I deemed my “Korean Security Guard” costume too ironic to use for students. I didn’t want to have to explain my costume to everyone in the school I ran into, so I decided to keep the glowing directional light stick and wear an Alien mask. The light up stick was my “probe“, lightsaber, or whatever an alien might carry. The students loved it.
The first class was with the little students that really love Halloween for the candy and monsters. I did Halloween Bingo, which was a huge success. There is this weird phenomenon everyone has experienced around kids while wearing a costume. You could be walking around normally, but as soon as you put a mask on your face, students will grab your clothes and try to rip everything “costume” related off you. I was grabbing my attendance folder with my mask perched on my head when a dozen students saw me and decided that they ALL had to grab the back of my shirt and be dragged around. If I removed the mask, they left me alone and went back to not touching me. What the hell is that about?
Anyway, after the little kids and their fun, I went on to teach two more Halloween themed lessons with elementary school classes. We did a fun Halloween story exercise where they had to end the story. The story stopped with the writer and their friends sitting in a scary house eating some candy bars. My favorite ending of the story was, “We ate some candy bars. We got fat. The end.”
The health consciousness of students continues rain on everyone’s Halloween fun in the middle school classes. Any student that told me, “Trick or Treat” got a handful scooped from my candy bag. Two middle school girls actually said to me, “Oh, teacher, I don’t want this candy bar. It has too much melamine. Please just give me some other candy instead.”
GAH!
It reminded me of my father always “testing” my candy bars for “poison” after we returned home from with our Halloween stash. He claimed he was being chivalrous. Never did I think a student would turn down FREE CANDY because of food safety fears. Yes, children take care of their health here much more diligently than in the United States, but sometimes it feels like I’m surrounded by pod people.
Just have fun on Halloween for once!
I had a good time, and since I teach different students tomorrow, I get to do the whole thing over again.
I’ve been a fan of the Cowon product line since I picked up the awesome Cowon D2 for a birthday present last year. I’ve had it on me, playing music and watching video daily. When Cowon announced a bigger, more robust, more video friendly flash based video player I put aside my money right away.
I’ve had a few days to play around with my Cowon O2 and I can assure anyone looking to upgrade from a Cowon D2 to a more featured PMP solution, the Cowon O2 does not disappoint.
Features
The model I own is the 32 Gig Flash model. It has no DMB. My model lacks the Extended Dictionary. It only has an English-> Korean, Korean-> English dictionary like the D2. I won’t comment on the DMB or dictionary features, because unless you are intent on teaching or studying in Korea, they are only a niche perk, not a must have.
The Cowon O2 supports much higher resolution video, and a much greater range of video codecs. The Cowon D2 was limited to 320×240 Xvid. This meant a long, annoying process of converting video over to the proper format with a program such as Avidemux. The Cowon O2 plays anything I throw at it without needing to convert. Quicktime? Xvid? Mpeg? THEORA?! No problem. If you watch a lot of video podcasts, and are worried you’ll miss out on content because you aren’t using an iPod, no fear, the Cowon O2 plays nearly everything on the web.
Reading from the package, the video support is listed as: AVI, WMV, ASF, MP4, MKV, OGM, MPG/MPEG, DAT, MTV. That’s pretty impressive support for some of the most obscure codecs.
The video codec support is great, but the audio codec support is just as long and varied as well.
From the package, the audio support is listed as: MP3, WMA, ASF, FLAC, OGG, M4A, MKA, TTA, APE, MPC, WV, WAV. To be honest, I don’t really have anything in my collection outside of mp3 files, but it’s nice to know if I stumble upon some new format my PMP will play it. There is also a speaker built in, so even without headphones you can listen.
The Cowon D2, and Cowon O2 are OS neutral. They work as USB drag and drop devices, so you can take them to any machine, plug them in, and have them show up.
However, the document viewer Cowon uses to compress Word Documents, PDF files, and other images and text files is Windows Only. You must convert files for the Cowon O2 using proprietary Windows only software. It’s not included in the software on the machine, and it looked to cost 3000 won (?) from the Cowon site. If you are going to make a player that works with Linux (!), why make desirable software for it that doesn’t work on that platform? If the Cowon O2 supported .CBR files for comics instead of a proprietary format, the would be much more love from me on the document reading front.
Packaging
I ordered the Cowon 02 from Cowon’s shop directly. I paid for the optional leather case and screen protector. In the package, the silicon shell case also came free. The screen protector’s directions were badly written, with the picture not matching the layout of the stickers. You couldn’t follow the directions and not end up with bubbles under the protector. We had to wash off the dust and try a second time. Eventually we got a bubble free screen protector that looks great.
The silicon protector does not work with the leather case. If you want to protect your screen with the leather case, you can’t also protect the paint job with the silicon shell. The paint is non-glossy and doesn’t attract fingerprints by the way. The leather case has a nice integrated stand, and the stylus doubles as a stand as well for those that want the silicon case. Both are very clever. The stylus cord is just long enough to allow the fat stylus to reach the corners of the screen.
The headphones are cheap and replacable. No worse than the ones included with the Cowon D2 if I remember correctly. You’ll want better ones to take advantage of the player fully.
Navigation and Screen
The main perk upgrading from a Cowon D2 to a Cowon O2 is the increased screen size. The screen is physically more than twice as large, and as clear and crisp. It is 4.3 inches diagonally. This means that watching movies on the go is a lot better on the eyes.
The overall size of the player is around the size of a Palm Pilot or so. It is fatter than the iPod touch, without a doubt, but you can still easily slip it into a pocket. The placement of the external buttons for power, lock, and volume mean that putting it in your pocket doesn’t stop you from controlling the player when you need to either.
The touch screen is easy to navigate by finger or with the fat stylus. When a video is being played, touching the screen brings up a menu. Tapping one of the on screen buttons will navigate in the menu. Even better, while you navigate, the video keeps playing beneath the semi-transparent menus! The UI is also customizable, but I haven’t found any skins I want to use to replace the default.
One of the major improvements to the UI over the Cowon D2 is the “Recent Files” menu item. It will list all the files you’ve recently been viewing, the day you were watching them, and how far into them you were. You can then resume watching at the point where you left off. Instead of having to keep a number of bookmarks to keep track of every video you might stop and start in a day, you can instead see all the files you haven’t finished and pick and choose.
This is great for someone that likes to stop and start videos depending on their location, for example switching to a video on a subway, then to an audio file when walking around town to avoid bumping into people. I appreciate this menu overcoming an annoyance I had with the Cowon D2.
The only physical buttons are for volume, and power, which is a slide toggle you must hold, Cowon D2 style. You can also use the power toggle to lock the screen.
Battery Life and External Memory
The amazing 52 hours audio battery live for the Cowon D2 isn’t possible with the larger screen of the Cowon O2. However, the battery life for the Cowon 02, 18 hours for audio, is respectable. Video for the D2 is rated at 10 hours, while the Cowon O2 has an impressive 8 hours. I never had battery problems with the Cowon D2, and I don’t expect to have any with the Cowon O2 either.
The power adapter was proprietary, so it won’t work with the D2. It’s a 5v plug, but the Cowon O2 also draws power from the USB when you charge it. The USB port on the Cowon D2 was covered by a small latch that you detached to prevent dust from getting inside. Thankfully, the SDHC card slot on the Cowon O2 is ALSO covered by this same slot. I have a 32 gig Flash model, but with the SDHC card slot I could potentially upgrade the space in the player up to 48 gigs! All flash! No moving parts!
Overall
I’m really happy with my purchase. I’ve given my Cowon D2 to my wife, and now have my new toy to keep me company. It’s improved on all the faults of the Cowon D2 in one degree or another, minus battery life. Viewing video on the player is a vast improvement, the UI is solid. The player is larger and heavier, but it’s still fine to put in a pocket and carry around. The codec support is unparalleled, and there is no DRM restrictions to worry about. There is no Bluetooth support, no Wifi support, and no browser. If you wanted any of those, other Cowon products support those features. I’m extremely happy with the powerful, portable video player I’ve got.
My Cowon O2 has arrived and has been unboxed. Consider these pictures just some spoilers for now. Now I’ll run my new Cowon O2 through it’s paces for a few days and put up a nice long review.
My school has revised it’s detention policy to make it more annoying for both students and teachers. The problem with giving half a class detention was that if half the class WANTED detention to work together, you are only playing into the worst student’s hands. In a few classes, students were intentionally getting detention everyday so that they could get their Korean homework finished together.
While some students still avoided detention like a punishment, bad kids tried to get all their friends to join them. Detention had been warped into a strange social club where you have to fail to succeed. My director decided that you had to pick the worst student, and only ONE student per class to send to detention. The idea is that if a bad student is stuck there alone, they’ll have to actually work instead of playing with friends.
Sending only one student is much harder than sending students to detention indiscriminately. If five students don’t do their homework, it’s easy to send all five. Students can’t be sent on absolute terms, and I have to pick the biggest idiot, I’ve got classes where it’s nearly impossible to choose who to send. There is a class where I dislike so many of the students that choosing one student that is the most awful is impossible. They all are so awful, it would take a tremendously terrible thing for them to stand out in any one class to get sent to detention. Sure, if they start stabbing each other I’ll have an easier time, but do I have to wait for it to get that bad?
Some classes get strict enforcement, because one bad kid will stick out, but if there are five bad kids in one class, and I can only pick one, it’ll seem arbitrary when I pick someone. I actually let five students that would have detention in ANY of my other classes go today because I didn’t feel like arguing why one or the other was worst.
Eventually, I’ll stop being fair and go back to being cruel and vindictive. Is it too late to add a solitary confinement wing to the school?
I knew that Ubuntu’s latest version was out soon due to their oh-so-logical numbering system. My version, Hardy Heron 8.04 had been installed for six months, so all needed to do was find out when the final version of the next release, Intrepid Ibex was due in October (8.10). The final release for the Ibex is on October 30th, but when I opened by browser I discovered the release candidate was available.
I took that this was a sign that perhaps I should just go ahead and update anyway. I took the appropriate steps to upgrade my entire system. I pressed “Alt+F2″ and then typed:
“update-manager –devel-release”.
That’s it.
The update manager then popped up. Having specificied I wanted to upgrade despite it being a development build, it downloaded the entire set of packages, prepared my system for the upgrade, got rid of all the redundant and old programs I used, installed up to date software, and told me what it was doing. Hands off upgrading for the win.
All I had to do was let it run in the background, then click “okay” a few times as it made all the right choices for me. SWEET. It was a while downloading despite my connection, but other than that, flawless. When I rebooted, I got a common error. Nautilus the file browser was hanging because the programs they picked to start up were different than the list I was using previously, so I didn’t get any desktop icons. The rest of the upgrade worked flawlessly. I added Nautilus to my sessions menu to have it boot up at start. I also added “scim” back to my sessions menu so that I could type in Korean. That worked just like it should as well. This would have taken me days to work out when I first started using Linux, but I fixed it between my house chores. Awesome.
The biggest differences are Gnome Do, and the enhanced print manager are sitting in my system tray at the moment. Gnome Do is an uber-keyboard shortcut program like launchy for Windows, but I can’t see myself using it that much. Half the time figuring it out takes longer than launching the program itself. Until I get used to it, it might just be a neat little toy. The printer program looks really improved from the previous program, but usually I just copy stuff or do simple printing. If I need to do any scanning or anything more advanced I’ll use it. I’m a bit disappointed that OpenOffice included in the release is only 2.4. OpenOffice 3.0 is what I’ve been using this week at work and it seems stable and nice despite it taking AGES to load up on a Windows XP machine.
Other than that, post-upgrade there is a NOTICIBLE speed increase in Firefox rendering and an increased zippiness in the overall GUI. I’m impressed with the solid upgrade. Virtualbox, something that was a headache to upgrade last time around, has a new version out that works perfectly with the upgrade as well, so I won’t have my wife complaining about a lack of access to Windows XP Internet Explorer this time around either.
There doesn’t seem to be anything radically different than the last release, but it seems really nice and stable at the moment. Considering this computer is nearly 3 years old, but is getting faster and more functional with every release of Ubuntu, I’m very happy. I could go on using a computer of this speed for Internet browsing and writing this website more or less forever. Not having to pay for an upgraded OS every year or so is a great treat.
One of my wife’s elementary school friends invited us to his wedding this weekend. My wife had prepared a gift, a giant hand made Korean paper lamp to give as a gift. She was going to give it to him instead of cash, the traditional Korean wedding present. The only problem with a large wedding gift is that you need a container to package it in, and we don’t own a car. If only we owned a car, this entire nightmare could have been avoided….but I digress.
Last night, my wife had to construct her own Frankenstein like box to hold her gift, and then wrapped it. Of course due to the odd dimensions, she had to cut and fold each piece of wrapping paper like origami to have THAT fit. She was up late preparing, and we had to leave early in the morning to catch the bus to go to the wedding.
The wedding was in Cheonan, which is a popular place to have a wedding. It basically splits the difference between Daejeon and Seoul and has lots of wedding halls. This is the second wedding I’ve been to at a wedding hall that has arranged a bus for the people in Daejeon to ride up to Cheonan. If we had a car, we wouldn’t have had to ride the bus, but, sadly, we were dependant on the transportation provided.
We arrived in time to catch the private bus, and were forced to sit in the second to last row. We set my wife’s large gift in the aisle, since there was no where else to put it. The elderly people behind us would be leaping from their seat every few minutes to greet someone or to get tissues, but a meter tall gift didn’t stop them. They’d jump over it, or kick it out of the way. It was clearly a gift for the wedding couple, but that wouldn’t stop anyone.
The ride up to the wedding hall was a bit dull. They served pork with kimchi, which seems like a bad dish to pick when riding on a bumpy bus full of people wearing expensive hanboks and suits, but this is the second wedding that’s done this. The soju started flowing on the bus promptly at 10:20 AM. I didn’t partake in drinking strong alcohol in the middle of the morning because at that time I still had my dignity. If only I had finished off a bottle of booze before the nightmare began, perhaps the rest of the day wouldn’t have been that bad.
We arrived at the wedding hall to find we knew only a handful of people. The groom hangs out with rough and shady people. He admitted most of his friends were gangsters, or at least LOOKED a lot like gangsters back when he was single. I had met the guy once with a group of his friends. He wasn’t exaggerating. Most of people looked like they had fallen out of the door of a shady nightclub a few hours earlier in the day. Really bad suits, women with miniskirts, and terrible hair will be what is captured in this man’s wedding photos.
We didn’t stick around for the wedding pictures. The wedding was ultra-cheesy. The disco lights were doing a twirling laser show that was fit for a 1960’s era Batman villian. We saw the couple ride a mechanical chariot, spewing dry ice fog to approach the ceremony. When they walked down the aisle they were flanked with sword toting women dressed as flight attendants. There were also bright lights shining in our faces. We had seen enough. We decided to cash in our meal coupon and go to the buffet.
The buffet was not as advertised. It was an assortment of the most inedible Korean foods of questionable safety ever collected in one place. Day old boiled octopus? Raw beef that probably sat out all day? We had some soup, but we stuck mostly to the rice and fruit. It was also not a self-service buffet. We had to sit while they brought us some food. The woman that delivered the food to our table hit me square on the temple with her metal serving tray. She NAILED me in the head as she tried to squeeze behind me and a pillar. The gangster looking dudes looked around at the source of the noise, and I swallowed down my annoyance. She apologized, and we wondered why she didn’t just go around the other side of the table to serve us where there was no pillar. We finished our meal and left.
The problem with the bus going home was that no one set a time to be back on the bus. The groom’s mother was in charge of the bus, as she was the one handing out the alcohol earlier, but she was occupied with the post-wedding hall ceremonies. We had to wait for the entire wedding party to leave by car before she left the wedding hall. The ceremony was finished in twenty minutes, everyone else had finished eating in less than an hour, and people were standing around for another thirty minutes before she got on the bus.
We waited around for another twenty minutes for no good reason. While we were waiting for people on the bus, the women on the bus behind us stole our seat and then began gambling. They were playing GoStop on the bus! They would run around grabbing change from their purses and accused each other of cheating between rounds. It was fairly annoying, but my wife said we couldn’t really do anything since they couldn’t play anywhere else on the bus. She said that as long as they gave our seat back when the bus started, it wasn’t worth speaking up about.
Finally, an hour and a half after all reasonable people would have gotten onto the bus, we departed. We were treated to subjected to some “Bongjak music”, which sounds like polka music with a more annoying bass line. The first, and ONLY song played was a twenty minute song played so loud that your chest rumbled in pain from the noise.
About thirty minutes into the trip, TWO FULL HOURS after the ceremony, someone called the groom’s mother wondering where the bus was. THEY HAD JUST LEFT THE WEDDING HALL! Any reasonable person would have said, “Catch another bus, this one is too far away for us to turn around.” NO.
Instead, this woman said, “My uncle has a car. He’ll drive you to the bus. We’ll park on the side of the road and WAIT FOR YOU.”
The bus pulled over to WAIT for the person that was IN a car to arrive and get ON the bus that they had missed by TWO hours because they hadn’t thought to tell ANYONE that they were going to be on the return trip. They were traveling in a group of people heading back to Seoul, and didn’t want to ride a seperate bus that was HEADING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION, NORTH TO SEOUL. They wanted to be on the bus HEADING AWAY FROM SEOUL, SOUTH, BACK TO DAEJEON, to get BACK TO SEOUL WITH THEIR FRIENDS.
Did we have a vote in this? No. Everyone ELSE on the bus had to wait. They pulled off the highway in the middle of nowhere. There was a gas station a few hundred meters away, but NO OTHER SIGNS OF CIVILIZATION ANYWHERE. We were TRAPPED ON THE BUS!
The people that had been playing GoStop, as well as the people that started drinking at 10:20 AM decided that just because the bus was stopped for the most moronic reason ever wasn’t a reason to stop the party. They took over the radio system and turned up the party music. They started dancing in the aisles and blocked anyone from leaving. We were subjected to thirty minutes of dancing to the exact same loud music that had played earlier.
My wife was crumpled in her chair weak and about to vomit, and I was flabbergasted. I had NEVER met a ruder group of people. We asked if we could leave soon, but they said that the person was on their way and the bus wasn’t moving without them. We said we had an obligation later and were going to miss it. They said we should just get drunk with them and dance. We both had migraine headaches from the music, and the rocking and bass made my wife carsick.
After recording the video, I snapped and basically HAD to get off the bus. I pushed everyone out of our way and got us off the bus of insanity. We decided to try to get a call taxi, at a considerable fee, just so we wouldn’t have to go back on the bus. We walked to the single point of civilization, the gas station, and tried to get a call taxi number. The rest of the party was very unnerved by our willingness to bail on them. “Come back…enjoy the fun….don’t go. Why would you want to leave…we’re having a great time… What’s wrong with them?”
We weren’t the only sober people on the bus, but no one else was attempting to solve this problem. I was closer to punching someone than I had been in a very, very long time. We got the number at the gas station, and were walking back to tell them that we were leaving on our own despite being in the middle of no where when the car, carrying the person that had held up the bus, arrived. The people that got out of the car, who were late to get on the bus, the entire REASON the bus was late, got onto the bus to rejoin their group.
My wife was fighting back her stomach at this point, so the people with the car offered to take us all the way to Daejeon. It turns out someone else was heading that way not affiliated with the wedding. That person wasn’t getting on the bus. The car was giving them a ride all the way into the town.
So just to be clear, the people that made us wait and listen to terrible music, the people that basically kidnapped us, had their own way to get back to town, but had wanted to stop the bus instead so they could ride with their friends. I don’t know WHY that car didn’t take the people who were late for the bus straight to Daejeon, but we had our ride and didn’t ever want to get back on that bus.
The car ride back into town was uneventful. Freed from listening to the terrible music and having people gyrating in our faces, my wife recovered from her carsickness. We basically JUMPED out of the car at the first subway stop we drove pass, and got back home as quickly as we could. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It wasn’t supposed to become a trial in patience. It was only supposed to be a quick wedding. If only we had a car, all of this could have been avoided.
The Mythbusters tested the legendary Hwacha (화차), which is a giant 200 arrow rocket launcher. It was completely awesome to see them dealing with a Korean myth on the show! They build this gigantic contraption and stacked it full of 200 arrows that exploded on contact. Every step along the way this improbably device met their testing requirements.
My dad, when going through the Seoul War Museum was really impressed by the Hwacha they had on display. My dad said that according to the sign on the display that the Hwacha they had at that museum was the oldest known (war?) device with the original blueprints to build it. He thought that it was impressive that the knowledge how to build such a device could be kept for hundreds of years and passed down to this day.
To see the Mythbusters build a massive Hwacha and then launch it was fantastic. It seemed like a lethal device to me. Check out Season 6, Episode 16 of the Mythbusters, or visit their website to see their launch. (No Deep Linking available.)
I love Mythbusters, and seeing a war machine I’ve seen in person tested on the show was fantastic. I hope they do even more Korean myths, but nothing as silly or as implausible as, say Fan Death.
Seeing as I usually wait till the last second to make a Halloween costume despite it being my favorite holiday of the year, I got started earlier than usual this year. We were walking around Emart looking for stuff to stock up on in the house when we ended up in the Halloween section. The costumes consisted of: Lame masks, devil pitchforks, bone-through-head, beer-bottle-through-head, fake-arrow-through-head, steel-screw-through-head, and Mardi Gras reject masks. The only good thing were some fuffy Halloween themed stickers I could give to students that I know they’d love, but wouldn’t cause them to get a sugar high. Those I purchased, while the rest I skipped.
My wife suggested that we think of something else for a costume. She suggested I go as a Korean security guard, which is an awesome costume. Back when I was touring my friends around in South Korea this summer, every elderly person we ran into were wearing these ridiculous fishing vests. They had vented backs, and lots of pockets to hold…stuff old people carry with them. My friends were the first people to point them out on the trip, and soon everywhere we went we couldn’t stop seeing them.
My first purchase for this costume was a neon light up parking pointer. I can now direct traffic! I’m borrowing the silly vest from her father, and I’ve already got a hat that would be perfect for a fisherman. Now all I need is poor posture, the ability to sleep in the middle of the day, some white gloves, and a whistle. I’ll come into class early and blow my whistle at them. Then I’ll direct them to their seats one at a time.
I don’t think my students will appreciate this costume, but I find it hysterical. I got out the traffic pointer as soon as we bought in and popped in the batteries. Every time we crossed the street I turned it on. I haven’t even assembled the costume completely and I’m already mad with power. This is a very good sign.
One of my students had to complete some of her intensive computer based training today. Half of her class was absent, so I took the students into the computer lab to let them work on any of their online assignments they needed to do. Their are entire online programs none of the foreign teachers need to touch, so I don’t go in the lab often. I let the students work.
The other student in the lab noticed that when the girl signed in, there was a bug. Someone had installed a something that the English training program caught as a cheating program. He said that the bug window that popped up saying that it was blocking a macro. He showed me what he thought was the culprit. Someone had installed a keyboard macro on this machine.
We saw when we ran the English training program that the macro was designed to try to monitor the lessons and copy some of the repeated sentence practice the students had to complete by typing in their answers multiple times. I guess some good student would complete the exercise, and then the cheater would log in, push a button, and have their homework completed for them instantly. Since the macro didn’t work, we don’t know what it was trying to do.
Anyway, as my class ended, another class entered the room. I asked the students if they knew who had been sitting at the computer with the installed macro. Someone told me that it was one of the WORST students that I taught last year. I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, but of the two students in the school at the time of the incident that I would guess would cheat, he was first on my list.
I went out in front of the secretary’s desk where he was goofing around.
“Did you install a computer keyboard macro?”
The boy answered, “No! I didn’t.”
“So, do you know who did do that?”
The boy said that a really bad student in his class, probably the number two most likely culprit, someone I also can’t stand, and his sworn enemy, had actually installed the program.
The secretary jumped up animated and said, “You little liar! That boy you said did it wasn’t here today.”
The boy said, “Oh, I know. He didn’t install that program TODAY, he did it last week.”
The secretary had him now. “That’s impressive, considering we ghosted the machines this weekend. They all have fresh installs. There isn’t ANYTHING installed on those machines that wasn’t put on there in the last two days since class started. The person you accused hasn’t been here all week. I couldn’t have been him, so why would you lie like that to blame him?”
Either the boy was lying and trying to frame his enemy in class, or there was another student potentially at fault. We don’t have any security cam footage in that room. I tried to get a little more information out of the student.
“So, how does that program work anyway? I tried to use it but I just couldn’t figure it out.”
The boy replied, “Oh, it doesn’t work. It’s being blocked.”
Wow, for a student that claims he didn’t install a keyboard macro, he sure seems to know a lot about how it works and the problems with its operation. That’s not suspicious.
I’m not sure the boy got punished. I know my director was flabbergasted that dishonest students would lie about installing programs to aid them in cheating to avoid studying. Students would rather spend an hour with an elaborate plan to get out of ten minutes of work than study a single second. It’s infuriating. Sadly, I was the same way in high school, and I nearly bombed my math classes because of it. I guess if I had to spend my free time typing in repetitive answers, I’d get the idea to cheat on things too. Still, I never paid money for an English program just to try to cheat and avoid it either.
If it was up to me, I’d install Linux on all the boxes, harden all the applications so they require administrator passwords, and run them as dummy like terminals that don’t allow anyone to install anything, and only allow interent access through a strict firewall. Of course Koreans would never, ever do that.
Holding a classroom of 10-15 students attention is a lot easier if you use humor from time to time. I am not the funniest person on Earth, and I don’t claim to be a comedian. I’m just a guy that wants to teach some students, but, to a group of Korean kids, ages 6 to say, 12, I can make an entire class laugh pretty consistently.
Today I had a stock set of jokes that I that I worked on in my first class. For this joke, I was being extremely obtuse and letting the students get one over on me on purpose to practice their vocabulary and pronunciation. The text book featured a drawing of a king. The king had a royal looking robe, a golden scepter, and a gem encrusted crown.
I drew a picture of the king and put blank spaces for each of the items. I asked the students to name each item the King was supposed to be wearing. Seeing as I know my students pretty well, I knew there was no chance any student would correctly pronounce the word “crown” correctly. The “cr/cl” blend is one of the hardest for students to learn.
The students were trying their best, but the first response I got every time was “Clown! Clown!”. I then drew my best looking Bozo the Clown on the head of the King. The students would huff indignantly and then say “Crrrrraaaawwwon….Craaaawon”.
“OH! Now I know.”
Then I’d erase the circus freak and draw a gigantic crayon on the king’s head. This got another peal of laughter, and then a chorus of lame boos. They’d ask me to drop the charade and just tell them how to say “crown” well. It worked well, and to be honest, my lesson plan was a bit short, so I needed to use this same material again in the next class.
I tried this exact same routine in my second class and got the same results. This time worked like a charm, except by the end there was one student laughing so hard everyone else thought she had damaged her brain. She went on laughing far, far too long, and it actually might have even been a sarcastic “over-laughter” you might do if you wanted to point out how unfunny a bad joke actually was. It’s like the sarcastic clap, but more annoying.
I didn’t expect sarcastic meta-humor from a girl in an audience of third graders. Either she wasn’t trying to be sarcastic, or she was just trying to waste time, I couldn’t decide.
