::A Geek in Korea::

Brother Sister Pagoda

My friend who came to Korea for a tour last month had a picture he couldn’t explain. My coworker recreated the story behind the picture:

A monk was praying in the cave when a tiger approached him and roared loudly in pain. The monk looked inside the tiger’s mouth, he saw a thorn causing the tiger’s pain. The monk removed the thorn, and the tiger left.

The tiger returned to the cave where the monk lived carrying a beautiful woman that the tiger had taken from a nearby village. This was the gift for removing the thorn.

The monk was, of course, unable to marry the woman and still remain pious. The woman, having been abducted by the tiger, was unable to find anyone to marry her when she returned to her village. Her parents urged her to rejoin the monk and convince him to marry her.

Instead, they decided to live as brother and sister on the mountain. The name “Nam Mae Top”, means “Brother, Sister Pagoda”.

The pagoda contains remains of the “brother and sister”. According to my coworker, devoutly pious people have some sort of stone (kidney stone?) develop in their bodies as proof of their religious belief. That stone is what is buried in the pagoda.

While evaluations and monthly testing are huge pains in the butt for teachers, level testing is the slow ride at the end of the day that soothes the pain away. The level tests are prepared by outside organizations and combined into a one hour test that all students in a class recieve once a semester.

They are based on standardized tests that we’ve culled from testing sources and modified into a test of skill for the students. It’s all multiple choice, and the students are crammed into a room, told to listen to some tapes, and select the appropriate answers. This isn’t the style testing we give on our normal monthly test, but it is the sort of examinations the students do in their actual elementary schools.

I will be proctoring some of these tests during the week. This is a sweet gig, as long as I can get the set up correct there is literally nothing more than pushing a button on a cd player and keeping students from cheating. I collect the tests at the end, and another teacher grades them with the key. Sweet.

These are the tests that place students in levels higher than their current level if the students do well. The most embarrassing thing that can happen at our school is being passed by your peers. This demoralizes even the worst of students and occasionally causes complete turn arounds in behavior, or the students quit. Either one is fine.

Usually we’ll be picking books for the next semester by now, but there hasn’t been anything spoken to me about it. Perhaps after evaluations are finished and we know where students will go, we’ll end up picking books based on who is in the class. Not sure yet.

So, the months of toil and annoyance of the computerized system at work are finally paying off. Students that I’ve been marking down grades for the past few months, toiling away to post their homework daily on the Internet, tally their scores on tests, and basically working every second I can to keep up with the information. Now the students will now get their evaluations for the past three months.

In the past, this was a hellish experience that ruined two weeks of my time with annoying amounts of tedious paperwork. We’d take the evaluations sheets, then write by hand all the different marks, scribbles, and notes we had made, try to come up with some sort of score, and see how it worked out. This was best for keeping bad things hidden, because sensitive students could get a bump here and there to pad their grades. This might encourage a failing student to stick around to see some improvement.

Now there are nothing but cold hard numbers. All the test scores are totalled by the machine. I entered the scores into the machine initially, but I didn’t throw any weights behind the students. A student that just started at the school should be given more leniency on their first few examinations, but I didn’t have time to factor all these different things in when I was entering them in between classes during a five minute break. All the machine will do is go down the line and nail students for failing homework. It’s going to be brutal when the actual averages come back and students see their homework scores in the low twenty or thirty percentile because they haven’t done their work.

The only input into the process I have to worry about now, besides entering the test scores, is giving a final comment. The only problem with this is that my login causes the machine to crash whenever I leave comments for students. “Student X has been doing a great job. Keep up the good work and continue to do homework.” *Save *Error *Crash *Login *Start on the next student.

It’s very annoying to have to log in each time I’ve done an evaluation. I’ve told my director about it multiple times. It slows me down considerably, but even with this annoying software problem I’m farther along than I would have been if I had to do all the work by hand. I can do three or four classes a day and not be rushed, where it would have taken a day or two for the same amount of work if I really focused.

Right now, I have no idea if the scores I’ve assigned have been entered correctly, if the output on the evaluations will look right, or if the evaluations will even work. I don’t miss doing it by hand, even if the workload day to day entering everything sucks.

EDIT: By some educated sleuthing, I discovered that the crashes were caused by using an apostrophe in my comments. Now I have to write lengthy commentaries about people’s qualities without using possessive nouns. It’s all “David has amazing speaking skills” vs. “David’s speaking skills are amazing.” Very annoying, and you have to break the habit or log in every time.

I’ve been in Korea for the 2002 World Cup and Olympics, 2006 World Cup and Olympics, and now the 2008 Olympics. Whenever a large sporting event involving Koreans takes place, you can usually guess the outcome without ever turning on the television. All you need to do is leave your window open and wait for the cheers and shouting.

This year, I was preparing for the friends to visit for my D&D game when I heard the first bit of cheers from the Olympics. I turned on the television to see Park Tae Hwan swim to the medal qualifying heat. 42.1% of Korean households were watching the exact same thing. I’m blown away by that number.

If it seems like everyone is watching the same thing and cheering for their players, that’s because they are. All you have to do is listen though, and you know it’s true. There is a collective cheer or groan whenever any Korean player wins or loses. It’s like watching the Superbowl in a sports bar from the bathroom, except it happens for weeks straight. You know SOMETHING’s happened by the sound, and you just need to join in with everyone else to follow what is going on.

We were eating a meal and heard a large cheer spring up outside. “Oh, looks like there is something on television.” We headed over, turned on Mixed Badminton, and watched Korean win a gold medal. There was a cheer outside every time they won a game. When they scored a final cheer, there was a small roar.I didn’t even know mixed sex sports were in the Olympics, and didn’t know that badminton was a sport anyone would get that excited about.

It might have only been badminton in my eyes, but I think there was more energy spent cheering for badminton that I had ever witnessed before. The cheer after yesterday’s Korea’s Olympic Baseball win against Japan was several times louder.

Being around for the World Cup in 2002 when it was hosted in Korea, I know that all this cheering is actually very subdued. When someone scored a goal in the Korean World Cup, you didn’t just hear it, you could FEEL the ground shake. It was amazing, and a little terrifying. There would be parties, and cars honking in celebration for hours, drunking shouting all night. It was great.

I think I can tolerate a little bit of shouting from time to time, even if I don’t get what the big deal is about badminton.

My wife an I caught the last showing of the evening of Wall-E with subtitles at the local theater. I had been wanting to see the movie since it was released in the United States, but it came out on the same weekend as The Dark Knight, and decisions needed to be made.

I made a point to say, “We are seeing this movie as soon as we can.”

I’m so glad I did.

I loved the story. It was a dystopia, but a rather easy one for children to understand. It does the “take things to a logical conclusion” angle and projects them into the future. It’s got a lovely set of characters, and a good message for children, despite the whole “ruined world that needs to be rebuilt” idea. Leave it to Pixar to make dystopia fun.

Both my wife and I absolutely LOVED this film. We sat in the theater giggling in delight. After the film we walked home and talked about where this movie ranked on the scale of other Pixar films. We’ve seen Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles together (Not interested in seeing Cars). We both liked Wall-E better than all of the other films Pixar has ever made.

For the past few days it’s be unusually stormy and wet. Normally we get the heaviest rains of the year during summer, but they usually aren’t more than a drizzle that last for a week or more. This year however, the weather has been much more intense. The heat and humidity is one thing, but the rain storms have had actual thunder and lightening. This isn’t as common as I remember thunderstorms being in Ohio. A good lightning and thunderstorm in Korea is relatively rare.

Last night the rain started up in the evening, and we went to bed like normal, Yoshi out on the veranda, asleep before we were. We were awoken in the middle of the night by him wimpering. It was raining much more that before, and there would be occasional thunderclaps. The wimpering got lounder, and then Yoshi started to pace on the veranda. He didn’t back, but he wanted inside. The veranda is loud during a rain storm, and I don’t have great hearing like a dog either.

We let him inside, but wouldn’t let him in our room. We left the veranda sliding door open for him to go outside if he needed to use his bathroom, and we thought that he would just sleep on the couch and leave us alone. Instead, he went over by our bedroom door and tried to get inside. It wasn’t doing us any good leaving him inside if he wanted into the bedroom. Whenever Yoshi would try to get into the door, my wife would shout “OHMYGOD!” in surprise, as if she couldn’t remember we had let the DOG in, and NOT the axe weilding psychopath.

I had already spent one afternoon trying to calm Yoshi down from thunderstorm. We had sat on the couch while he was shaking in fear. Whenever lightning would strike, he would finch, then he would pace around the house looking for the thunder. I had to hold him and calm him down the entire time. I didn’t really want to hold the dog the entire night, as it looked like the storm was going to continue for some time.

After an hour of trying to settle him down with no luck, I decided that I needed to find a room that wasn’t as noisy as our living room, and didn’t have the large window to freak him out. I considered the central bathroom, which wouldn’t give off any light, but my wife said he hated that room from post-bathtime related trauma. I decide

I never thought that I’d get involved in the whole Dungeons and Dragons thing. I made a character because someone had asked me to join their game. I was there because if I didn’t play, no one else could, so I sort of did it out of curiosity, having nothing else to do, and just to be a team player.It gave me an excuse to get out of the house, and I didn’t have to spend money on Magic: The Gathering cards, so I was more than willing to give it a try.

Right away, I got interested in the dynamic storytelling method and the idea of shaping an adventure through our actions and a little dice rolling. The mechanics seemed alien and overly complex, but the basic framework was pretty cool. All the rule books were there to basically support the story telling, but weren’t desperately needed unless you were doing something you didn’t know how to resolve another way. It was there more as a clarification than something that needed strict following. The overwhelming amount of information available to try to assimilate was very difficult, and still is, but you don’t really need to read everything available. You just pick and choose, and it is a problem you look a little more to see if you can find the answer, otherwise you make your best guess and keep the story going.

There are so many different paths to take, and each of them has different quirks. There are rule books, different strategies, and different takes on each theme that you can choose to follow up on. There is also an amount of “making it up as you go along”. As long as no one else complains, you are good to go.

I even had my hand into trying to craft part of the story as we went along. That was also an interesting peek at “the other side” of the game, where your antagonism towards your fellow characters as the agent controlling the things that want to kill the players has to be tempered by the fact you want to keep the story going to some degree, and that death is merely an annoyance, not a real finality.

The person who is taking over from me to do the next round of storytelling is asking us to roll up new characters for his adventures. The other two people also wanted a chance to play different style characters, since their builds are nearly identical. These will be a sort of “secondary” set of adventurers that might interact with our current batch of characters or not. The “West Coast” Avengers, if you will. Now that we’ve established the setting and put things in motion towards the plot, we’re adding extra characters to keep things fresh.

At best, it could work to revitalize the play sessions. With more characters, there is more variety, and different ways to tackle different problems. At worst, it could be like adding Cousin Oliver, or Ted McGinley.

I was thinking of different characters to try. I spent hours, literally HOURS, thinking of different adventurers. I’d consult things on the Internet, I’d use character creators, I’d email the guy that is going to take over the next part of the adventure. I had one template, then another, then ANOTHER. The process of making new characters is also compounded by having multiple people also picking characters at the same time. Even if I had a flash of brilliance, there are rolls the other players staked out at their meetings when discussing the other characters. I could always have a “me too” sort of character, but I’d rather have something completely different than anyone else.

I think I’ve got something going. I’ve got two characters “in reserve” at the moment. One is a rapid crossbow firing marine wanna-be inspired by R. Lee Ermey’s character in Full Metal Jacket. I’d have to practice my cursing to role play that character well. Another is a lycanthropic monk that aspires to be a high flying wrestler, who is basically Fray Tormenta. This guy might be more difficult to fit into the party because he keeps ending up a “good” sort of character, and the people I play with end up doing evil things during the course of the game most of the time.

Anything I do seems to keep it interesting, as I have to be creative and find out how to explain all the quirks for the characters I make. I’m also on the lookout for ideas about my next planned adventure. Now that I’m a CO-DM, I’ve got to come up with a new story every month or so. It’s going to be an interesting challenge to keep up with the story and keep it going.

Fantastic Contraption is everything that a flash game should be. It’s got a wonderful premise: Use basic tools to move a ball to a goal. Simple.The different objects in the game follow different physics. For example, the water rod can pass through other objects, the wooden one cannot. By exploiting the various properties, and by using the environment, you can achieve your goal.

It’s got wonderful music. It’s got fast learning curve. You could pick up and start playing the game immediately by looking at the hints and the interface. There is no “right way” to win, and when you stumble upon the solution, either through trial and error or careful tweaking, you feel like a genius. It’s awesome to build something you think will work, have it fail through unintended consequences, then stumble upon an entirely different solution. I’ve been playing the game all afternoon after someone twittered about it, and I love it.

Careful, you might waste an afternoon or two playing this one.

I had an activity where we would go around the room asking students, “What did you do on Sunday?” We were practicing the past tense. Standard answers included:

“I was watching the Beijing Olympics on Sunday.”

“I was sleeping late on Sunday.”

“I was playing computer games on Sunday.”

Then, once I got around to one particular girl. She said, “I went to my grandmother’s house on Sunday. I went to the hen house. I broke a chicken’s neck, fed the blood to my dog, and plucked out it’s feathers with my grandmother’s help. We ate samgaetang (chicken stuffed with rice, ginseng, and other herbs boiled whole). It was delicious.”

That pretty much derailed the class for about ten minutes while we went over the various parts of her story. She talked unflinchingly about snapping the bird’s neck and cutting off it’s head. Then she talked about removing the feathers. By this time, I had a serious D= face going. She said the food was great.

Now, I eat chicken, and I’m aware that someone along the line needs to do what this girl did. I can only eat after some terrible violence against chickens has been committed. As long as it is humane and out of sight, I tend to block that out of my mind. However, to have a 10 year old kid describe the process of killing the chicken in the same terms you’d use to describe any other somewhat undesirable, but necessary chore that wields positive results was weird to me. I might have grown up in rural Ohio, but all the meat still came from the store, sans an occasional fish.

One of the students asked if she ate “ttak gochi” which is “chicken anus”. This is something some Koreans like to eat. The girl said she gave that to her dog, and the rest of the chicken, sans feathers and head, were in her soup. The boy said he liked the ttak gochi because it was chewy. That derailed us even further, as people said it was good enough for dogs, but not people.

It was one of the more interesting conversations I’ve had for a while.

My word count this week.

Wordle.net is a cool website that lets you create word lists by frequency. I’m pretty surprised to see how much I talked about games this week, but not about Korea. Oops.