system, which meant that every apartment could control the temperature of their own rooms. These were individually billed, so if we liked to keep our apartment warmer, we could, but no one else had to pay for us to stay toasty. If we left for a vacation, we didn’t need to pay for heat. This is cheaper, but requires the apartment owners to know how to use, and pay to install, boilers.

Right now, the apartments in this neighborhood aren’t set up this way. Their is an apartment wide vote on the issue. If enough people want to switch over, there will be some construction work, some installation work, minor parking disruptions, and increased apartment fees. There is a ballot box outside the apartment security guard room. You drop off your ballot and register the vote. They take care of the tallying and notifying the apartments of the proceedings.

The only problem with all of this is the time when they choose to tell us about what’s going on. 8:00 am! We get woken up every morning by some boring security guard talking about the various issues with the boiler once or twice a week on our security announcement speaker. He talks in a loud voice for 5 minutes. The worst part is then he says, “Okay, to repeat…” then repeats what he said ONE MORE TIME for another five minues.

I can NEVER get back to sleep after this interruption. I don’t know WHY there has to be this sort of announcement at this hour. Perhaps parents are most likely to be home at this time, but they can’t just put up a note in the elevator and be done with it? Do I really have to hear this a few times a week?

We’re moving in 2 months, so we don’t really care what they do about the issue. Our new apartment will also have to convert over to this new system. We’ll have to listen to these messages all over again.

A dog is a pretty close companion. Yoshi spends a lot of time with me and knows my quirks pretty well. In fact, he’s learned to do a few things I didn’t even need to teach him to do simply out of routine. Here are a few examples:

When I get up in the morning, I usually turn on the computer as surf the web for an hour before my wife gets up. She prepares something for breakfast. I get up earlier for some alone time, and usually I’m not that hungry. Yoshi just sits on my lap as I read the news. When my wife wakes up, I turn my office chair to face into the kitchen area to greet her. Yoshi knows this is going to happen, so he doesn’t jump off my lap unless she goes to feed him. However, if I turn the chair as he hears the shutdown music of the computer, he automatically jumps off my lap.

Usually when we let Yoshi off the veranda, he hops up on the couch for a nap. If we talk about food, or mention Yoshi, his ears will perk up. If we say, “ma ma“, which is a Korean baby word for food, he’ll jump right down and follow us around till he gets something to eat. He’ll do a little dance and follow us out to his dish.

When I take Yoshi for a walk, he’ll stand in one spot while I put the harness leash on him. Then, if I head towards the door and pause, he knows to sit in front of the computer while I unmount my mp3 player for podcasts on the walk. He also will wait at the elevator in the same place going up or down. When Yoshi and I walk, we take one of three courses. My watching my feet as we walk past different parts of the neighborhood, he knows if we are walking one place or another for the day.

When we return from the walk, he holds up each paw to be cleaned before returning to his dish for some water. He also knows to avoid the shoe area so he doesn’t get dirty. I’m not responsible for this bit, this is all my wife. She accuses me of having socks dirtier than Yoshi at times.

Yoshi knows the words “Up” “Down” in English, and “go get your ball” in Korean. He’s got a favorite toy, which is a noisy green alligator. When we say “Noisy!” in Korean, he usually doesn’t stop making it squeak. He’s not a perfect dog.

When I snap my fingers and point to the veranda, Yoshi stops what he is doing and goes outside. I can also snap and nod my head, and if it is night he’ll go out too. Only my wife can get him to follow the “come here” command however. She also gets him to shake hands more frequently.

Occasionally, when my wife gets ready for bed, he’ll just go out and sleep on his blanket without us even having to say anything. Other times he curls up on the couch and needs to be reminded to go out on the veranda to his pillow.

It’s pretty cool when a pet figures out something on it’s own. Most of the things he knows because we have a repetitive sort of lifestyle that doesn’t change.

Now that my classes have a one week homework turnaround, I’m a lot stricter on my grading. Last I gave out a very simple assignment. The students had a modeled example of a food chain. The example was “Fox -> Duck -> Fish”. The students had to then come up with their own three tiered food chain of a similar fashion.

Some students drew pictures instead of writing English. I told them, “Please write, as this is an English school, not an Art school.” They did the activity correctly, but didn’t grasp the point of practicing their English. I let them have time, as the directions we’re written in absolute terms on the paper, and corrected their spelling. They got full credit as long as their spelling and picture matched.

The next group of students wrote English words, but often didn’t have a logical connection between their words. Lions aren’t known for eating fish as far as I know, and fish don’t eat birds often. If I could correct their logic or substitute an animal that would have worked better, I gave them partial credit.

Then I got to the lazy students that got “socially promoted” into the class. A “social promotion” is when you bump a kid up into the next level because he is too big to study with the students in his last class due to age or size. This student got bumped up a level because he was studying with his younger brother in the same class and doing much WORSE. This caused problems, so we pushed the older boy ahead despite being very low level and out of his depth. If you imagine English as water, this boy is drowning out of his depth in a half filled spoonful.

This student handed me a nearly blank paper, devoid of anything except one or two words copied from the student in front of him. He had the exact same spelling problems, and had less completed. He HAD to think I was the dumbest person on earth not to realize everyone in the class didn’t mispell “frog” as “forgu” coincidentally.

I asked him why he didn’t just use a dictionary to look up the words in Korean, then copy them over into English. Students are supposed to have these at home, or failing that, use the Internet. There is no excuse that in a WEEK to do homework he couldn’t ask his parents for help.

He said he didn’t KNOW any animal names in English, or Korean, or how to use a dictionary. His excuse was “I don’t know any animal names. I can’t use a Korean dictionary.”

Seriously.

He might spend a LOT of time in class, but I THINK he’s been outside enough to have SEEN, or at least have HEARD of the concept of animals. Considering his parents are sending him to an English school, I really doubt they would have failed to see he was illiterate in Korean first. There are zoos, televisions, and ALL sorts of other things that lead me to believe this is probably NOT true, even if he is kept as a boy in a bubble at home.

If you are going to lie about your homework, pick something SLIGHTLY plausable. Worst excuse EVER.

The group I hang out and play Magic: The Gathering with is the sort that would make sure it had seen the new Indiana Jones movie on it’s opening weekend. In fact, I made it a point to see the movie earlier than I usually would specifically because I knew I was going to be playing cards with them on Sunday and didn’t want my initial impression spoiled.

I liked the film, despite it’s flaws. It was entertaining. It had fun things. It hit all the right beats. At points it was ridiculous. At no point did it reach the level of indignity the Star Wars franchise visited, so how could I complain? It was good enough to feel I got my money worth out of the trip to the cinema.

While playing Magic, I put forth the argument that they should turn Indiana Jones into the next James Bond. I agree that if future movies were made, the perfect person to pass the fedora to would be Nathan Fillion and not Shia GuyfromTransformers.

Just to be clear, despite being a big Joss Whedon fan in the past, and liking Firefly after I got recommended it by friends, I’m totally not a Browncoat. I just totally got the Han Solo vibe from Mal on Firefly, and with a little work, Nathan Fillion could continue the series onwards. It’s not that I like series that perpetuate into a spiral of crappy sequels, but if they are going to do it anyway, they might as well have the right guy on board. Anything in a “future episodes of Indy” series would be better than the last series of Bond Films. Yeesh.

The group said that if they were going to make a new film, it wouldn’t be a bad choice. I guess my movie cred is safe for now.

One of my students had brought some watermelon from home to share with me after class. We had some forks, and were munching away at the first of the season fruit when I went to pick out a seed. I put the seed back on the plate, and he said, “What are you doing?”

“Uh, picking out a watermelon seed. That’s what you do when you eat watermelon, right?”

“No, I eat the watermelon seeds. My father also eats watermelon seeds. Who wouldn’t?”

I was surprised. I grew up in rural Ohio.  I know people who grow watermelon. I know people who sell watermelon. I know people who eat watermelon. I don’t know ANYONE who eats watermelon seeds.

“I never eat watermelon seeds. My family doesn’t either. I’ve even heard of watermelon seed spitting contents, but I never eat watermelon seeds.”

“Huh, people in America are weird. Just eat them.”

I got an idea. “Do you eat popcorn seeds?”

“What? Popcorn? Yes, I eat popcorn.”

“No, the seeds, you know, the seeds at the bottom when you get an unpopped piece. The kernal”

“No, I don’t eat that teacher! Who eats that?”

“I do. My father does. So do some of my friends. We like half-popped popcorn. It’s delicious.”

“What! We don’t eat that teacher! No one eats that! That’s so strange.”

Whatever, watermelon seed eating freak.

Somewhere along the line, the school I work at has shifted to a more brutal, more rude sort of place. The tone the students take had gotten nastier. Young children cursing their peers. People not doing homework, bad attitudes, that sort of thing. Positive reinforcement only works when the students can do something to get rewarded. If they stop trying, what then? What can you do to change students that stop doing their work? What if the parents are too busy? What if you can’t leave it up to anyone else?

One example of things going wrong is a class I have with older students. They used to try extremely hard to get every question correct on everything they do. Now they are intentionally failing tests with zero correct answers. They are signing in tests and turning them in blank in protest. They have warped the system to suit their purposes. They want to spend an extra hour of time hanging out with their friends doing homework at school, rather than working at home or before class since they have no free time.

They think their parents won’t see their test scores, or don’t care if they do. Either that, or the punishment they get at home is worth enduring to get more free time that would have been devoted to studying English vocabulary words. Homework isn’t that bad when you can copy off four friends and get it done faster.

These students got “dealt with” a few days earlier by my director. After I had walked out at the end of the hour of another bad class, I told my director that they had all failed their tests, hadn’t done their homework, and had spent the entire hour talking in Korean to each other. She said, “I will have a talk with them.”

She didn’t say it in a grim Nazi “I vill talk vif dem” accent, but I might have guessed something was up at that point. There was some inflection in her voice, I’ll leave it at that.

Since they are my last class of the day left it at that, but I later heard what she had meant by this remark. She went in with a wooden stick and rapped them on the hands for each of their misdeeds. I’ve been told she uses a wooden drum stick, and swats open palms. It’s enough to force students to write with their other hand. Some of the boys were saying that it was hard enough to make them cry. The very next class, their tests scores went from 0 to passing.

I am of a very mixed mind about this development. I find it deplorable to hit students. It is something I would never, ever do as a teacher. In this case it was immediately effective.While I wouldn’t hit them myself would I use their punishment to my advantage? Would I use the threat of violence to scare bad students into doing a better job on their homework and tests? Absolutely.

Today, in another class, several of my students were totally half-assing their work. They had skipped parts of homework without asking questions, failed their vocabulary tests, and generally been slacking off. I warned them that my director had picked up a more direct form of punishment, and that they needed to watch out, because they might be next in line when the “hammer” falls. As if summoned, my director came into the room and asked me to step out of the class.

I went back to the teacher’s room, and she did whatever it was to punish the kids. Whatever it was, she didn’t want me to see. All I know was when I returned, one of the students had a sore hand, all of them paid attention, and they really, really wanted to have their homework finished for the next class.

One particularly naught boy asked me if I had told her to come in and punish them. I told him I had no part of that exchange. I didn’t know she was going to do that, and I didn’t sanction it. No matter the dislike I might have personally for a student, I don’t want to see them hit in class. To be honest, if I was going to pick a student to get punished the worst, it would have been him, because I know he’s lazy and up to no good.

I might be claiming innocence since I don’t raise a finger to hurt anyone, but when I was checking his work, I caught this very same student cheating and copying homework for the director’s class when he should have been working on my assignment in class. Did I tell my director about that? Absolutely.

I don’t like the fact my director is hitting students, but it is a common practice at the “hard core” schools in the neighborhood. I turned down a job at one school because their foreign manager seemed to get sadistic glee out of punishing students. I had told the manager that I thought their methods were too extreme, and that they had sent my cousin to the hospital due to stress, anxiety about punishment, and humiliation. I was genuinely fearful when I saw the manager couldn’t contain a smile while thinking about hitting students. There was this sick nostalgia in their eyes. That’s not right, and I don’t want any part of it.

Some parents will absolutely choose to join a school because they know their is a discipline system in place that encourages study by force. The option of last resort, for burnouts and lazy students. Part academy, part reform school, teachers with brutal methods are often the most popular. I find that completely fucked up, but I’m also benefiting the short term gains of improvement at the moment.

However I’ll never forget seeing a student racked with test anxiety, fearful he would get hit by his mother for getting a test answer wrong, curled in a ball vomiting in terror at age nine. Do I want all of my students to turn into neurotic headcases? Hell no. Do I want them to study? Of course. Do they want to study? Not at all. What is to be done?

I guess this is what I have to put up with for now, but when that contract needs to be resigned, I’m really going to have to weigh the decision carefully if this escalates any further. There will be a point where I’m going to say I am uncomfortable with this occuring in my class, and if it costs me my job, I’m prepared for that. If I was asked to punish students myself, that would probably be where I would walk off the job for good. I won’t end up on that side, and I don’t care if it hurts my chances of finding another job in the future. That’s not something I’d live with comfortably.

Like any political debate in Korea, eventually the stupid rhetoric reaches students in my school and I’ve got to waste time dealing with whatever warped version of reality has sunk into these children’s head. One mouth-breathing student asked me if I lived in America. He asked it coyly, like he was springing a trap on me. I was about 10 steps ahead at this point.  I answered, “Yeah, I’m from the United States. I walk to Korea every day. What do you THINK?”

“Do YOU eat CRAZY COW?! HA HA HA!” was his reply. Oh, zing, he sure got me.

This boy spends about 90% of his life playing video games and not studying. The fact that he had been exposed to the OMG-CRAZY COW Internet rumors was nothing surprising to me. He also doesn’t have any person acting as a filter for his Internet exposure, telling him truth from fiction.

If I may drop my political agnosticism for a moment, I am of the opinion that the same people that were protesting the Korea-USA Free Trade Agreement are the same people that are desperately hoping that the resumption of shipments of American beef into Korea can be hijacked into a referendum about the treaty since the beef is a precondition for the rest of the deal to proceed.

The last administration accomplished agreeing to the treaty with the thinnest of margins by stifling dissent. The issue has now been reopened, and Korean farmers have one last desperate attempt to stop the tide before competitive measures start to erode their hold on the economy. This crowd is largely xenophobic, and will use nationalism at the drop of a hat to justify any position. Spreading rumors to the impressionable set to mobilize the press into publishing stories about how American beef will melt your brain isn’t below them. Daring the president to eat beef as if Lee Myeong Bak’s head would explode like a dude from Scanners is dumb.

I don’t care, one way or another, if they let American beef into Korea. I think that using lies to delude children in an attempt to subvert a treaty is despicable. So, thanks to some of the beef facts I learned from ZenKimchi, I tore into this whole rumor and really dropped some knowledge. If they were going to waste my time, I wanted to quash it once, in a proper fashion with a debate.

Sadly, when talking to elementary school students, the debate IS going to be a little on sided. I don’t think they had heard the entire “other side” of the issue once. I basically got them to agree that Korean beef isn’t going to be THAT much safer than American beef since they don’t even check it for Mad Cow disease.

They also agreed that as long as American beef is checked and is safe, it could be allowed in. Most of the students said that they would prefer Korean beef to American beef, which I said was entirely within the rules of the FTA. Allowing American beef into Korea didn’t mean that no one could eat locally grown beef.It’s more socially responsible to eat locally anyway, but Korea doesn’t have enough meat to go around, thus the need to import.

Basically, the risks of American beef had been GREATLY overstated, and the superiority of Korean beef had been equated to nationalism, racial superiority, and cultural identity. This is the same thing that happens EVERY time there is ANY debate with international entities requiring a change in Korea. People hijack the debate and turn it into a referrendum about loving their country more than loving foreingers. It’s counter productive and always ends poorly for everyone invovled. This is one of the downsides of a mono-culture. I’ve been around for a few of these issues, and I usually ride out the tide with only a few snarky comments from students. This time, at least, people were willing to conceed some of the points.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a rogue-like, is a harsh mistress. It’s a punishing role playing game that runs basically on any computer with a monitor and a keyboard. Right now it’s recaptured my attention because there has been a thread at a forum I was reading that taught me a few things I hadn’t know about the game that had annoyed me.

The hardest part of a rogue-like, besides looking at a screen full of text where “@” represents a player, is getting a handle on the interface. Everything is done with the keyboard with shortcut keys representing commands, and not only that, the shift and control keys modify the commands. You have multiple menus and overwhelming options to begin.

Very often there are options you don’t know about that would have prevented your death, but due to the interface being a mass of keys, it’s often hard to know about different options. Sure, there is a readme file with lots of helpful key bindings and stuff, but you need to know what they are even talking about by playing the game before you would ever know why one thing or another is bound to what key. Don’t even get me started on classes, races, and god choices in the game. It’s enough to make any person feel lost.

For the longest time, I would traverse the dungeon by pressing the directional key, following a wall, and simply keeping in one direction until I ran out of hallways to explore. Then I’d go down a level, get slaughtered, and start over. I learned this week I can press “Control-O” and auto-explore everything in one level of the dungeon in one to five key presses.

If I discover anything, I automatically stop. If I see a monster, an item, an object, or an exit, I get command back and I’m able to act as freely as if I had pressed each individual keystroke as before. This alone has made the game 100% easier, faster, and more fun. I didn’t KNOW about this option until I had dug into some menu for some other key combination and found out about it. Now I consider it a necessity, and can’t imagine even tolerating the game before I knew of it. And yet this is the second or third time I’ve come back to Crawl. No wonder I quit, frustrated last time.

Every time I get back into this game, there are things I discover. For example, if you have necromancy skills and raise the dead (depends on your spell or god) you can command them to attack your enemies (that’s AWESOME!) by pressing the exclamation point key! I was playing a mummy character, and I was able to raise pet zombies, but I had no idea of their purpose until I found out about THIS menu. Pets went from a neat toy to a killer sidekick.

There are TONS of secrets to discover, and a LOT more for me to learn in this sort of game. I usually get frustrated, since I haven’t even seen past the beginning levels with a character, but I’m slowly getting better. I’ve also started watching games on http://crawl.akrasiac.org/ via PuTTY at work before classes start. I’ll have it in a small window as I create papers and prepare my materials.

I throw it up and it’s like the Matrix for everyone else. ASCII flying around, text rapidly updating, all sorts of weird symbols on the screen that don’t seem to make sense. Only I can decode what the hell is going on when other people play the game, but I’m learning a few things about different races, combinations, and what NOT to do in the game.

Eventually I might even get an Orb of Zot and complain about how difficult something other than the very beginning of the game is for once. Either that or I might get a character that survives for more than one sitting. One thing at a time. Probably not.