::A Geek in Korea::

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.

My mother in law is a big time religious woman in her church. She’s been important in church politics and their community programs for a long time. She is a deeply spiritual woman that finds comfort and community in her church. She received word that she was chosen for becoming a deaconess by her church. It was a once in a lifetime event for her, so we needed to be there for the pictures.

We had commitments that barred us from arriving at the beginning of the ceremony. We had to rush, first via subway, then taxi, to this church on the other side of town where the religious event was being held. Having attended some of the other ceremonies related to this church, I wasn’t too worried we’d miss anything. They tend to really drag on and are never in a rush. Just in case, My wife and I were both well dressed running around town trying to make sure we didn’t miss the pictures of the event. I was told that we needed to RUN because if we weren’t in these pictures we’d never live this down.

After all the huffing and puffing, we ended up arriving there while some pastors were giving their speeches before accepting their new positions. There was a LOT of speech giving to be had yet. Everyone was trying to out speak each other. We hadn’t missed anything of importance yet. There were a lot of very hot, very uncomfortable people waiting around for the pictures.

Unlike Korean weddings were people show up for the buffet and go home, all these people were waiting around to get their pictures taken with their relatives in the front of the church, then go home. My mother in law was the LAST person on the list for pictures too due to her placement of alphabetical  order in Hangul. (That’s not the correct word. It’s not the alphabet. Whats the equivalent in Hangul? Hangul order?)

We ended up meeting an Aunt and her children, two college aged cousins. It was good to see some of relatives again that don’t make sarcastic comments to me all the time. The last time I saw relatives was when my mother in law was in the hospital for her spinal surgery and my second oldest uncle (Who I can’t stand most of the time.) said I was working too hard and needed to lose some weight. He even pinched my belly like I was the Pillsbury Dough boy. Hah ha ha. (Ugh.)

I liked the relatives I met at church today a lot more. One of them will be a nurse at the biggest hospital in the city while she studies for a health care job in the United States, and the other is studying Japanese in college. We chatted, and since they had come across town as well and stayed for the entire ceremony, were delerious with hunger. We headed to the church cafeteria to eat since we had a long time before the photos.

Eventually it was our time to take the photos. We walked up, posed as a family, had two pictures taken, then walked off the stage. I know being there was important for my mother in law and everything, but it was a lot of build up for an anti-climatic picture. She said she was happy we made the trip for her too. I don’t know what increased responsibilities her new title brings, but I do know that the same aunt we saw today is going to be doing the same thing at her church soon, and now were expected to be in her pictures too.

The responsibilities for an extended family just never end.

The nerdiness has taken a bizzare twist. Now that one of the members of our D&D group is back in the United States, there is no way for us to effectively play. While he’s back in the States collecting D&D playing accessories and dungeon tiles to really pimp out our gaming experience, we’re back in Korea working on how to make our group extra lethal. I’ve ended up with D&D “homework”, as we work around our player limit testing out how to maximize our strengths in a party by running some test scenarios.

What we discovered switching to D&D 4th edition was that most of the scenarios and encounters that I put the party up against were designed for a part of five adventurers. Scenarios are easily scaled, if we choose, but I ran them for a part of five. I followed the urging of the group to not dumb down or simplify the adventures due to party size. One of the players doubled up and played two characters at the same time, but we were always a adventurer short. It’s like playing a man down in soccer. You are always going to have a whole somewhere in your party, and a group needs to work together to stop from falling behind and being completely exploited by their lack of manpower.

The party was concerned that without tight coordination between players, we would get slaughtered as soon as we started the Living Forgotten Realms campaign. That would be embarrasing.

One of the people in the group wanted some experience in being the Dungeon Master, so he will design some scenarios to test our newly redesigned, ready for Forgotten Realms characters. I’ll also be playing as a character for the first time in 4th edition, handing over all the planning of the monster encounters and everything else to him. I’ve got a Genasi Warlord build that I need to complete before the test scenarios in a few days. Not only do I need to do a single build, I’ve also got multiple levels to plan for, as the test scenarios will be at levels 1, 3, and 5, to see if we are working as a team.

I’ve actually got a really busy weekend, and squeezing in a game, pre-game paperwork, and all the planning and strategy involved in building a character. When did my hobby become work?

I finally received my official ballot for absentee voting. This was nearly a month after I sent the registration form into my county. I guess I did it correctly, because I’m allowed to vote. Anyway, having never actually voted before (secret shame) I think the process has changed for me now that I am an English teacher. One of the best guides I found for voting was from The League of Women Voters.

I used the candidate’s answers to see their qualifications, their style, and also their general philosophy. Since I don’t live in my home county, don’t plan to live in my home state for the next few years, and don’t have any tax burden due to my salary being earned and taxed abroad, most of the issues didn’t affect me directly. They affect my family in some sense, but that’s about it. I’m not taking my civic responsibility lightly however, so I did take more than an hour of my time to vote on each of the local candidates I thought were most responsible.

There were a few qualifications they needed to meet to get my vote. They had to have a website, or answer questions to give me a chance to find more information about them. If they aren’t on the Internet at all, they were instantly disqualified. Other than that, party and past experience weren’t factors in my decision.

The one thing I noticed was that some of the candidates definitely weren’t being elected on the strength of their English grammar. While I am a blogger who exercises the occasional lapse in the strict rules of grammar for humorous, or stylistic choice, I am not a person seeking political office asking for the confidence of the American people.

If a 100 word response to a voting questionnaire has MULTIPLE, GLARING GRAMMATICAL ERRORS, WEIRD FORMATING, OR ANY MISTAKES, there is NO WAY I am going to deem you competent to hold public office. If you can’t write a complete sentence, you don’t deserve my vote. Even with the limitations of 100 words, you need to be able to express yourself coherently. That sort of information is like a resume. Any error should be near instantaneous rejection for the position. If I can write a completely understandable post in Twitter in 140 characters, you have no excuse for not being able to answer a question in a single paragraph.

Some of the mistakes I found might have been typographical in nature if they weren’t deeply structural. I didn’t use grammar as the final arbiter of my vote, but it was a factor. Yes, my English teaching job has finally pushed me over into doing things that 3rd grade teacher you hated in Elementary School might say when you didn’t write a sentence the proper verb tense. “If you write like that….you’ll never be elected to the County Recorder’s office!”

You might have hated that 3rd grade teacher, but low and behold, there are grammar issue voters.

Sad to say, there was more than one occasion where one or more candidates had fluff answers, equal resumes, and multiple grammatical errors. Both candidates were disqualified on my English grammar standard. Formating and other issues then had to be resolved. If you cheat on a 100 word response and use non-standard characters to save space that doesn’t make you look good. Get a better vocabulary or reformulate your platform. Don’t use “+” when you mean “AND”. That’s just lazy.

If a candidate doesn’t know how to use word wrap or bullet points, do they really know what they are doing creating a document? If you don’t have basic computer literacy skills, do I want you crafting documents that affect your constituents? If your website response like molasses, how will you respond when people need to reach you in a crisis?

I know choosing between two evenly matched candidates based partially on grammar is ridiculous, but if all a guy on the other side of the world can find out about you is that you can’t put together a coherent sentence, you get what you deserve if you lose. Sorry.

I gave three tests to the same level of students today. Theoretically they should have all scored around the same on the tests. The students in my first two classes were given two days to prepare. The students in my third class were given TWO WEEKS to prepare because they are not good at English in any metric I have discovered.

With the computer system I had available to me, I could see the median scores after each class. The first class had two overachievers, one or two students in the acceptable range, and three failing students that were lumped around the 50% mark.

The second class, which is larger and has more behavior problems was shifted. The bell curve on this class was about 20% points lower. There were two outliers, but the best students in the second class were only as good as the acceptable students in the first class. The average in the second class was as low as the failing students in the first class, and the worst students in the second class were 20 points below the average students in the first class.

I examined the test and decided to reweigh the test questions. Instead of setting the listening and reading sections evenly for points, I tripled the weight of the part the students did for homework, and counted the listening as a quarter, instead of a half of the test. This was to even out the grades for students that did homework, but suck at listening in class. I thought that if they had prepared even a little bit they could score better.

Unfortunately, the trend continued in the third class. The students in this class were shifted ANOTHER twenty points worse than my second class. The same test, and they were on average 40% worse than the best students earlier in the day. This was after reweighing questions that HEAVILY favored the multiple choice section of the test. I made it easier, and they sucked considerably harder. RANDOM CHANCE scored higher than these students.

I brought in the director because when the class average was hovering around 30%, there HAD to be something going on. The director went student by student in the class and asked them about their excuse. “I had a test!”, “I was busy!”, “I forgot!”, “My dad had me help me do a…(long winded excuse not relevant)”, “I was late to my other class…”. The worst excuse was, “I didn’t study because I don’t care.”

My director flipped out over that one.

Anyway, I’ll have to figure out a solution to the moronic students eventually. It might require the entire class, save one student that overachieved, back another semester to a lower grade. Or they could all just quit in frustration or something. Who knows?

The most expensive things most students handle on a day to day basis outside of a computer is their cellphone. Responsible students get phones so that they can call their parents for rides to academies, or to tell them when they need a ride when they are sick. Irresponsible students also get phones to keep track of their homework when they forget it, or to make sure they are where they are supposed to be. Students as young as six or seven have phones.

The one big thing that can freak a student out is losing their phone. Parents put a lot of trust in their children dropping money on a phone, and if students lose this symbol of trust, they are in deep trouble.

One of my students forgot her phone. She was in panic mode through the entire class. The students were very helpful in trying to jog her memory.

“Did you have the phone in the bathroom? Maybe you flushed it down the toilet by accident!”

“NO!”

One of the students said that if she didn’t find the phone, saying she dropped it in the toilet might still work out for her. She said one of her friends claimed to have dropped a bad phone into a toilet so that her parents would buy a nicer model.

Another boy said that while this might be a good idea, if you can blow dry a phone, some models might work after being dropped if you don’t turn them on until they are completely dry. I thought the idea of talking into a phone you knew had dropped into a toilet seemed disgusting, dry or not.

“Did you have the phone on the bus?”

“No. Yes? I don’t remember.”

The students continued to push the girl. Every five minutes or so, she would stop her work and just say, “OOOOOOhhhh, I can’t STUDY! WHERE IS MY PHONE!”. She had serious separation anxiety. She was also worried about what might happen when she got home.

“Did you have the phone when you were in your mom’s car?”

“Yes, I remember it at that time. I had to send a message.”

I said that she should probably call her mother and ask her to search the car, since it was the last place she remembered having her phone. During the break between classes, she called her mother from the office phone. She told her mom that she didn’t remember where she put her phone. Her mother said she had found it in the car earlier, and that she didn’t need to worry. The girl was overjoyed to hear she hadn’t lost her phone afterall.

Too bad it happened after my class, because she wasted a lot of my time talking about it.

World of Goo

World of Goo is the new hot wunderkind game on Wiiware at the moment. It started as an indie game project called Tower of Goo.It was developed by a small group of people and is outshining the best games on the entire Wii platform at the moment. It’s really outstanding.

It’s a physics based game where you manipulate “goo” as building points. Gravity, stability, and the various different abilities of Goo compete for your attention while you try to reach a point on the level. You have to reach this goo extraction point so that you can collect the delicious Goo for the Goo Corporation. Each level has a completion goal, a higer OCD goal for an even greater challenge, and the better you do, the higher your Tower of Goo can reach! Others can see your dominance via the Internet as well.

It’s the most expensive game on Wiiware, at 1500 points. It’s totally worth it. It’s the game I was most looking forward to playing after Super Smash Brothers Brawl, and Bomberman WiiWare, and it’s delivered BIG TIME. The music, gameplay, and presentation rival the best disc based games. It’s also got really challenging game play that keeps you coming back.

Right now, I’m stuck on the first “real” level of the game. I’ve got to use building Goo and balloon good to keep above a pit of spikes, but below a ceiling of spikes. The balloons need to be grabbed and placed EXACTLY so that I don’t rise and fall too much, and I have to build strategically to have enough left over to win the level. Right now I’ve played the same level for about 30 minutes and failed at different points every time. I’m oh so close to beating it, but I have to perfect my strategy.

It’s very rewarding to figure out how exactly to tackle each level. Even if you get stuck, you can use a limited number of “skips” to go on to different areas. I simply refuse to do that yet. I have not been beaten! There are 48 levels in the WiiWare version. The game is also available via Steam, and from the 2D boy developer’s website (Support their game directly if possible!).

It’s amazing that this is this developers first professional game. They’ll have a high, hard hill to climb if they want to top this venture. I’m eyeing the television every chance I get because I want to go back to playing it.

Now that my most anticipated remaining game of 2008 has come out, I don’t know what else I am looking forward to on Wiiware or on the Wii in general.

This month our apartment is getting a new paint job. This has led to a few annoyances.

Our apartment is on the second floor. This puts us right at the tree line four our windows. When we moved into the apartment, the security guard came over to harass the movers because they were going to put up the lift to our window through a space between the trees. The movers had to climb onto the lift an tape back the branches so that they didn’t damage the trees in front of our apartment.

Fast forward to a few months later, when they decide to paint the apartment. The security guards are in charge of getting the areas around the apartment ready for this procedure. Despite having no power tools, horticultural experience, or any sense of aesthetic taste, the guards handle all the landscaping duties in the apartment complex.

These old gentlemen spent the entire day yesterday absolutely mangling the trees directly outside out apartment. They selected a level, which I think was simply the highest they could reach on a ladder with a saw, and went to town cutting all the trees to the exact same height. It looks like someone gave the trees a buzz cut. The only tree they didn’t destroy was the persimmon tree that’s in front of our living room. They only reason they didn’t mangle that was because they swipe the fruit off that tree to snack on.

The rest of the trees that used to keep the sunlight out of our bedroom in the morning are all hacked back several years of growth. When we wake up in the morning it’s like the sun went supernova outside our window. It’s so bright! Also, we have to keep our frosted windows closed at all time or the children on the playground will get a rude surprise after we finish a shower! Ick!

Even more annoying was their declaration that to seal water damage anyone with an air conditioner mounted on the entrance roof had to disable, disconnect, and move their machine before the painting process started. They said anyone that didn’t do this would be responsible for any water damage the building took. Seeing the cracks in the roof, we decided to call for an estimate.

The air conditioner after service center wanted to charge us 300,000 won for this service! My wife, at my urging, went to complain that the apartment told us we could mount our air conditioner on the roof of the entrance, and that if they were going to charge us to detach it, we would want them to cover part f the cost. No one told us they were going to paint the apartment when we moved in a few months ago. We got permission from a security guard to place it there, so for them to tell us we HAD to move it on our own seemed unfair. Especially since it was so expensive to do, and they weren’t letting us take time to get various estimates.

They told us that we should eat the cost, it was our fault for having the air conditioner installed and put on the entrance. We said that the security guard had told us it was okay. The central office told us to never listen to a security guard, because they don’t know anything about the policy of the apartment. Hmmm, I’ll keep that one in mind the next time the security guard says something to us.

We alerted our neighbor about the policy, and he knew a guy from work that could detach the air conditioner much cheaper off the clock than the company officially allowed. We went in and split the cost of that with them and got our air conditioner unit off the entrance for 1/6 the cost of original estimate.

They are repelling around painting the apartment during the afternoon. The cars in the parking lot are covered in plastic to prevent paint damage. I hope the paint looks good, because right now it’s a total pain in the ass.

There is a website not far from Galleria Timeworld in Daejeon called “Indy” (인디) (Phone: 042-471-7052). It’s not an Indiana Jones themed restaurant, but a really good Indian restaurant. The prices are high end, but the food is oh-so-delicious. One of our friends told us to check this place out. We had gone there the opening weekend and really enjoyed it.

We invited some friends out to meet us at the restaurant this evening. This is the hip new place to eat for foreigners, as nearly every table was filled and there were only a few Korean couples scattered around the place. We waited at the door 30 minutes for a table. Even then, we couldn’t make a reservation for 6 people.They only handle bigger rooms for parties only 10 and up. Otherwise they’ll tell you to wait it out. We had to split the party up into two tables to get in.

Before we went in, I met one of my old coworkers. He was going out for his birthday, but decided against eating at the restaurant because his young boy wasn’t going to be able to eat the spicer dishes. While waiting inside for a table, two of the people in my party saw one of their current coworkers. While walking for desert, another person in our party ran into some old friends on their way to the very same restaurant.

We all got different dishes and some nan, the delicious bread they serve with the curries. I could pretty much eat only buttered nan and be satisfied with the meal, but a mouthwatering curry and some cottage cheese stuffed nan had me stuffed by the end. The different curries were fantastic.  The Tandoori chicken was also not that spicy. The lamb, chicken, and beef were all great, and the dishes my friends recommended were also good. The dishes my wife tried were also completely different and sounded interesting as well.

Despite being absolutely stuffed full of Indian food, we walked to Bennigan’s down the street and ordered a round of “Death By Chocolate”. Despite only ordering dessert, we were also served bread. We barely polished off the chocolate dish and headed home. We asked for bread to take home as a joke, and they actually prepared a set for each person.

We tried to work off all the excess calories by walking home. It was a great meal, and I’d recommend it to anyone that wanted to try some different food.

I’ve gone and joined another social website. Despite the website where I intend to keep posting my personal stories every day, Twitter where my flippant or insubstantial thoughts go, I’ve also joined Facebook. This is the social network of the foreigners I know in Korea. When I say, “Get on Twitter”, they think I’m an ecentric, but the fact that I wasn’t on Facebook pushed me into “leper” like status. After two weeks of debating the pros or cons of yet another social network exposure on my social life, I’ve decided to dip my toes into Facebook.

At the moment, I’ve kept it “Actual Friends Only”. If I don’t find myself comfortable at the idea of visiting your house, or sending you an email about something we share mutually in common, I’m not adding you to my friends list. This means I run with a tight knit crew of people.

In fact, my crew of friends is much tighter than my brothers, who I accidentally invited to Facebook. My brother, who only bought a computer a month ago, signed up and had 55 friends on Facebook in two hours! He might be the key demographic for this sort of social network, but that’s ridiculous. Even if I put EVERY foreigner I knew, met, or ever talked to in Korea, I wouldn’t have that many people on my list. I’ve got about a dozen people I could add, but haven’t, but I’d never reach a social network that big. It is simply impossible for me to ever out socialize my brother. It’s not a competition, but seriously, it’ll never happen.

The current thing that gets me to check Facebook at the moment is rip off of Progressquest. One of my friends found a multiplayer, semi-cooperative version of Progressquest with a Dungeons and Dragons skin on it. You pick characters and equipt them. Then you click a button to put them on an adventure. The game plays in the background while you work. Then, after a certain period of time it reports a success or a failure. The time alerts you to when you will reach the next milestone in your adventure, when you level up, when you get an item. All you control is where your adventurer goes, what they wear, and when they drink their potions. Even that can be automated somewhat.

You’ll get an update on your status that reads something like this:

Encounter 3: Mountain

Three bugbears chased Smee Butterpants across a rope bridge, hurling javelins (and insults) as they ran! Smee Butterpants made an Armor Class check with a difficulty of 26 . . . and rolled 32 Smee Butterpants dodged the javelins (and ignored the name calling) and deftly cut the rope bridge behind him, sending the bugbears down into the rushing river below. He then noticed a partially concealed cave containing the treasures the bugbears had been guarding. Smee Butterpants received 55 XP and 9 gold.

Armor Class check: d20: 11 AC Bonus: +20 Buffs: +1 Total: 32 Difficulty: 26 55 XP 9 Gold

Here you see my Dwarven Warlock, Smee Butterpants, succeeding in his task. I did nothing to make this possible except to send him to his doom. My friends that play this game can buff me, which is a clever mechanism to keep players nagging other people playing. I can also buff my friends so they get bonuses.

Now, each adventure takes a certain about of time, and if I get injured, I can choose to recover my HP by waiting before I undertake them. This means I can start the game in the morning, then go to lunch if I take a beating, and return to full health if I wanted to continue later in the day. The more time spent playing is more time spent leveling…etc. It’s got all the issues of a grind encapsulated in Progressquest, except it’s socialized and more hands on. It’s a total and utter waste of time, but I played it at work all day because it’s no more involved than a click every thirty minutes at most.

Anyway, other than playing around with pictures and digging up a few old friends I’ve lost touch with, I haven’t gotten to deeply involved with Facebook yet. It might stick around for a while, but I’m not giving up the blog.