dagSeoul

dagNotes: on privilege and white power in Korea

2011-12-23T14:55:00.001+09:00

[from my tumblr blog, posted earlier today]

In my last post, I talked about the problem with white people coming to Korea and suddenly becoming conscious of race. Except, they don’t see white power and privilege, which is everywhere on display. They see racist Koreans.

Then, I received an anonymous ask shouting at me for being white and calling out white supremacists and racism. An obvious troll, but one who provides me with an opportunity to discuss why white people experiencing racism like the young woman in the former post are so misinformed.

I’m white. I argue I have a responsibility to betray my inherited privilege and unearned ambition. And not for any reward either. Simply because I, like everyone else, have an ethical obligation to fight the white power structure that constructs individuals as white subjects. White people don’t exist. Whiteness is constructed and protected and inherited. I may be able to benefit most from this racist ideological apparatus that shapes capitalist society, but I should reject it. It’s a moral obligation, in my opinion.

And as some folks are claiming, I’m not doing this to point the finger at white privilege. I’m actually trying to examine how it works for myself and in my life, and I’m writing about it. DagSeoul isn’t a “white people are privileged” blog. So, please stop sending me stupid shit in my ask-box about that.

***

I don’t go around claiming I’ve experienced racism in the manner most white people do. Most talk about angry black people, hateful hispanics, crazy Koreans—jealous others whose envy for power causes them to hate their whiteness so much that they act in a racist manner. Of course, that’s utter nonsense. It’s bullshit. That’s not racism. Yelling at whiteness, hating whiteness, having a problem with white people isn’t always racist. It’s a sign of white power. It’s a response to white supremacy.

I play football almost every Saturday in Korea. I live in a Korean neighborhood, so all my teammates are Koreans. They’re all men. They’re almost all younger than me. I’m bigger than all of them. Stronger than many. I’m not the most skilled footballer, but I’ve played since 1978. I’ve got skill. I can score. I’m fast. I know and love the game. And, I can run all day. When a bald (I shave my head) and bearded white guy is booking down the field with the ball, it’s intimidating. A lot of Korean guys are super-fit and strong, but smaller than me. When I run into them at full speed, I feel it, but they really feel it. And I play a much more physical style of football than Koreans do. Fans of the game will understand this. Most guys love it when I show up with my Korean teammates to play. They talk to me on the field. It’s fun. But it’s not always fun.

When I first arrived, a colleague took me around to meet various clubs in the area. Word got around rather quickly that there was a foreigner who wanted to play and he was good. I got asked to play by my team. I was invited. I considered myself lucky. I really figured I’d have to find foreigners to play with, but I wanted so much to play with Koreans. It’s one of the reasons I was excited about coming here. Anyway, I felt accepted. In a few months, I had twenty-five younger brothers. It was a wonderful feeling.

One of the teams we regularly played often got very mad at my teammates that I was playing so well. It appeared that way to me. I didn’t get it. I’ve since learned that some Korean players think its unfair that they should have to play a foreigner. I’m big and strong and can hurt them. I don’t hurt them, but we’re talking intimidation here. I had so intimidated a couple of players that they couldn’t contain their frustrations any longer. After a day of playing together, they confronted me and my team. We almost had a brawl. My teammates were standing up for me. I was pulling guys away from one another. And one player on the other team yelled, “Yankee, Go home!” Some of us laughed. Some of my teammates wanted to fight. The oldest players stepped in and yelled at everyone. My wife had showed up to watch. She was very upset.

Simple story, right? I play. I play with Koreans. I play well. A little physical, but nothing dirty. I score goals. My team wins a lot. The frustrated players on the other team blame the foreigner for fucking up the peace. One guy says something insulting. Many white people would call it racist. Dude’s a hater. It’s not even racist.

Once, I parked my scooter in front of a cafe and the owner told me to move it somewhere else. She didn’t want it in front of her shop. I told her it was legal. She yelled at me for being a spoiled foreigner. Many white people would call it racist. But. It’s not even racist.

I’ve been involved in pushy moments in the crowded subway where I’ve been yelled at in Korean, called out as a rude foreigner. Many white people would call it racist. But. It’s not even racist.

Koreans who call me out for doing things Koreans often do and explicitly scolding me as a foreigner are often referred to by white people in Korea as racist Koreans. They’re not racists.

White people love to see racism against them. And why not. White power works that way. White people are raised to feel precious and deserving of good treatment. They deserve respect. Why would anybody pick on them because of who they are?

Fact is, there are haters in Korea. The longer I live here, on the other hand, the more I recognize my white privilege is in full effect here. And the rudeness with which I’m treated at times simply requires a little patience and understanding. This might sound patronizing, but it’s not. After all, I was brought here and treated well because of who I am, treated well in a manner that the majority of Koreans will never experience.

I’m often asked, Why would you come to Korea? Koreans talk about their country being no bigger than a booger (우리나라는 코딱지 만큼…) or no bigger than a palm (우리나라는 손바닥 만큼…). Why would I come to a place most Koreans can’t leave? Well, the answer is because I’m privileged. That’s the answer. The humiliating aspect of that answer is its correlation: I can leave whenever I want to. In other words, I can go home. I have a place to go other than here. I can return. That’s what Koreans see me as sometimes, but especially when they’re annoyed at me. They are confronted with privilege. And they sometimes take it out on me. It’s not racism. Try telling that to many white people in Korea, though.

I’d have to be a real dick to deny this privilege. That guy yelling “Yankee, go home” at me is reaching for something to say at all in the face of my belligerent presence in his life. He was being a dick, but he can’t speak English and he yelled the one insult in English he knew might hurt my feelings. The power he feels that oppresses him in a daily manner is a problem with Korean culture, centuries of oppression. Shit I don’t get. But I’ve added another element. Now he has to play soccer, on his day off, with a white guy who reminds him of a specific and painful lack of privilege and I’m going to knock him down, too. I’d be a dick not to expect some sort of response.

Disappearer

2011-12-08T13:51:00.001+09:00

well, i have been writing and reading and working towards my short return to the states next year
when i'll attempt to defend my dissertation and wrap up my business at university of denver before returning to korea.
until then, posting here will be sparse.

i post daily on my dagseoul tumblr blog. i have a large community of readers there. if you're on tumblr, follow me.

i'll likely pick up posting on this blog when i return to writing about pedagogy and begin teaching again.

right now, i'm a jobless writer. writing.

DagSound: Burn Out Session, No5

2011-11-07T21:06:00.000+09:00

DagSound: Burn Out Session, No5
Download it or stream it after the jump.

Playlist:

DJ Pantshead “The Good, the Bad, the Freak”
Evolution Control Committee “No Time for Yes”
Beastie Boys “Cooky Puss”
UTFO “Split Personality”
Jungle Brothers “Because I Got It Like That”
Boogie Down Productions “My Philosophy”
Erik B & Rakim “Follow the Leader”
MC Lyte “Lyte as a Rock”
3rd Bass “The Gas Face (feat Zev Luv X)”
A Tribe Called Quest “Excursions”
De La Soul “Bitties in the BK Lounge”
DJ Quick “Loked Out Hood”
Biz Markie “Just a Friend”
Big Daddy Kane “Smooth Operator”
Steady B “I Got Cha”
Salt N Peppa “My Mic Sounds Nice”
UTFO “Roxanne Roxanne”
Techmaster P.E.B. “Bassgasm”
GZA “0% Finance”
King Geedorah “Krazy World (Feat Gigan)”
Mos Def “Mathematics”
Wu-Tang Clan “Shame On a Nigga”
Dalek “Blessed are they who bash your children’s heads against a rock”
Dalek “No question”
De La Soul “Stakes is High”
DJ Pantshead “D’oh Yeah The Slurp”
Evolution Control Committee “Star Spangled Bologna”

Social inequality worsening in South Korea

2011-10-25T12:49:00.000+09:00

Social inequality worsening in South Korea

Ben McGrath's great article reminds us about Korea's a particularly cruel austerity measure for Korean workers called "job sharing" that, as it turns out, has done nothing to relieve unemployment problems here. It's not hurting corporate profits, though. Check it out.

Job sharing can be advantageous for employees. It's not hard to think of the reasons for it working well for certain kinds of workers and the challenges it presents a employers and employees. However, job sharing is not good for Korean workers. It's used here to produce increased profit in corporations during a weak economic cycle. Employee wages do not increase, employment apparently increases, productivity increases, profits increase. It's a way to make employees bear the burden of austerity on behalf of their employers who bear little if any at all.

Like American workers, South Korean workers have been forced to take on more and more debt due to declining wages. According to figures from the National Tax Service last August, per capita earnings for the lowest 20 percent of workers liable for general income tax decreased by 35 percent between 1999 and 2009.

In no small part, this decline in wages came from casualisation of employment. The number of irregular workers—workers without contracts—has risen sharply since 1998. Today, more than half of the workforce, or 17 million people, are considered irregular, earning an average of just 1.35 million won a month ($1,145), or 57 percent of the regular average wage. Irregular workers are also subjected to workplace discrimination and firing at the whim of employers.

The chief architect of this “labour flexibility” was Democrat President Kim Dae-jung, elected in 1998, who imposed the conditions set by the International Monetary Fund for a $10 billion bailout in the midst of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.

Kim’s successor, Roh Moo-hyun, continued to develop the Democratic Party’s anti-working class policy, introducing the falsely named Irregular Worker Protection Act in 2007. Employers were required to offer contracts to workers who remained for two years. However, companies exploited loopholes that allowed them to fire their irregular workers before the completion of their two years. After Lee came to power in 2008, he maintained the loopholes.

The result has been a rapid expansion of cheap labour. International Labour Organisation statistics show that workers earning two-thirds less than median wage comprise 25.6 percent of the workforce, compared to 24.8 percent in the US and 15 percent in Japan.

The so-called “poor class”—defined by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development as households earning less than 50 percent of the median income—increased to 3.52 million or over 20 percent of the total in 2009, double the OECD average of 10.6 percent. The so-called middle classes, earning 50-150 percent of the median income, declined from 60.4 percent in 2003 to 55.5 percent in 2009, according to Statistics Korea.

By sharp contrast, the top corporate executives—including President Lee, a former Hyundai CEO—have made extraordinary fortunes. The 2011 list of the 40 richest individuals in South Korea saw a record of 21 US dollar billionaires, up from 11 in 2010 and 5 in 2009. Last year, they added more than $20 billion to their collective wealth, now worth $65.6 billion.

Samsung’s Lee Kun-hee is No.1, with net wealth of $9.3 billion, ahead of Hyundai Motor’s Chung Mong-koo, whose fortune jumped 80 percent to $7.4 billion last year. That was not the most dramatic rise. Nexon online gaming owner Kim Jung-ju leapt 260 percent to $2.06 billion, while Mirae Asset Management Group’s Park Hyeon-joo tripled his worth to $1.5 billion.

Sections of the ruling elite are warning about the explosive consequences of this sharp polarisation between the powerful corporate elite and millions of poorly-paid workers. Former Premier Chung Un-chan warned in July that the gap between rich and poor had reached such a “grave level” that there was a “possibility of our society collapsing.” This was “a more serious matter than relations with North Korea,” he said.

dagSound: Burn Out Sessions, No4

2011-10-21T23:25:00.001+09:00

I've just uploaded Burn Out No4: Bombed Out Lovers to dropbox. You can find it on my tumblr or on dagSound. Download it or stream it (if you have the most recent browsers.)

Enjoy And Play It Loud.

Something Rachel Maddow Doesn't Know

2011-10-14T14:46:00.000+09:00

While talking about Korean President Lee Myung Bak, fucking Rachel Maddow said the Korean language is “written in the most part using Chinese characters" during the last segment of her show while making a stupid point about pronouncing the President's name.

Apparently, Maddow’s writers didn’t even bother typing “korean and language” into Google. Hangul Day was just last week, for crying out loud. 565 years ago, Korea created its own alphabet. Hangul should not be confused with Hanja, the Chinese characters Koreans use that Maddow seems to be thinking about but knows nothing about. Maybe she was thinking about 19th Century Korea when Chinese was still prevalent here? I don’t know. Maybe she was trying to refer to the fact that many Korean personal names are based on Hanja? I don’t know. She certainly wasn’t thinking about a good portion of the 20th Century when Japan occupied Korea and outlawed Hangukmal forcing Koreans to take Japanese names and to learn Japanese.

It doesn’t matter. Korean is most certainly not “written in the most part using Chinese characters.” It wouldn’t have taken more than a minute of work to figure this out so that Maddow could make her stupid point about how we spell his name, Lee, is not how we pronounce his name in Korea, “eee”.

FTW. Americans are such idiots when it comes to Korea. Maddow should know better because she’s got an army of fans that hang on her every word. We’re still engaged in war in Korea. We have had our American hands involved with shaping this peninsula for over 100 years, often causing intense suffering and harm because of our actions: turning our backs on Korea when Japan occupied, waging war in their country, turning our backs on democracy fighters in Gwangju in 1980. We should know about Korea.

If she wanted to say something cute, nerdy and interesting about the surname 이 (most commonly pronounced “Lee” in English and pronounced “eee” in Korean) she could have talked about all the variations Chinese and Korean immigrants used. For example: Lee, Li, Yee, Yi, Rhee are all the same name.

Here's the segment:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Pessimistic Whiteness: It's your privilege catching up to you

2011-10-14T13:41:00.001+09:00

Life is getting hard for white people in the United States, and they’re not happy about it. The government is to blame, right? Not so fast.

What happens when white people become class conscious? In other words, what happens when a white family wakes up from the dream of upward mobility to find that they, like all the non-white families around them, aren’t quickly moving up the social ladder?

Apparently, they give up hope for a better life while their nonwhite neighbors believe, with a little time, they’ll be better off than they are today. In my opinion, what we see in this story is a desire for whites to hang on to their whiteness. In order to cling to whiteness, they give up their optimistic looking forward to wealth and general, social upward-mobility. They say, At least I’m white. That statement embodies white pessimism.

The research is proving Lillian Smith’s claim about the bargain poor whites make with wealthy whites about wealth and whiteness. She published Killers of the Dream in 1949. Guess it takes the popular culture 63 years or so to wake up to the reality that when white people realize they aren’t “getting rich,” they become satisfied with their social and economic status and begin relying on whiteness itself to provide its unique and unearned privileges. Others must look forward to the potential for upward mobility in spite of its difficult achievement because they aren’t born privileged, and they know it. They’ve didn’t inherit access to privilege and they realize they must work hard if they’re to have any opportunity to achieve. They can remain, or be seen to remain, hopeful. White people feel it’s owed to them. When they don’t get success, they become (get) pessimistic.

Check out this article from The Atlantic, “Why Whites Are More Pessimistic About Their Future Than Minorities”. The Atlantic doesn’t put it like I did above, but that’s not surprising. I think it’s an operation of white power: we’re encouraged to look at non-white families to see what’s different about white families. Such narratives provide us, as a culture, with the notion that we are integrated. Of course, white people are pessimistic. We are taught to expect (to inherit) privilege. I’m not saying The Atlantic article is racist, so don’t get me wrong. I’m just pointing out that an article (that examines white pessimism) is mostly written about non-white people. White is always in contrast with others. It’s always non-essential to the narratives that describe it. Dig?

Why do white people blame the government? Because the bargain they make with white privilege is that they will never blame wealthy white Capitalists, the actual culprits. SEE ALSO, crass libertarianism, capitalist libertarians, Ron Paul dittoheads. These people have a radical certainty that they, too, have a natural right to achieve the wealth rich folks merely inherit.

Ignore my crappy Hangukmal, but not my privilege.

2011-10-05T16:19:00.001+09:00

I'm working hard at being a better Korean speaker and reader. I'm trying to learn. I'm in my fourth year here and I've lived in the same neighborhood for three years. I feel at home here.

I'm trying to learn. I'm in my fourth year. I've lived in my neighborhood for three years. It's very hard to go from knowing beginning Korean to knowing complex Korean--what we call intermediate Korean here. So difficult. Especially out of school. The learning curve for beginning Korean is not too high. If you speak Korean as often as possible and practice with friends, you can do well because Korean has strict rules that once learned and understood help instruct more than confuse. And the longer you live here, you learn to mask your foreign accent and sound a little more Korean. But once you've mastered small talk in Hangukmal, the learning curve becomes difficult.

I'm excited, though. Next year, I'll be in school full-time, five days a week at Sungkyunkwan University. I get a family discount on tuition--thanks wife!--and am going to take advantage of it while I'm unemployed. Goal is to be at a good level of spoken Korean next Summer. I want to be able to use Korean and resort to English. That's not as easy as it sounds.

It's hard because I feel super-guilty the longer I stay. I want to talk to my friends with more than small talk. It's my responsibility. I feel obligated. This obligation-feeling, the impulse to be obligated, is very Korean. It's not something we learn in the US. I feel obligated to the folks in my neighborhood to learn Korean. I could reject the obligation, as most of the foreigners who live here do. To be fair, most do try to learn survival Korean and some learn the next level, small-talk Korean. And many succeed. But it takes dedication to be good (intermediate,) even a little schooling. So, it takes investment and dedication.

I just went for a drink to the corner store and the clerk wanted to know why it's been a while since he saw me. I told him I've been studying. He asked where. I told him, no I'm writing at home. He then asked me what exactly I was doing. He didn't understand because I confused him. Studying at home? For what? Well, that's hard to explain because it's technical. And I can do it with Korean and English, which he can't understand because he can't use English. Now, I feel obligated to learn so I can tell him.

I'd never have felt this way in the US, for example, felt obligated to learn Spanish to speak with my neighbors in West Denver. I had twenty years to do that and not once did I say it with a sense of obligation, I should learn Spanish. And not one native English speaker would ever feel obligated. It's a choice. I wanted to learn Spanish, but I studied Latin. (Why the fuck did I study Latin. What a dork.)

That I still have the option to invest and dedicate myself to learning Korean language while living and working in Korea while my Korean neighbors are obligated to learn English is a sign of my privilege. And this is something many foreigners simply don't care to understand.

Annoying things white people do when they get to Korea

2011-09-19T14:56:00.000+09:00

Arrive in Korea and insist they're an oppressed minority and discover prejudice, bigotry, exaggeration, hatred, and inequality everywhere around them. Fucking Korea!

Then, they start blogging about how bad Korea is: they post on ESL forums; they post on expat forums. The time spent is Korea becomes an examination of popular culture and media--the way Koreans see and represent foreigners. When you search for theses authors on the google, you will learn that their activism only developed after they arrived in Korea. And the ones who've left, well, they stopped their vital work informing against hate and oppression as soon as they got home.

White Power Douchebaggery, even in Korea. This shit is what I call the privilege of being able to leave minority status behind enables and emboldens thousands of privileged white mother-fuckers to speak out against non-white haters. It's Safe Activism: thousands of white people each year finding a place, like Korea, to displace their own privilege and to project their own guilt and shame.

dagSounds: Burn Out No3 "Live Fast Love Hard Die Young"

2011-09-15T21:09:00.001+09:00

Just posted the latest Burn Out over on my Tumblr blog and dagSound. Check it out. Can download it from my Dropbox or stream it in your browser.

Burn Out No3 Playlist:

Eat “Communist Radio”
Classic Ruins “1+1<2”
Anti-Nowhere League “I Hate People”
Trodskids “Gueule d’Enfer”
Red Kross “Everyday There’s Someone New”
New Bomb Turks “Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young”
The Cramps “The Crusher”
The Compulsive Gamblers “Pepper Spray Boogie”
April March & The Makers “I Just MIght Crack”
Thee Headcoats “I Don’t Like the Man I Am”
The Pretty Things “Buzz the Jerk”
Scientists “Human Jukebox”
The Birthday Party “Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow)”
Foetus “The Throne of Agony”
Radio Birdman “Murder City Nights”
The Flamin Groovies “Teenage Head”
Elf Power “Drug Store” (live @ WFMU)
Neats “6”
Nick Lowe “So It Goes”
Kenny “I Don’t Miss You”
Smoke “My Friend Jack”
The Dirty Shames “I Don’t Care”
The Drones “I’m Down Today”
Elvis Ph’o’ng “Bai Ca Ngong” (The Crazy Song)
Dara Pusrita “To Love Somebody”
P.P. Arnold “God Only Knows”
펄 시스터즈 ”커피한잔” (The Pearl Sisters “A Cup of Coffee”)
산울림 - “나 어떡해” (Sanullim “What am I going to do?”)
Michel Polnareff “Time will Tell”
Mary Weiss with The Reigning Sound “Don’t Come Back”
The Equals “Baby Come Back”
The Equals “Police on My Back”
King Kahn & The Shrines “No Regrets”
The Ponys “Let’s Kill Ourselves”

Alien Registration Transformation & Changed My Address

2011-08-31T10:43:00.001+09:00

Happily was E-2;
am now F-1.

It's good for two years and multi-entry.

Worth noting is that the old address system is not used by government offices any longer. Even though I gave the address I've used for three years, the one printed on the back of my ARC card corresponds to the new street name and building number. My villa number remains the same.

Last year Korea standardized addresses nationwide, affording each street a name. Before that, Koreans relied on building numbers assigned to places within neighborhoods, within districts, within cities to find people. It could be difficult. Blue street signs and blue building placards appeared almost overnight. It appears we can begin using them for official things like mail. Probably always could, but you never know.

So my address is now:

[Street Name]로26가길 70-0 B3호 (Street Name +Street# +Building# + Unit#)
관악구 (District)
서울특별시 (City)

It's simpler. I like it. Easy to find people anywhere in this maze of a city.

With an appointment and all the paperwork handy, the Visa process isn't too difficult here. I stress appointment. My replacement at my high school spent what sounds like a few hours at immigration without an appointment. And the school made him go the day all his fellow newbies to Korea were certain to show up with their new colleagues to wait. Bad idea.

Other great thing about this F-1. No testing. None.

On CISK

2011-08-19T18:30:00.003+09:00

So, I hear somebody's raking in the points and publicly airing his dirty laundry. I'm not surprised;

I wonder if she got pissed that he made her sign a contract in triplicate.

Thee Dreaded Sojourn to Korean Immigration

2011-08-19T18:08:00.000+09:00

This post is for anyone coming to or new to Korea.

I was fortunate to have a Vice Principal at my high school back in 2008 who had lived in Europe and Saudi Arabia prior to returning to Korea to work at my school before leaving again to work in Russia. He expected how I’d react to Korean bureaucracy and made sure to accompany me to immigration and teach me how to maneuver through the system. In addition, he foreshadowed many of the conflicts I’d have with Korean co-teachers, and though he was strict with me, he didn’t permit my stubborn colleagues to blame everything on me either.

What many foreigners fail to realize when working the immigration system—well, any Korean bureaucracy—is that to get what you want, especially if your request is at all different and/or strange, you must be pushy. In addition, you must have followed all the rules. If you miss a step, there’s no mercy and no help.

You really don’t have a choice. I have to admit that it took me a while to figure it out. Being pushy is not something I like doing as it was culturally drilled into my head to not be pushy because being pushy is always rude. It’s a necessity here. In fact, the more Hangukmal I learn, the more I realize that it often works to my benefit to be pushy in Hangukmal. In English, pushiness always sounds abusive. In Korean, it often sounds desperate. I think we can call it earnest pushiness. It’s more than demanding insistence. Earnest pushiness permits a speaker to share his or her frustration without blaming the listener(s).

And I’ve discovered that when I’m polite and pushy—in other words, desperate—I begin to receive sympathy from the Koreans who are tasked to help me and who work customer service. Hangukmal permits being polite and pushy at the same time. English doesn’t. Especially to Koreans who might not speak English well. Pushiness in English always sounds shrill and is always unwelcome.

So, you have to be pushy. In addition, you have to recognize when something begins to happen for you, when things start to go your way, it’s best to thank the person helping you and tell them you appreciate their working for you. Even if you’re annoyed at the help, thank them both for helping you and for understanding your confusion. It’s worth it.

Today, I had to go to immigration for two reasons. My annual visa is set to expire in less than 7 days. Because I will remain in Korea as an unemployed guest, my current alien registration ID is worthless. As of the 25th, I’d be here illegally without a new contract from my school or another educational institution. I needed to apply for an extension of stay, which gives me 30 additional days simply for showing up to apply. In addition, I needed to apply for a Visiting Spouse Visa, which will permit me to come and go from Korea at my leisure and for as long as my wife is employed here.

The first step is a common one for foreigners between jobs. With the most recent immigration regulations, Immigration expects me to show up at the end of my legal stay and request an extension. They’ll automatically give me 30 days for applying. The second request, however, is strange—not strange that I’m married and want to stay in Korea, but strange because my wife is a gyopo and American citizen and not a Korean citizen. Gyopos are one kind of persons with Korean ancestry who aren’t Korean citizens. My wife is a second generation American. Her parents left Korea in the late 70s. She gets special visa status in Korea that other people with Korean ancestry, say third generation Korean-Americans, would not get. My request is strange because most of the people requesting Visiting Spouse visas are not Americans married to Americans, they’re Americans married to Koreans.

As I explained above, strange requests lead to problems. It’s a rule. We spent an hour insisting that our request be processed and, in the end, it was. If we weren’t pushy, we would have left and would have had to return with unnecessary documents and our instructions from other agencies who’d have to have corrected the initial Immigration Officer’s mistake. But you simply cannot tell somebody they’re not correct without encountering problems.

Korean skepticism can be a tough nut to crack. The Immigration Officer we worked with was a kind, older man who was genuinely interested in solving what he thought was a real problem with my request, but the problem really was in his mind. He simply didn’t understand why we were making that specific request. When we got him to help us rather than attempt to brush us off, he lightened up in spite of all we had to do to convince him of our worthy and legal request.

First, we had to be pushy. Pushy to get the ball rolling on our request. Pushy to make sure he didn’t ignore our legal marriage certificate. Pushy to get him to understand my wife really is a Gyopo. There comes a time in these complex social situations in Korea, when the person one works with relents—not because he or she gives up or admits being incorrect but because one has proven genuine interest, concern and effort. When the Immigration Officer began working with us instead of trying to get us to go away, we knew everything would work out to our benefit.

This is similar to what happened when we worked with real estate agents to find an apartment to rent. The people we worked with insisted that we’d have to accept high fees and high prices for what we wanted. Basically, we were told we’d never find what we wanted. We insisted otherwise and politely debated for about fifteen minutes. We were insistent, then pushy, then demanding. We wanted to try, dammit. Amazingly, after the debate, we received many wonderful offers, eventually finding a new landlord who is kind to foreigners in a part of town without many foreign residents and at a very reasonable rent and deposit. If we were new to Korea, we’d never had made it that far. We’d have left and likely headed to the expat ghettos around Itaewon. Exactly where we didn’t want to live. You have to be pushy.

When the Immigration Officer sent my wife to pay the tax for my VISA request, I was elated. Having been to the office twice before, I knew this meant my request would be processed. I took advantage of time alone with him to insist that I apologize for my confusion and am grateful for his effort to successfully help us. I said it properly and in Korean, and even went so far to explain that I needed his help because I’m still new around here. Three years in Korea seems like a long time, but it isn’t. He was positively charmed and blew my apology off. He didn’t need it except he did. He smiled through the rest of the process, even filling out our paperwork. He asked about my hometown, my university, if we’re having children. I’d made a friend.

I hate this process. It’s stressful. And I often forget my role in it, getting unnecessarily anxious at the start of the process and then fulfilling my role both linguistically and socially. But if I’m unwilling to participate in it, I have a much more difficult time successfully navigating Korean bureaucracy. Last year, the process was easy: I had a new contract; I needed a new VISA. Pay my taxes. Get my VISA.

Korean Immigration can be difficult. But it doesn’t need to be. It’s best on your first visit to bring a Korean citizen along and preferrably one who works at your job and is your superior. The office treated me like gold when I was being ushered around with the Vice Principal of my school. We were in and out in twenty minutes.

Always go with a reservation. This means making a reservation maybe a two to four weeks prior, so you can get the time and day you want. When you have a reservation, you can simply step up the Online Reservation Window For Foreigners. There’s never a long wait. Walking in to Immigration is asking for stress you don’t need.

If you notice a free window and you have a question, go up and ask. You might get instant help. Step up and be pushy. Today, I arrived an hour early. My agent was not busy. I went to him, sat down, told him I had a reservation and was early and wanted to get the process over with. He helped me. There were several other foreigners looking helpless, waiting in the background, not sure what to do. That hesitance stresses Koreans out. Never assume that the Immigration Officers speak enough English and comfortably enough to approach you and ask if you need help. You have to ask. And you have to know how to ask. A Korean friend or coworker can write the requests down for you if you’re brand new. Simply give the written note to the Immigration Officer.

Have cash. 50,000 to 80,000 in manwon notes. You’ll have to pay taxes (30-50,000) and you may have to pay for delivery of documents and/or photos. You have to pay with cash at Immigration. They will not accept bank cards of any kind. Same goes for the Department of Motor Vehicles and when you want to get registration for a vehicle at a District Office. Business like this is always handled in cash.

If you’re alone, bring the instructions with you. If an Officer insists you don’t have proper paperwork, you can illustrate that you do.

PS: do not visit the ESL Cafes like Dave’s ESL to learn what to do in these difficult situations. Those forums are full of haters who will often mislead you because they are misinformed and have an agenda. If you’re reading this and need help, ask me. I’ll make sure you get accurate information and the help you need. And I won’t shit on Korea while doing it.

dagSounds: BURN OUT Sessions

2011-08-03T22:50:00.001+09:00

Burn Out No2: Other Mental Objects is now available on dagSound. Check it out.

Korean Wave is Corporate Corruption

2011-08-02T10:17:00.004+09:00

I'm no fan of K-Pop. It's all shitty lyrics, stolen measures, awful samples, horrid dancing, insipid fashion, and happens to be strictly for children and pedophiles. I know, I hate it, right?!

Provocative rants aside, K-Pop is actually very Korean Wave, which is the idealized representation of nationalist sentiment in Korea as represented in the free market. If you could turn Korean culture into a transparent commodity that could be consumed by purchasing any object made in Korea to be distributed off-peninsula, then you'd have the ideal 한류 (Hallyu) Object. I'd say, K-Pop is an attempt at producing and distributing such an object. Korean Wave is stocked with corporations intent on exploiting markets, often via intentional and direct corruption of the market. In the music scene in Korea, it's called 증회. English speakers will know it as payola.

The Korean economy is often hailed by Koreans as strong as if by law they must say that it is strong. If we don't say it is strong, then it can't be strong. It's the thing I dislike most about life here. Sometimes it's as if there's no real world of consequence away from the peninsula. There's a grand delusional vision of The World that I don't understand in spite of witnessing its regulated distribution to citizens here. Although it's undoubtedly growing, the economy's strength is incredibly inflated. The fact is, much of its touted strengths are artificial and controlled. And part of that control exists in corruption.

I'm not going to delve into this too much, but it's rather obvious that the Korean government has its hands full regulating corporate corruption on the peninsula.

Here's a new story in The Economist:

Corruption in Korean pop music

K-ola

WITH its over-reliance on manufactured teen pop, and a leave-nothing-to-chance managerial style reminiscent of Phil Spector (minus the murder), there are obvious parallels between “K-Pop” and the American music industry of the 1950s and 60s. And perhaps now another box can be checked: the practice of bribing one’s way onto the charts. That's payola, or 증회 in Korean.

Twenty-nine people, mainly radio and cable-TV staff, have been arrested on suspicion of accepting cash payments in return for airplay or fraudulent chart positions. New artists and their managers, keen to start their careers off with a hit, were the most frequent customers: Incheon Metropolitan Police believe that between April 2009 and May of this year, around a hundred wannabe singers paid a total of 150m won ($143,000) to several producers and the chairman of a cable-TV company. Such sums are dwarfed by the 400m won or so allegedly collected by the operator of a website that compiles a chart based on the number of radio plays each single receives. According to police, the unnamed 60-year-old took the money from singers and pop managers, promising six-month stays in his dubious top ten, for a price of 38m won each. (Read the rest of the article on The Economist's site.)

Don't get the wrong idea. I love it here. I hate nationalism. Even the left wing in Korea is awash in nationalist sentiment. I hate that. To be clear: K-Pop, for me, represents the pinnacle of corporate-driven, nationalist, commercial music--vacuous, meaningless, talentless, over-produced bullshit. In other words, all hype, all image. I'll shut up about it because it'll ruin my day. There's a ton of talent in Korea's various underground scenes and popular music history. You'd never know it, though.

Nobody creates jobs. That's Mr. Nobody to you, Mr. Wittgenstein

2011-08-01T09:23:00.002+09:00

Stop using the term "job-creators" to address capitalists and entrepreneurs. People don't own businesses because they want to create jobs. They own businesses because business owners are permitted to profit through the exploitation of labor when and only when employees cooperate in their exploitation in exchange for agreed upon benefits such as safe working conditions and health insurance that they might not otherwise be able to afford. Cooperating employers and employees create jobs.

So let's get this straight. Let's begin using language properly. Let's think about what we say. And when you hear somebody say this, let's appropriately respond.

1. The Free Market, not as we want it to be, but as it is. We should insist that family, friends, teachers, media, and politicians properly talk about the market. As it stands, in our market, we don't--some would say, we should not--do things for others, we do with others, as in alongside others. When capitalists tell you something that clearly goes against their own principles, it's OK to admit they're lying for a reason. After all, Capitalists believe that a free market works best when people act according to their own desires without interest in others, in society, in anything actually. Capitalists believe that through this self-interested behavior and the liberty it establishes that the most happiness for a greatest number of people will result. The market, then, is said to promote a liberal social order that cultivates and nurtures our free society without the demand for much regulation. In this neoclassical framework, this Austrian dream of capitalism, there is no such person as a job creator. Thus, we live in a society where people cooperate with one another for their own benefit, not the benefit of their partners.

2. Ethics. It's unethical to permit a wealthy minority to insist that employment and labor is a measure of their magnanimity. As I've already noted, it's a lie. But it's an especially damaging lie because it's meant to manipulate the cooperation between employers and employees. It insists that the wealthy are the elite and the sine qua non for democratic culture. In other words, it's a veiled threat. It's anti-democratic. It recalls feudalism.

3. Unearned Ambition. Moreover, no one would think to call laborers "profit-creators" and distribute propaganda via popular media that states taxing workers disencourages their desire to work. And we know why. We heap unearned praise on the wealthiest and unearned scorn on the poorest without much critical thought. I have two things to say about this. The working classes--and middle class, whatever that means nowadays--do pay a greater share of their profit in taxes than do their employers. We know this because wealthy people have many more ways to create more wealth. Working class folks have their labor and that's pretty much it. When we permit discussions about taxation to become discussions about value and labor, we're cheating the poor. And we're being patently unfair. Wealthy people should pay more taxes. They make more money. It's no accident that talk about the job creators is always parallel to the discussion about how much more in taxes wealthy people pay compared to poorer people and how unfair that is.

Rain Rain Go Away

2011-07-28T10:16:00.003+09:00

Just saying: since June 22, Korea has received approximately 87% of the anticipated annual perception. And quite a bit of that has fallen in the last 48 hours.

Floods, sewage, power outages, landslides, crippled public transportions, and drownings are as expected. What's different in Seoul (than the expected list of tragedies and incidences in the wake of a massive storm,) is that millions of commuters still struggle to get to work and school. When people should be looking after their families and property, helping their neighbors, they're all trying to get to work and study.

In Seoul, this means people stranded on expressways on top of their cars and in flooded subways. One of my students, yesterday, waded through her flooded neighborhood, from her flooded home, to get to school only to cry and apologize for missing my class and ask for my phone number. Afterwards, she returned to home. No kidding. What stupid parent sent her through the sewage to get my phone number and apologize?

It's upsetting to think that thousands and thousands of people are expected to put their lives on the line to beat their bosses to work and teachers to the classrooms in these circumstances.

Of course, I'm addressing students and business men and women. I'm not criticizing the thousands of business owners all over Korea for whom storms like this are potentially permanently financially devastating, who cannot afford to close for even one day.

My Rain

2011-07-27T09:49:00.003+09:00

So, this is what the last week of the rainy season looks like this year. Crazy storm hit yesterday and is still raging.

It reportedly rained over 70mm, around 3 inches, during a two-hour storm late yesterday afternoon. We were stuck in Hyehwa waiting for the rain to stop enough for us to ride the scooter home. But yesterday's sudden downpour is nothing compared to the early morning storm.

The storm that began in the earliest hours today and thrashed us with early morning lightning and thunder for 90 minutes has almost certainly dumped yesterday's rain two times over.

I put on my swimming trunks and cleaned the walls and windows outside the apartment that were filthy from Seoul's daily dirt, and beginning to mold and mildew from the two months of rainy season weather. That kind of green is not welcome.

According to estimates, it'll have rained somewhere around 600-700mm by Thursday when the storm is supposed to begin to clear out. That's around a foot of rain in 48 hours. I think those estimates were made at the beginning of the storm and may increase.

Three o'clock yesterday afternoon, the humidity was intense and as the sun set it cooled off quick producing intense storms. The picture above is typical of what happened around the city. It's the heaviest rainstorm in Seoul since I moved here in 2008.

We live on a hill, so no flooding here. I'm sure Dorimcheon--the river down the street--is swollen, if not dumping its excess into the lowest streets

It's a fitting storm for my birthday, I think. It's like a long-waning wail against the oppressive summer heat.

See 장마

Keli Goff, Hater

2011-06-28T17:41:00.005+09:00

I don’t know what Keli Goff did to earn her right to be a US citizen other than be born in the US, live in the US, use natural resources in the US—you know, eat, breathe, shit in the US. She’s privileged though and apparently privileged enough to believe that she has the right to tell all of us who is more American than others—privileged enough to make very lazy arguments about immigration reform and people that incorporate conservative, racist tropes to make an emotional rather than intellectual point.

In making an emotional appeal for a friend, she reduces immigrants to a stupid, insensitive binary: those who are in the US illegally yet have proven their legitimacy and those who are in the US illegally and are illegitimate. Apparently, Goff believes two things: 1)that The Dream Act would be a great way to sort who belongs from who doesn’t and 2)that knowing somebody is as simple as hearing stories about them.

Goff believes a Pulitzer Prize winner has earned his stay more than a mother of three because he’s not a burden on tax payers and she is. PATENT HORSESHIT. (Of course, Goff is talking about media darling and liberal pet cause of the moment Jose Antonia Vargas, who I should mention does say a little bit about how everybody deserves equal treatment not just fortunate educated people. I give the guy credit, but his appearance now is much safer than it would have been when he was sixteen.) The problem is that her comparison is flawed and unjust. I think it’s relatively clear why we do not want to compare these two based upon their appearances and CVs. People have stories, just like Goff’s friend. Tthe law purposefully fails to distinguish between people based on their experiences. A broken law for whatever reason is a broken law nonetheless. Herein lies the problem with crappy, half-assed reform.

Goff’s concept Having Earned A Privilege may be improper, but it has a long history. Adam Smith worried about unearned ambition a long time ago in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. The poor mother who continues to have babies is less desirable than the man who is more successful. Open a Horatio Alger, Jr., novel—any of them—and the most apparent lesson is that the smarter and more physically attractive a poor person is, the more likely they are to be patronized by society’s most privileged people. In addition, men are more desirable than women.

In her editorial, she almost dares us to call her out for her explicit bigotry. Dig the clip MSNBC, or Goff, chose to show of the mother of three. It’s disgraceful. She gleefully praises her friend, showing a nice head shot of him smiling. He’s almost defiantly heroic and smiles in spite of his travail. She uses the worst possible footage of the unknown mother of three, though, to gain another kind of emotional response entirely. She can barely hold the one child in her fat arms never mind care for three. It’s a nasty set-up. “Who would you want?” Goff asks. The Pulitzer Prize winner who Goff’s mother loves or the unattractive mother who continues to have children that eat up all our resources.

And need I remind you of Goff’s sly hint at the racist “anchor baby” claim? She implies it without mentioning it, but she’s using it nonetheless. It’s bigoted. It’s bullshit. It should make you mad.

If you want to say citizens must prove they value the privilege of being an American before they deserve to become an American, you are a bigot. Not one of us born in the US need prove anything. We get our privileges unearned. It’s an unreasonable demand that should be vociferously rebuked. Moreover, Goff believes she knows who belongs and who doesn’t. Where did she get this power? Her mother? Fuck you, Keli, and fuck your mother.

Here’s Keli Goff’s profile at Loop21.net. I think everyone should drop her a note about her bullshit and tell her to pull her head out of her ass. We don’t need to cater to conservative, racist tropes in discourse about immigrants to gain ground and promote reform. The mother of three has as much stake in her citizenship as the Pulitzer Prize winner does, whether or not Keli Goff likes it. I need not like a person to welcome them into my home. I do it because it’s right.

Goff titled her segment “In Defense of Illegal Immigrants”. She’s not defending anything other than her petty notions about who does and doesn’t belong. She’s a hater.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

dagNotes: On Whiteness, White Power, Capitalism & Anti-Capitalism

2011-06-24T15:28:00.000+09:00

Bear with me fleshing out some language.

This is the mistake they* make: that whiteness is a quality we can sense, that it’s in some significant way material. That we can examine it and eradicate it without transforming society. It’s talked about like it’s a simple sin, a mistake, a form of revisionism, or an act, sometimes rising to a crime. We use words like transparent and opaque. We excuse its appearance as careless at best, mistaken at worse. We outline it as if it were a structure, like an organized cell.

Whiteness and White Power are now you see it now you don’t like part of a tacky magician’s act: white power is the reappearing thing itself, whiteness the object pulled out of a hat. Or, the result of birth. As in, I was born this way. What can I do about it.? A matter of rhetoric. Or worse, I’m not white. I’m free from guilt. I can do no wrong. Or, the not-white other who can actually claim he’s the hope himself for change simply for being not-that and nothing else.

White power isn’t material. It’s culture. It’s in the spirit of place: Great Britain, America, Europe. It hovers above the wreck of The Enlightenment. It infuses western religion with a sense of dominion over human being. It’s power is an idea that people have faith in but cannot utter. It’s a refusal as much as it is testimony or plan. It resists its own narrative but calls on the narrative of its individual constituents for proof of their allegiance to a man-made purpose. Seek self-help. Confess your sins. Do it alone.

Whiteness is powerful in the same manner Capital is self-valorizing. It’s the result of doing being. We let it happen because it’s how we tell the story of Nature organizing human action. It’s History itself. We shouldn’t romanticize it, manipulate it, look at it as a tragic formation of ideas. It’s not the debris in the rear-view mirror. It’s always already forgotten. It’s essential to character and habit.

Yet, it’s a wreck after all. A mess. On the other hand, it’s an order of being that instills within individuals a sense of duty to individualism that profits community regardless of location and direction. It’s purpose without purpose. It’s a dumb notion of Freedom based in the liberty to freely exploit. Dumb because it ignores the essential goal of its labor: to destroy everything first and then myself. It’s dumb because it ignores all science that it relies on in favor of the imaginary representations of reality in fanciful ideological formations. One wouldn’t be too mistaken to infer that individuals’ labor in white capitalist societies is to prove the value of its ideological assumptions about individual labor in white capitalist society.

White power is the will to expend everything first at the expense of Myself. (It’s always My Self in relation to others.) Forget the stupid medieval notions of the sin in the king’s hoard—the old king who takes everything for himself condemning his realm to rot and ruin and finally becoming the festering dragon protecting its useless treasure. The capitalist’s goal is nothing less than a barren landscape heaped with useless gold coin. (Ron Paul, I’m thinking of you.) The white power mad capitalist has nothing to protect. His goal is nothing less than the purposeful extinguishing of all natural resources for nobody but himself.

I often wonder how anyone would think it’s possible for me to do everything I want for myself and benefit others by so doing. The notion that such human action is possible must be based in the idea the Nature as it organizes us will infinitely provide resources to expend. It’s patently stupid thought.
This is the end of Ron Paul’s notion of Liberty, of Hayek’s Liberal Social Order. It’s the Republican reason for stalling government to promote corporatism. It’s the hope behind Obama’s neoliberalism. It’s not “Yes We Can” after all, it’s “Yes You Should Have Some, Too”.

Fleshing out the character and habit of whiteness is one manner to better understand white power. We can see it, in a way. White power, on the other hand, is a part of the practice of contemporary capitalism. No matter where you find it, what’s most conspicuous about it is its whiteness-for-itself. Capitalism uses white power as a kind of warrant for the free market (like I’m a free man,) as if its promotion were the point all along, and by simply doing things in the free market is to not be a slave.

I suppose this is why to be anti-white power, to be anti-fascist, to be an environmentalist, to be anti-racist, to be feminist, is necessarily to be anti-capitalist. To say otherwise is to accept white power, to embrace white ideology and its absurd ideological framing of societies.

*”They” are capitalists: liberals, progressives, activists. Of course, conservatives, corporatists and fascists.

Censorship in Korea

2011-06-23T17:21:00.000+09:00

The Republic of Korea is under surveillance. All the time. In many ways. From snitches to cctv to censorship, there's not much that can't be censored for almost any reason.

My readers outside of Korea won't notice, but now the Korean government has decided to censor the gadget on Google's Blogger platform that displays Google Followers. That gadget is a box titled "Followers" on my blog's left-hand sidebar. In Korea, it now appears with a portion of the blue, black and white KCSC-Warning that the content is deemed offensive.

Proving once again that the Korean government has no clue what it's censoring on a daily basis. As my wife says, That's so Korean.

Testing, Testing (Part Three)

2011-06-21T12:48:00.011+09:00

(Edited 22.6.11: for grammos, typos; deleted two, pointless parenthetical statements; added content for clarity; updated related links.)

Related Reading:

Testing, Testing (where I decided to organize my thoughts & recording my pedagogical principles)
Testing, Testing (Part Two) (a good definition for teachering)
Teaching & Teachering (fleshing out the difference)
The Many Are One And Are Increased By That One (on the production of space in the classroom; teaching in media res; vertical v horizontal, or transversal)

My complaint: I’m a literature and theory guy. I focused on practical linguistics and ESL/EFL during my MA because I was teaching composition and rhetoric and working in two writing centers attended by many foreign students. I wanted to learn how to better address their needs. And I’m a nerd who likes thinking about language and thought. My practicum was a chance to study the science of language rather than the philosophy of language.

I’ve yet to see much practical linguistics put into practice in classrooms, in curriculum. In Korea, contemporary English education fails the majority of students. I know that students at my school could study a little harder, but when I look at them and my work, I have had to conclude that I have no support and they have little. It’s my opinion that because wealthy and privileged Korean elites continue to succeed in spite of the poor English education policies, the failure is ignored.

As we know, public education is criminally underfunded. The Seoul agency managing enough English teachers to populate a small town is operated by a small and overworked staff. What can they actually do but manage? Training is non-existent. Peer evaluation forbidden. Teacher development restricted to a chosen few. That there are thousands of teachers in Korea and no conferences, no retreats, is shameful and a sign that most of the teachers aren’t professionals, but travelers using Korea for one of two things: a break from life back home or to gain a year of experience before entering the job market back home.(I’m always willing to criticize lazy teachers, but it’s mostly the self-promoting idiots who so often pretend to represent teachers in Korea who I’m really pissed at—the scheming white capitalists. The link is only one example. A horrible writer with a horrible blog who often and naively writes horrible things about teaching and teachers.)

Many professional NSETs in Korea appear only too happy to aid the Korean government to further ghettoize english education in support of their careers, leaving Korean students of English in the lurch. When I call my peers unthinking, scheming capitalists, I’m being provocative. Many of my colleagues care, but we’re in the minority here. It’s the same everywhere: many teachers find it easier to be cronies for corruption in exchange for job security. No matter how awful the teaching conditions, the treatment of students, or how low the quality of education become, these folks will find a way to be satisfied to be working in the front of a classroom telling people how to think and what they should know. They aren’t teachers, they’re possessors of knowledge. They don’t teach, they teacher. It’s doing something without action. They’re not teaching, they’re teachering.

I should stay on focus: The successful students are privileged, the ones who have lived in English-speaking countries, or the ones who have a knack for language. The students who need the most help, the kids who struggle, are ignored. I suppose if we look at the problem from an economic perspective, Koreans can argue (President Obama and his administration do) that their education system is successful because the education business is booming, the standards appear high, the competition is tough, and consumers have many highly valued choices. None of that has anything to do with languages and learning, of course, but it’s nonetheless true. Objectively speaking, Korea’s rigorous public and private educational system should be a success.

Education, in Korea as in the USA, is more easily accessible for the most privileged students. Students at my school are poor and don’t get nice classrooms, nice labs, a well-maintained school, good food, access to the best hagwons—nor do they get to travel. English, for them, is something they learn about in Korean and it’s confined to Korean culture. As a result, English is a cultural mechanism that more or less oppresses each of them. This is in direct opposition to how English language is sold to the students: as a means of future liberation.

Koreans do not really understand English language culture and are consciously stubborn about learning how to incorporate that culture in its English classes and wider society. Or is it Korean culture? There is something called 한류 (hanryu) that illustrates how Koreans see the world via their own culture and its distribution and representation around the world, and it might serve us well to think about that when talking about complex cultural problems Koreans and their foreign colleagues confront. Anyway, the text books here are a joke. They are boring and meaningless and very poor approximations of white English-language culture. I’m not a prescriptivist, but no real attempt is made on a daily basis to properly implement English language, even in a Korean manner. The attempt is to use English in Korean—that’s very different.

In spite of these difficulties I think there must be something we can do as teachers to improve a bad situation. Moreover, it’s likely from the teachers and students where the most useful and meaningful innovation in classrooms and curricula will erupt into the wider discourse. The governments and industry professionals are nothing more than market forces. Administrators are aspiring capitalists. They aren’t teachers.

I was thinking about all this while testing my students for the second time this year.

What the students do know about English: In three years, I’ve learned that students know how to take cues form their Korean teachers about English, know how to speak about English in Korean using English vocabulary pronounced in Korean, know how to read English texts and answer multiple choice questions about what they’ve read, know how to listen to English and guess correctly what’s spoken and what it means. That’s what they learn in their regular classes. In other words, that’s what they learn without my presence in the classroom. The students know what it means to have English explained to them and this helps them recognize patterns they’ve studied when they take standardized tests, more often than not, yet be unable to hold a regular conversation. It’s a common complaint among English teachers: Why can they perform well on tests yet are unable to participate in simple conversations?

Students learn to successfully take English exams; they do not learn everyday English. If you go to YouTube, you can see that what many teachers think is useful everyday English education is teaching idioms in an entertaining manner. This would be useful education if the average student understood the basics of English syntax and usage, but the average student does not. Even the most advanced Korean students often lack an ability to use simple transitional elements in their speech and writing. Why? Because students learn English through repetition and memorization. It’s all very thoughtless. They memorize lists of words and patterns for phrases by repeating lists and patterns over and over. I do believe the idea is to get English to as many people at once in as short a time as possible. The result is a country using English in Korean. The result is awful English, awkward English, too-complicated English.

I try to teach my most advanced students to study English differently and to learn to use it by owning it. I developed my method as a writing teacher, but found that when tutoring Korean and Japanese students, it worked for addressing their speech as well as their writing. “Owning it” is rather vague, I know, but this is a blog after all. Allow me the space to flesh it out. My students are not only uncomfortable with English because it’s difficult and oppressive and tied to their futures like an anchor. English is difficult because they use it as a foreign instrument. They are taught that This does not belong to me.

I’ll put it into a Korean classroom context. They way we teach English promotes difference and denies that English and Hangukmal do the same thing, are used for the same purposes. The way we teach English promotes information over meaning, based on a standard of correctness. Nothing in English, in Korean classrooms, is in context with everyday life. That's a problem. We know we’re not doing right by our students because we know understanding how to present ideas in English means understanding that English speakers and Hangukmal speakers differently represent similar ideas with language. It’s not a simple matter of translation. The arrangement of the languages is different. To speak English well is to understand the languages and their different arrangements as much as it about knowing vocabulary and the parts of speech.

It’s more complicated when we consider how teachers talk to students. One of the most common instances occurs when a teacher attempts to solicit a response from students. Foreign teachers often resist—I have witnessed this—representing their requests in English in a manner most common to their Korean students. (As I said, it's always out of context.) This is the most significant aspect of my teaching experience that I wish to explore. The failure for the teachers, coteachers, schools, administrators to work on encouraging Koreans to be bilingual (I don’t know a better way to put it right now) is a real problem. The other-ing of English alienates English students and instills a power relationship in the classroom that alienates both teachers and students and cultivates an oppressive hierarchy in the classroom that favors the most privileged students and those fortunate enough to have a natural knack for languages.

The resistance teachers encounter and implement in classrooms cultivates a distance from the students and produces a vertically organized classroom with the teacher located at the top and with the most, if not all, power. I’m strictly opposed to this classroom formation. Confronting my resistance, embracing a bit of discomfort, and attempting (in my case) to find a way to use English in the classroom in a way my students can understand it, that is presenting my students with useful English that a Korean can comfortably use as well begins to produce a space where English conversation can occur without the oppressive, insistent force of The Test or A Grade. (I’m not only modeling, I’m leading while inviting as my comments invite an attempt. I am attempting as I want them to attempt. This disturbs the traditional power structure in the classroom as well and destabilizes the students’ safe distance from their teacher.)

The Speaking Test: The following is just a quick example of one way I’m approaching thinking about teaching according to my experiences proctoring conversation tests. In my test, I’m asking students simple questions like: “What happened at the beginning of the story?” They can often answer in strings of nouns and verbs. If the story is about a tired boy who refuses to get out of bed, for example, most of my students can say without too much effort, “Boy…bed…annoyed…sleep…alarm…off.” If I insist, “Try making a simple sentence. Use a noun and a verb. I know you can do it.” If they have studied, they can often say something like, “Boy is sleep. (Long pause.) He is turn off alarm. (Long pause.) He is annoyed.” Only a small minority of students can organize ideas and events into useful sentences.

There are many interesting things about the students’ answers that illustrate how a Korean student sees the English language itself and how the students think English should be used. Or, students consider how to say something in English and they navigate the known differences between English and Korean and then add words they think are necessary. This is a problem for NSET (Native Speaking English Teachers) who know nothing about Hangukmal, Korean language culture and everyday Korean speech. The English-only approach to language education is a failure for many reasons, but for this reason it’s most useless. We do not encourage students to understand both their languages, Korean then English, in relation to each other. It limits learning.

If a student wants to talk about the table with the computer and apple on it on the other side of the classroom, they will quickly translate “computer,” “apple” and “table”. They will make use of the verb “To be” and often as a linking verb, whether or not it is required. My students have the most trouble using prepositions and adverbs. As a result, the simply don’t use them at all. As in my example above, I get a lot of sentences similar to “Boy is sleep” and “He is turn off alarm”.

The problem for me, their teacher, is not that I must now create a lesson where I get them to repeat sentence patterns over and over until they get it right. The problem is to resist teaching as their benevolent leader who insists upon correctness and to help them find a comfortable and logical, a meaningful approach to English usage that they can understand well enough to begin using at an intermediate level that, with practice in conversation, will lead towards mastery.

I’m beginning to learn how to do that. But as I implement my method in classrooms, I’m confronted with two problems: lazy and fearful teachers who’d rather stick to the traditional plans in spite of the literature they read in school that supports my approach, and oppressed students who insist that education means receiving deposits of information from their teacher each day that are organized into lists and bullets and that come with directions explaining exactly how to think about the work to be completed.

On testing culture: Students can score high on TOEIC but can’t use basic English to answer a simple question about daily life and/or simple opinion. For the teacher, it’s frustrating. For the student, it’s humiliating. For the education programs in Korea, it should be embarrassing. But it’s not. Why? Hagwons are set up to teach to tests. In the three years I’ve been here, it’s obvious that hagwons are used in conjunction with the traditional education to such an extent that Koreans seem to believe one can’t exist without the other. This is, in fact, the effective privatization of public education. It’s already happened here.

The better students do on tests, the more profit for everyone. It’s a very simple model. Public schools are set up to form a ranking for potential college entrance. I don’t really see any other focus from junior high school to graduation. Americans wondering where they stand on the standardization of public education in the United States should get to know Korean public education. It’s enough to make you want to kick Arne Duncan in the nuts and tar and feather Michelle Rhee.

The students who perform well on my two-minute conversation test are not really much smarter than the other students. But they know how to use English to say things. I don’t know where they get that knowledge, but with research I’m sure I could find out. I’ll tell you one thing: they didn’t get it at their expensive hagwon and the skill was likely not attained in English class. Show me two kids who excel at a hagwon, I’ll show you ten who don’t. Remember, I’m not talking about test scores. Hagwon and public schools have shown they can consistently produce high scores on standardized exams. Schools have to use vicious, future-determining curves in order to rank students because too many can consistently achieve the highest scores in each class, even at the lowest ranked schools.

So what’s the point of my two-minute conversation test when, no matter my critique, the ranking is much more important? This is why I’m suffering the issue so much, at such a length. There can be no other goal for me than to help individual students recognize that they have the capability to use English for themselves regardless of their scores on tests and rankings in school, regardless of their hagwon experiences. When I return to teaching after I defend my dissertation, I’m going to figure out a more focused manner to address the problems I’ve raised. Maybe I can find funding to conduct real research?

밤섬해적단 : 20 minutes that'll make Saturday night great.

2011-06-03T16:44:00.000+09:00

Heading out to Club Spot tomorrow night to catch a show. Excited most to see 밤섬해적단 (Bamseom Haejeokdan or Bamseom Pirates.) We saw them last at 두리반 (Duriban).

Whiteness in Liberalism: Down With Tyranny! on Natural Corruption in Asia

2011-06-02T09:23:00.005+09:00

Generally, my posts about whiteness tend to address people we'd typically refer to as conservative, white and Christian. Sad fact that may be for some readers, it's true that this demographic loves, more than any other, to speak from the corrupt heart of whiteness.

I have a treat for you, today. A Change of Pace Post. I was reading my news feeds when I came across a post on Down With Tyranny! A little left of liberal, this blog is a daily reader for me. Some of the political analysis is very sharp and I generally agree with the cynical wit in its tone.

Today, one of its bloggers published a piece entitled "Is it safe to eat or drink anything in China?" The title was enough to make me cringe. Turns out, the stupid title is the best part of the post. Framing the body of text about the Chinese government wanting the judicial system to crack down on food safety regulations violators, even suggesting the death penalty be applied to some violators, and a quick summary of famous food problems, is a very problematic intro and conclusion. The post is below my commentary in its entirety.

Look, I loathe the Republican Party. I hate American Conservativism. I'm a strident anti-capitalist. But the post is bad even though it's directed at Republicans I love to hate. In my opinion, the author wants to convey three things: 1) He or She will be as vegan as can be, whatever that means; 2) He or She is frightened to eat or drink anything in China; 3) He or She doesn't like Republicans. That's fine, I suppose. It's not necessarily interesting, but nothing wrong with the desire to convey these truths. Unless, you decide to convey them with a claim that Asia is so fundamentally corrupt that the Republicans who want to emulate Chinese business models must be worse.

You should not do this. It's a racist claim. In this post, the Republicans aren't bad because the US economy is corrupt and our government is corrupt, too. In this post, the Republicans are bad because all of Asia is corrupt. Here's how I'd summarize the blog: "Chinese business is very corrupt; well, Asian business is naturally corrupt, don't you know. We've already proved that in other posts. Trust us. Anyway, you might be served dog meat at any moment in place of other meat in China, and you can't be sure the bottled water is safe. Oh, well, I'm a vegan so at least I don't have to worry about the dog meat part of the problem over there. Anyway, because the Chinese are handing out the death penalty, maybe in the future some time, for food safety regulation violations and the Republicans want to snuff out most regulation in the US, the Republicans are super bad because Chinese business practices are, as we've already shown, naturally corrupt." That's the fucking post. I'm not kidding. The tags for the blog are: China and Regulation. No mention of Republicans, the immensity and immediacy of US food problems. Instead, the author rolls out the infamous stories we already know about Chinese food poisoning and lax regulation.

I'm really pissed about two things:

So, it's not corrupt capitalist practice in Asia that is at fault for the horrifying business practices in China. No, it's the "nature of commerce" in all of Asia that is corrupt. What a claim! It's the nature of commerce. If you don't see the problem, let me explain. The point of the blog is to shame Republicans. All the stories about food safety in the middle of the post can be dumped because the blog is about the first several paragraphs and the last line. The real concern for the author is that commerce in North America is corrupt and becoming more corrupt and in China it's already very corrupt. Therefore, it's a problem that Republicans want to emulate Chinese business and regulatory practices. OK. We get it. But the nature comment is way out of line. It offers our corrupt commerce then, now and in the future a pass, in that a reader can infer by the initial claim that we have a different commerce in nature. Namely, one that is not naturally corrupt. As in, we are better than them. It's a fucking nationalist, exceptionalist swipe at Republicans by a progressive blogger. This, more than anything else in the post, deserves condemnation. They are bad because they are like The Chinese, the people who do naturally corrupt things.
Dog meat references. What point do they serve? It's a racist dog whistle. Mix it with the smug reference to the author's veganism and we have proof that the post is nothing more than a hysterical and neurotic grunt: a half-assed attack on Republicans. It's lazy stuff. And it's smug.

The post follows with all emboldened text my added emphasis:

This morning we tried to make the point that the very nature of commerce in China-- in Asia really-- is built on fraud and corruption. Reactionary American politicians like Pat Toomey (R-PA), Ron Johnson (R-WI) and John Boehner (R-OH) admire China so much-- Communism or not-- because their financial and commercial system embodies the very depths of caveat emptor taken to the extreme. In two weeks I'll be back in China and, I have to admit, I know I have to be warier than in most places about what I consume. What's in the bottled water? How safe is it to eat in a restaurant, even a highly rated one?

So it was with some interest that I noted yesterday that China will be handing out the death penalty for food safety violators. An announcement like that presupposes some real problems that need to be addressed. Their highest court has ordered lower court judges to toughen up the sentences for people violating food safety standards "amid deepening public concerns over the country's food safety following a wave of recent scandals." If someone dies because of food safety violations, the death penalty is now in order-- and government officials taking bribes to protect the criminals will also be facing harsher penalties.

From milk laced with melamine, pigs fed with performance-enhancing drugs to watermelons juiced up with growth-stimulating chemicals, a series of recent scandals have outraged Chinese consumers, despite ramped-up government crackdown and state media campaign against food safety violations.

From last September to April this year, Chinese courts have tried and convicted 106 people accused of violating food safety, including two who received life imprisonment last month in a "melamine milk" case, Xinhua reported.

As vegan as I can be-- especially when traveling in dodgy countries-- I'm not worried about being fed dog meat disguised as something else. But I am interested in the new organic food movement started to sprout up in China's cities. Can it be trusted? Maybe...

In recent years China has been hit by a number of food scandals and fears about safety have lingered. In 2008, 300,000 babies became seriously ill and six babies died after being given formula contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine. In April this year, police seized 40 tons of beansprouts which had been treated with dangerous growth promoting chemicals and hormones, while this month, watermelons started exploding in the fields because they had been treated with too much accelerant.

In March health officials discovered pork that glowed and iridescent blue in the dark because it had been contaminated by a bacteria.

Amid the scares it was reported that China's government departments were running their own organic farms to feed staff, sparking criticism that officials were putting their own safety before that of the people. ... [O]rganic farmers and a host of co-operative schemes that lease small parcels of land to urbanites who want to feel the soil under their fingernails-- not unlike British allotment schemes-- report business is suddenly booming.

Peng Xunan, the founder of the "Farmlander" allotment scheme that has 200 sites across China said the plots were being rented in ever-growing numbers, and no longer just be pensioners looking to occupy their time.

"I'd say it was split three ways between families who want to teach their children where food comes from, older people in their retirement, but in recent months definitely a growing number worried about food safety concerns after all these reports of lax food safety," he said.

Interestingly, the other China-- Taiwan-- is having a similar situation, with legislators urging tougher penalties for tainted food and better regulations for factories manufacturing food products, particularly sports drinks, juices, tea drinks, fruit jam or syrups, tablets or powders, all of which have been found to be poisoned with plasticizers.

A legislator of the ruling Kuomintang proposed yesterday to revise regulations to levy stiffer penalties on suppliers of food products that threaten consumers' health, establish an information system for all products, and change the listing of plasticizers in the second category of toxic chemical products.

...Chang pointed out that the current law only stipulates fines between NT$60,000 and NT$300,000 for using plasticizers like carcinogen di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) or other toxic substances in food and beverages, not enough to deter unconscionable food processors and suppliers from harming consumers.

An integrated registration mechanism should be set up to record all information concerning raw materials, components, additives, manufacturing and packaging to help manage every step of the food and beverage supply chain, Chang said.

Such a product identity system will also help to track products, he added.

Oh-- and the crackdown and regulations... that's not what Toomey, Johnson and Boehner admire about China.

(source: Down With Tyranny! Here's the post on their site.)

Got 눈치?

2011-06-01T15:43:00.000+09:00

눈치 (nunchi, pronounced noon-chee,) is a complex concept inextricably woven into the Korean everyday. You can go here to read a little about it. I like that somebody mentioned paralinguistics in the post. However, I had to remove an idiot's product placement in the first paragraph and citing himself from a stupid book about Korean culture. I hate when people do that--and, go figure, the link was dead anyway. I'm only going to discuss my experience with nunchi in this post. I'm not going to go into tone of voice or social status and attempt to be objective about it. That would be impossible. I like to leave that sort of cultural anthropology for the colonialist social critics and tourists. There's blogs-a-plenty of haters and fetishists out there who love to oversimplify the Korean everyday. I try not to. Moreover, there's no need to address such things. When it comes to nunchi, some people have it and some people don't.

When I first arrived in Sillimdong (신림동,) Seoul, I lived in a neighborhood with few foreigners. That's not true. Very few native-English-speaking foreigners lived near me. My neighborhood has a diverse group of foreigners because of Seoul National University and a large Asian immigrant community. I spent most of the first two-months with my colleagues and the neighborhood friends I played soccer with on Saturdays. I think I was so fed up with the United States I only ventured out for social interaction with other foreigners once or twice. I hadn't studied the language before moving here, so I relied on my wits and desire to fit in to get by. Many days were lonely trials.

One of the concepts I learned about was nunchi because I was praised for having it. That's a good thing: you don't want to hear nunchi eopda (눈치 없다) used to describe you and your behavior. Unfortunately, you either have this or you don't. I know many foreigners believe you can learn it. If you don't have good nunchi, you can learn how to perform it, but we all know the difference. And my Korean friends seem to recognize the people who possess it as part of their ethos (habit and character). If you have to perform it at the right times, you're faking it.

I first learned about what this meant after going out on my first five or six weekends with my soccer team--I play with an all Korean team on Saturdays and nobody speaks English--and with teachers to hike and to learn about the neighborhood. To be honest, I had a blast figuring out who to sit with, how to play with, how to eat and drink with my new friends. I first thought this was nunch: doing the right things at the right times. Iquickly learned that was not it at all.

I think I first heard about my nunchi after a younger teammate who takes care of the club's money insisted I need not contribute because I was a guest. I told him I wanted to be a member and shouldn't receive special treatment. He didn't understand me and simply left me with my money. I had to out-insist him. I succeeded a little later after we were all good and drunk. I have paid dues ever since. It's important to note that I decided to pay without them hinting that maybe I should. I believe to this day they'd permit me to play as a guest and without paying dues. I had to make the decision and be consistent. But to do that only would be a performance, wouldn't it? There's something about the way I communicated wanting to be with them that they appreciate in addition to my decision to pay dues, and that's much more difficult to convey right now.

The insistence to pay is one thing I think many foreigners simply do not understand and find easy to oversimplify, as is the obligation to go out with colleagues. There's a lot of literature out there, many videos, many blogs about how to know when to pay and when to attend, but they're almost every one of them over-generalized and stereotypical nonsense. I suppose this misinterpretation of complex social fabric is understandable. People want some concrete statements about what to do and what not to do. Yet, I wonder.
Westerners love to understand others. Understanding others is part of our bigoted colonialist character. It's part of manifest destiny for US citizens, for sure. I hate it. I disavow it. We get a kick out of saying that we know what something means. We get a super-kick out of dominating foreign scenes as expats. I find it rather obscene, to be honest. I think this disavowal in connection with the way I want to participate is the key to my nunchi. I don't have to think about it.

I'll give you an example of what I mean. I was the first Native Speaking English Teacher (NSET) to teach at my school. I was brought here because the school wanted an experienced teacher. I was all-but-dissertationed from University of Denver and had been teaching since 1999. So, they got me. Nobody at my school was good at speaking English. (That's changed now, the younger English teachers are quite apt and, frankly, I'm no longer needed here.) The first year, my co-teachers were substitute teachers who'd never co-taught before. However, I had one helpful, permanent co-teacher who went out of her way to try to accommodate me and advise me about learning to fit into the faculty and culture of the school.

My school is tough. It's a poor school with poorly performing students many of whom will not attend university out of high school. They'll go to open university, I suppose, but that's not a very respectable thing here. The students are not happy and not interested in my class. I don't blame them. My school is proof that Korea is hurting for educational reform. My conversation class and speaking tests only add to students' English-language study load. They're already frightened about the future. I'd say 60% of the students like me but feel oppressed when I enter their classroom.

When I first arrived at school, the English faculty held many meetings to figure out my role here and our roles together. Nobody spoke English, so everything had to be translated. When we disagreed, the translation could cause trouble because comments were often accidentally and, sometimes, willfully misinterpreted. I once said, "Let's put the students' needs before teachers' desires" when referring to use of the only room with functioning technology and it was translated, I'm not kidding, as "Gary says we're incompetent."

I had to be patient. I had to be willing to take some abuse. (That willfully awful translation of my critique is what I'd call stubborn abuse, but after a little reflection, I recalled my experience as a faculty member in college and university English departments where such complaint is common, sometimes insulting, yet permitted as a way for colleagues to vent. It's permitted there. Why should it not be permitted in Korea?) My closest co-teacher and I came up with an idea that we called "Korean Time". We'd have our meetings. I'd appear in the first part and speak about my classes, lessons, complaints and/or questions. They'd respond. Then I'd leave and permit them Korean Time: time to talk according to their style about work and scheduling without my presence, which can be oppressive. Imagine having to explain yourself all the time to a person who thinks differently about your tasks than you and your colleagues do. Why it's like the government placed a white person in your school just to insist you justify your underpaid and overworked presence each and every day. I understand the contempt. I don't like it, but I get it.

It might sound silly, but it worked. And that's possessing nunchi. They needed not for me to go away or take unearned criticism but for me to understand that my presence really alters their working environment and, though it might pain me to admit, it wasn't necessary and it wasn't useful. It's sounds simple, but being able to publicly acknowledge that I'm not the center of their universe worked wonders. And many NSETs insist as a rule that they are the center of Korea's universe.

I know a lot of NSETs who'd disagree with my interpretation. I worked with a woman at a junior high school summer camp who routinely screamed at our Korean colleagues after common confusions. She didn't and still doesn't, I'm sure, possess nunchi. But she does have (as do her partner and their friends, yes I'm dishing,) plenty to say about Korea and Koreans. By the way, there is a time and a place for screaming in Korea. And I've had my fair share of tirades. You just have to do it properly. But that's for another post.

I don't know why I'm thinking about this right now. Maybe it's because I resigned from my position and will leave my school in August. I'm taking a year off to finish my novel and defend my dissertation before attempting to locate work in an English department at a university here, well anywhere. (Though I'm happy to say that Korean university folks have already shown interest. With a little patience, I'll have a nice position here and I continue to study the language and live in the US when I'm not teaching. Home for vacation and Away for work is a nice proposition.)

I think I'm going to miss my school and my neighborhood, too. We'll be moving to a different part of Seoul. Sillimdong and my high school were very good to me. It's not the hip part of Seoul. It's gritty and dirty. The working people around here are pushy, but I love it. They permitted me to fit in, which is more than I can say for the segregated neighborhoods I lived in back home where difference is shunned and severely beaten down as a rule of citizenship. For all the cries of nationalism I hear in foreigner discussions about Korea and Koreans, I've been welcomed much more sincerely here than in most place in the United States.

Of course, the reason I'm welcomed is that, for some unknown reason, I've got nunchi. I know how to act without having to perform. I know: I'm bragging. Fuck it. I've earned it.

disqus

2011-05-31T12:48:00.002+09:00

I'm trying to integrate disqus comments into my blog. I have yet figured out how to do this well. Please ignore any strange formatting while I learn to use disqus's platform. Thanks for your patience.

dagNotes: On The Perverted Foreigner in Capitalist Culture (Korean Edition)

2011-05-31T12:45:00.001+09:00

Gusts of Popular Feelings blogger, Matt, recently posted about a story in the Gyeongin Ilbo newspaper. I quickly commented on his blog. My notes here are a slightly different version of those comments.

Matt keeps a good blog. It's worth visiting. To understand some of my points in this post, you should read his post first.

Matt often posts about the grotesquely anti-foreigner popular press on Gusts. This form of journalism directed towards immigrants and immigrant labor/laborers is similar to much of what you find in Europe and the United States--the article's headline addresses the laborers rather than the institutions and business owners. Considering Matt's analysis of the Gyeongin Ilbo article, it's clear that foreigner teachers are used as a warrant for the claim that reform from business owners is necessary.

I'd like to see a study of journalism that examines the use of foreign labor corrupting local culture as a warrant for calls to increase national security. In addition, the research could illustrate how national security in capitalist culture is equivalent to the well-being of consumers.

As Matt notes, the Korean government is exploring means to improve the standards and practices of hagwon owners. Why does the popular media focus on the employees of hagwons? To some extent, it would make no difference if foreigners were prohibited from teaching at hagwons altogether. The media, I'd predict, would shift its focus from perverted foreign teachers to unqualified and inexperienced Korean teachers. My claim is that the popular media shelters business owners from criticism in spite of the government's acknowledgement that the business owners' practices are, in fact, the problem.

I'm confident the global study of popular journalism I have proposed would find similarities in the culture(s) of readership in spite of different ideological attitudes/directions of nations, governments and markets. The critique of foreign employees, like the critique of Native Speaking English Teachers, is not distinctly Korean, rather a global capitalist construct that elite culture permits and cultivates in bargain with popular discourse to shield its unethical and illegal behavior. The wild stories about perverted foreigners is market derived and nurtured and directly related to what capitalist politicians and theoreticians like to call the liberal social order of the market. It's part of the mess that prevents market action from being transparent. (See Hayek and Mises on market transparency for classical capitalist discussion regarding the opaque nature of the market.)

There's something to profit from the exploitation of immigrants and their labor. Such exploitation permits regulation of the market in useless ways that can satiate the desire for reform from the public discourse, from voters, from consumers, while sheltering the capitalist from the effects of reform. We might want to consider, once again, we're being presented with a strong critique of the usefulness of capitalism itself because this demonization and perversion of the foreigner directly contradicts a keystone claim about the catallactic economic activity in a free capitalist market--that business between strangers creates friends rather than enemies. The business in capitalist markets clearly has trouble creating friends, in spite of trade agreements and opening borders. I'd argue it's best at creating arguments for enforced homogeneous nations that, as they grow more prosperous, grow more authoritarian and xenophobic.

It's not too difficult to understand that the claim all foreigners will become perverts suits a narrative that supports the consumer economy as well as the government that regulates it. What does this mean in Korea? Nobody wants education reform because education reform would require fundamentally altering hagwon culture, which would represent a national cultural transformation, likely a radical alteration.

We see this daily in North America where the right wing resurgence in recent elections in the US and Canada, the movement to the right of liberal politics, as well as the wholesale acceptance without much struggle of neoliberal and American libertarian principles, can be understood as an attempt to maintain a concrete idea of what it means to be American or Canadian. The regression for North America involves the fantasy of white, Christian, masculine identity. In Korea, it's an identification with fantastic Korean identity that, like the American identity, has never actually existed. Consumers want to buy their identification. Studying at hagwons is compulsory for most Koreans. Well, so now is the presence of perverted foreign teachers who want to corrupt the national purity.

As I argued above, this is not a Korean characteristic. It is the result of capitalism.

Cornel West & The Neoliberal Response to Race

2011-05-20T11:00:00.008+09:00

(cross-posted on dagSeoul's Tumblr)

I just finished listening to Sam Seder's interview with Eddie Glaude, chair of the Center for African-American Studies and the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Princeton University. They spoke specifically about Cornel West's provocative criticism of President Obama in his recent interview with Chris Hedges. I think Seder and Glaude handle the controversy the way I've been thinking about it and succinctly discuss the issues I'd write about here. In fact, it's what I was planning to write about today.

I've been steaming mad ever since Ed Schultz tried to scold West after which he brought on Melissa Harris-Perry to list Obama's achievements as President and say that because 85% of black Americans support Obama maybe we should shut up and trust their judgement.

Some of you will understand the neoliberalism when you see it. If not, you should spend an afternoon reading the ample literature on neoliberalism and race. Articles are very easy to find via a google search, though you have to watch out for weird right wing crap that litters the search. Harris-Perry's response and call to support Obama is an entirely uncritical, unwarranted, populist, knee-jerk, pointless, and powerless response to power. (I'm really mad at her. Can you tell?) The US has catered to neoliberal discourse about race (ie, reverse racism) for many years now, maybe most vociferously since the early 90s. According to Harris-Perry, I gather we're suppose to continue to cater to that shallow understanding and manipulation of racialized politics. In her words, only black people can understand and sympathize Obama.

William Faulkner has a line that I think explains much of the racist culture in the US about mules and the way whites and blacks handle them. I can't find which novel it's in. He developed the conceit in many stories and novels, though, so maybe you'll recognize it if you're familiar with his work. The image is based in the white gaze and involves white folks wondering why black folks are so talented at handling mules. The scene I'm thinking of involves white folks wondering why black folks talk to mules--they're struck that black men and mules can hold meaningful conversations. Only black folks can truly understand a mule. It's one of many moments of casual, Southern bigotry in his works that so accurately betray how racism is integral to the power structure in society. It's what we like to call crystal clear.

Harris-Perry's assertion to Schultz--maybe we should trust black people and their understanding and support of Obama--is the same sort of stupid bigotry. Not that Harris-Perry is a bigot. She casually uses the white power structure to illustrate Cornel West as the Obama workhorse who stubbornly stepped out of line with his criticism of the POTUS. West should know better because he's black. Schultz's scold is patronizing: don't you know what you're doing to Obama? Harris-Perry is used as his warrant.

I don't expect anything different from Ed Schultz. He's an ass. And he consistently implements neoliberal tropes in his populist rhetoric. I expect more from Harris-Perry. I think she took advantage of a situation where she was asked by Ed to offer a solid counterpoint to West's provocative opinions. Instead of discussing the subtlety of West's argument contra Obama, she took advantage of the stupid white framework of Ed Schultz's show and conflated West's personal opinion of Obama's snub (which exists) and his precise, accurate, powerful rebuke of Obama's failure to help poor and powerless brothers and sisters.

I don't think it's worthwhile to shame her because she knows what she did. I think it's important to point out that neoliberal responses to race permitted her response. A smart host would have asked her why she wasn't willing to take West's personal statements and political statements as two separate things. Why wasn't she willing to accept that the Obama administration has consistently taken the progressive left to task for not falling in line behind him, to support without criticisms his policies. Moreover, why should we ignore that Obama has rejected his progressive agenda?

Harris-Perry's response is good for ratings because it wallows in good old American bigotry. If you want a nuanced discussion that is both honest and well-intended, check out Sam Seder's discussion with Eddie Glaude. You won't be let down. I promise. If I wasn't already a member of his show, this episode would have made me become one.

Materials:
1. Neoliberalism and race. Research it; read about it. It's relevant. Basically, the problem with claims of reverse racism; how white power turns (versifies) discussions of itself on you (the person--any person--speaking to white power,) back to you, and then blames you for it.

2. My William Faulkner reference. On his use of the mule in his fiction. You have to have read Faulkners novels to get a good sense of my point, but I think I clearly made my point.

3. Ed Schultz and Melissa Harris-Perry. Ed Schultz is a moron. I think the longer his show continues, he becomes more clearly moronic. I imagine he has viewers because he follows Rachel Maddow. (Not that Maddow hasn't descended into performance over substance, but that Schultz is all blowhard.) First, he has the audacity to bring on West to scold him as if he's some uppity black man. That was demeaning, patronizing and, for me, almost impossible to watch. I don't know why West tolerated it. Schultz wasn't listening to a thing he said. (Schultz never listens to anybody.) Second, he used Harris-Perry as the black person who'd justify his white, neoliberal logic. Harris-Perry has an editorial out there that you can read, or you can watch her discussion with Schultz. It's awful stuff, in my opinion. I offer my critique of her opinion above.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

4. Sam Seder and Eddie Glaude discuss the controversy on The Majority Report. Please support The Majority Report. It's a great show in search of membership. We need to support good left wing media. Seder's program is independent and looking to stay that way.

Privilege and Complaint

2011-05-04T09:23:00.000+09:00

I know I can sound difficult, mean even, when addressing issues I care deeply about. In my defense, I do believe I live in a community--the expat community in Korea--that takes its privileges for granted, that believes it has earned its status on its own, that wants freedoms and liberties it doesn't necessarily care that other communities have, that feels its free will expressed in written and verbal discourse is the sine qua non of public discourse.

All of that is complex. The simple fact of the matter is that nobody can expect much change to occur without first coming to terms with our status quo. That many of my peers--native speaking English teachers, in this case--are unable to discuss this basic problem of organizing to promote useful change is all too clear. Look at the public writing about teaching in Korea, subtract from the list the useful practical teaching blogs, and you're left with two kinds of discourse: tourism and complaint.

I'm not very optimistic about these authors being able to organize much more than a web site that lists information already available nor to organize much more than a group of their close friends to meet from time to time to complain about problems, to publish lists of demands.

In Solidarity: UNIDOS Take Over Tucson United School District Meeting

2011-04-28T22:15:00.001+09:00

"Our education is under attack. What do we do? Fight back!"

Watch these amazing students stand up for their rights.

Write to the Tucson Unified School District :: You can watch the video and learn about the concerns students have. Maybe you can let the TUSD know what you think about it. Perfect time to email all politicians and superintendents and schools and board members. Much of their info is going to be online. Force them to respond to the kids' demands.

UNIDOS 10-point resolution on ethnic studies:

We want our ethnic studies classes to continue to meeting core social science requirement;
We want the repeal of HB 2281;
We want ethnic studies programs to expand everywhere, from K-12 to university;
We want no school turn-arounds, no school closures and full support for Rincon and Palo Verde high school communities;
We want a TUSD governing board that is accountable and will stand up for all students;
We want an equitable education for all;
We want an immediate end to all racist, anti-immigrant, anti-indigenous policies;
We want full compliance with our civil and human rights;
We want Attorney General Tom Horne, state Superintendent John Huppenthal and Governor Jan Brewer immediately removed from power;
We want local control of our education.

Vote on Future of TUSD Ethnic Studies Rescheduled for May 5th.

The kids united will never be divided.

On Teaching and Teachering (repost)

2011-04-21T13:30:00.000+09:00

I wrote this almost a year ago. In my last post, I use the word "teachering". I thought I'd repost a portion of the blog when I first used the word.

From June 15, 2010:

***Judging from the bulk of lesson plans I see circulated and the general discourse about teaching (in Korea,) the less-experienced teachers seem to make the wrong decisions for what may seem like very practical (read, good) reasons. Teachers tend to decide that the requirements of the lessons and demands of the culture are so significant that they must insist students accept a classroom environment the teacher thinks will work best for them to meet curricula-determined goals. I disavow this practice. I guess this could be my reaction to useless lesson planning practices. After all, how long have teachers been composing plans based upon concrete goals that are met only after imposing a strict outline of timed classroom activities? It's stale; it ignores students.

A good lesson plan illustrates a teacher understands how to define an attainable goal. A good plan never addresses how and what students think about it. Moreover, detailed plans always determine how students should approach a lesson. Therefore, plans limit creative and critical discourse. Nowhere in these lesson plans are students visible. Students are unnecessary to its implementation, and they will be present when a lesson is discussed and assigned. They will be given a lesson. I know many teachers who can compose wonderful lesson plans who cannot teach, aren't interested in teaching. They are good plan implementers. And the students' grades are merely numeric representations of the quality of implementation. In fact, that's how both the US and Korean Republic see education. This is the prevailing theory of education: if students receive high test scores, then they are learning.

My Korean colleagues often sadly approach me and apologize because I have had to "lower my expectations" since coming to Samsung High School. When I first arrived, I thought this was because my Principal had read my CV to the teachers in a faculty meeting before introducing me. It was embarrassing. I'm proud of my work but I don't brag. And some teachers were intimidated. What was I doing here? They asked it; I asked it. But I have learned that they're thanking me for working hard and trying to be respectful. I'm not good with gratitude. I have a real problem seeing myself as good. And it's even harder for me to figure out how to return gratitude. I'm terrified of obligation and never quite get it right. . . . When I first arrived, were it not for my experience, I would have been shocked to discover that it's close to impossible for me to properly complete my contracted tasks--that much of my work, in the traditional sense of teaching lessons, is pointless.

But I have learned to stay focused on the students. To love my students and not necessarily their work. And so, when I'm reminded how sad it is that I have to lower my expectations, I respond with a smile and say "No problem." What's the point of explaining that I find such apologies demeaning to the student body? It's not worth it. I know how my colleagues think about my most recent approach to developing lessons: they see my newest take on teaching students here as a lowering of expectations. It is decidedly not that at all.

The level of English in my working-class district is lower than you might expect. I have 2 or 3 out of 35 to 45 students, in 20 classes, who can listen to a question in English and answer using complete sentences or meaningful clauses and phrases. That's about 60 out of 600-700 students I regularly see. As a result, the first thing I ditched was the English-Only Classroom. For me, that was the easiest part of the environment to change.

Even before arriving in Korea, I wholeheartedly disagreed that enforcing English-only in classrooms encourages and supports the students. Now I can say without a doubt that it's merely wishful thinking to suggest a classroom can be English-Only. It's a ridiculously limiting conception of language as well, as if language were only spoken. The students are not thinking in English. No matter what they say or think, the English language is always already in context with Korean language and culture. We might as well use that to our benefit. English-Only classrooms in Korea are much more about making English teachers more comfortable. I hate classroom power trips. Thus, my classrooms are proudly bilingual.

I would suggest that newer teachers in Korea think about ways to assert themselves in the classroom. Co-teachers will attempt to dominate younger and inexperienced teachers. They'll attempt to police your classrooms. If you need help and are a brand new teacher in search of guidance, this might be a happy coincidence. On the other hand, many teachers have practical experience and will find that Korea's classroom culture is odd, possibly alienating. One of the first things to learn while teaching here is how to fairly and positively manage a Korean English classroom. It takes some work. But the conflicts that will arise and headaches that follow are worth the stress. If you're a good teacher, they will respect your different style. If the students dislike you and you can't teach, they're going to get rid of you as quickly as possible anyway. And I agree with them. Korean students shouldn't be the lab rats for Western teacher wannabes. (I don't mean to be overly cynical or rude to younger teachers, but using another culture's student population as a tool to explore your options back home is unethical to say the least. It's something a teacher wouldn't do.)

The second thing I have learned is how to see the classroom as my students do: a boring, uninspired series of lessons about how to properly answer multiple choice questions based on reading, listening and thinking about ideas in English. Korean English teachers handle this aspect of the job. It's a teacher-stands-in-front-of-the-class-and-tells-you-what-things-mean kind of situation. And Korean students are often much more accepting of receiving such lessons from a Korean than a foreigner. Korean education culture mandates this approach as necessary to teach the students how to prepare for their standardized tests. The advanced students take notes and passively listen and the students who are slightly behind sleep or daydream. The issue for me, as an NSET (Native Speaking English Teacher), is a matter of role: What is my role in the Korean high school classroom?

I've decided my role is to be the one consistent English-speaking presence necessary to acclimate students to the sounds and logic of the English language. By using English with them, I'm performing what it sounds like, how it acts, what it means, and when to use it. In addition, I am what it looks like. This role is in opposition to how most foreign teachers work. This is not to say that they aren't well-meaning teachers with strong lessons. But who are they kidding? I have seen videos of lessons about idioms that drive students mad with laughter. But a PowerPoint presentation with videos and an active classroom is still a lesson about an idiom that relies on a stupid comparison between Konglish and English usage of English language words. It's simply not teaching language. It's teaching jokes. At best, it could be referred to as "reaching an understanding" about a routine. And, in many cases, a teacher risks reinforcing bad habits and lazy routines.

Many NSETs attempt to improve on the Korean English teacher's work and talk about teaching as a competition between co-teachers. At times, they wish to correct the mistakes and to encourage more contemporary usage. Many of the lessons online are based on improving the language the students already know. I think this approach almost gets it right but the flaw is in the pedagogy. NSETs like to be The Expert English Person on Campus. They like to own the language. They complain about the mistakes Koreans permit in their lessons and textbooks. They like to correct cultural errors. They like to transmit Western cultural lessons via language lessons. And as a result of playing the leader, they often find themselves very much an outsider in their schools. They become English Language Informers--the tool in their schools to illustrate who knows English well and who doesn't: somebody who is approached only when the locals can't answer a language question without an expert's help. I want nothing to do with this role. It's a means to alienate myself from my students. In addition, I may be an English teacher, but I do not own the language.

All NSETs should meditate on this mantra: I know I am not in Korea to change Korea.

On the other hand, I love Korea. So, why is it not enough for me to simply be myself using the language and being a teacher being myself using the language? It really does boil down to being a teacher or being like a teacher. Am I teaching or teachering?

I do everything I can to work with students on improving classroom discourse to permit as much student participation as possible yet insist that we maintain a useful direction. After all, we must succeed at focused study with a purpose. In my classrooms, even when I'm evaluating the students, I try to encourage them to use the language they have already learned in order to practice it and become more familiar with it. I insist they attempt to speak in coherent sentences when possible.

You may think I have set the bar rather low. I'd disagree. I have renovated the English classroom. Once a week the students feel at ease when an English teacher walks into the room. At ease because I am the Native Speaker, not in spite of it. (Although my co-teachers often feel alienated in my classroom. Yet again, that's for another post.) This serves an important purpose. I'm the guy you can speak your lousy English with because I'm patient and kind and want you to succeed. I'm not here to inform you that you're incorrect. Quite the opposite, I'm the one who will tell you, "I understand." I'm not concerned with your ranking nor your grade. I'll insist you use English, but I'll support your attempt. In addition, I'll not cater to you nor insult your intelligence. I'm the teacher who knows you know the answer but can't figure out how to say it. We'll figure out a way to say it together. Consequently, I'm the teacher who will insist that English is only possible in conversation with others no matter how much the government and anal Westerners insist it's about correctness.

I'll give you an example. This month we're working on illustrating six themes from the film, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. While some of my students are preparing to find jobs and begin a life of hard work, many students are working towards university life. So, it's important that they begin thinking critically about ideas they encounter in texts. They need to be able to generate reasonable statements about those ideas. They need to know how to use examples from texts to support their statements. And they need to improve their English speaking skills.

I don't have enough time with them to work on reading and discussing texts. I do have time to screen films. We watch a film; I hand out vocabulary. We discuss the language in the film and homework is to familiarize themselves with words and phrases that are new to them. I encourage them to use dictionaries but require their answers in class be in their own words. They aren't permitted to speak in dictionary-ese. The following week, groups have to stand and answer questions about the new words and phrases. We spend one week writing sentences about the meaning of familiar words from the narrative. I assign homework to group leaders who must organize their groups and get them to present a discussion about one of six themes. In their presentations the following week, they must use the language from our earlier vocabulary work. Again, I assign homework asking the students to draw an illustration of their group work about a theme. Their illustration must contain a slogan that captures the spirit of their chosen theme. I sneak a little practice on writing a summary into an art project. The following week, group leaders present their work and the class evaluates the presentations.

It sounds like difficult work, doesn't it? It is and it isn't. These are smart lessons that permit duplication. In other words, in any given school year, I can help the students develop comfort with new vocabulary and English language culture using a format that entertains them. The material in each lesson is new, yet it recalls prior work. The students can become comfortable with my teaching style and a classroom routine without me having to give up the complexity I think is necessary to actually promote learning. I have a lesson ideal and a general direction that maintains a focused and accurate purpose.

The most time-consuming part of the preparation is putting students into groups because I make sure the groups contain high-performers and low-performers, students who both know and don't know English. The students teach one another by listening to their group members discuss how to complete the work and other groups present their work. They become the experts. Students learn who to trust and ask one another for help. I encourage the groups to routinely give others the answers. I encourage students who know the answer that a person standing doesn't know to share their answer. Students know there is nothing wrong with hearing an answer and then repeating it. Of course, they must learn to hear the most correct answer. As a result, I have discovered a way to permit a noisy classroom.

It's much more complex and demanding than anything they're accustomed to as students of English, yet they enjoy it. The difference is that we work in groups and share our results and discuss our problems understanding the meaning of the English language in both Korean and English. The classroom becomes less about the assignment and a teacher's evaluation than it does about the discourse needed to address the questions at issue within each stage of the assignment. Moreover, the students are involved with evaluating their performance as the final lesson requires classes to discuss group performance.

Ultimately, I'm satisfied because this is a practice I'd use with Seoul's most privileged students. It's not something developed with my students in mind; it's something that works regardless of social class. The lessons permit useful participation from all kinds of students, and their participation is required to be in concert with their classmates' work. I'm engaging with them on what can be thought of as their terms. In other words, I'm not reinforcing the stupid ranking system where the best and brightest are rewarded as they shame their classmates who haven't scored as high on their tests. (This is a problem in US classrooms, too, where teachers use the smart kids to motivate the kids who aren't doing as well. It's demeaning. As far as I'm concerned, it's a kind of training for corporate life that should be banned from the classroom.)

I've been using a word lately to distinguish between useful and useless teaching practices. Teaching is always useful teaching. Teachering is when what you do in the classroom fulfills your obligations but does not necessarily have anything to do with your students. Teachering is always useless.

Testing, Testing (Part Two)

2011-04-21T12:21:00.004+09:00

This is a continuation of "Testing, Testing" posted last week, April 13. In that post, I wrote:

I’m working on two posts that I’ll soon publish. Maybe I can complete them this evening. The first will explain the work I planned for my classes and illustrate the expectations I had looking ahead to the tests. The second post will illustrate the test and discuss the results, student reception, and their apparent study habits. I’ll try to offer an honest evaluation about the success of the lessons and exam.

I've been sidetracked because the work on my critique of progressive libertarianism and meritocracy has been rather fun. Sidetracked isn't the best term, I guess. I've been reading and haven't taken the time to write about the last month at school. Here goes.

First, I'll discuss the work we completed over a four-week period leading up to the conversation exams. I teach 20 classes each week, each class has 35-42 students. Korean high schools have three grade levels, first through third. I teach the first and second grades. For three weeks, we watched three short-films and worked in groups to discuss and write sentences answering questions about settings, themes, characters, moods, and genres. In the fourth week, we reviewed the three shorts in detail, trying to focus on how to speak about the more interesting scenes in each story and to reinforce new vocabulary. The fifth and sixth weeks have been for the speaking tests. Next week, the students will take their regular, midterm exams. As you can see, I've developed a method for teaching my high school English conversation class that builds a conversation over a four week period. I do this to reinforce new vocabulary, to promote acquisition and to build confidence through familiarity with the chosen subject.

I like this method for two reasons. As I mentioned in my first post, my students' English language skills are lower than expected and desired for university-bound 16-19 year olds. Rather than focus on rudimentary language games that entertain as much as teach, that they've played since early childhood, and rather than focus on building confidence through staging scenarios for conversation via cheesey conversation-starter exercises, I believe my lessons reinforce the kinds of English my students will be required to use as students over the next five years. The lessons are designed to be accessible to almost all my students while being practical for those who will attend university. In addition, my approach doesn't insist that I teach only to the smartest students who are likely going to be competing with many thousands of students, many from higher ranked schools, for positions at the most respected Korean universities. And I simply refuse to teach to the middle, which is always teaching in opposition to critical thinking. My lessons produce space for all students regardless of their English proficiency to practice English and build skills, vocabulary, understanding and confidence.

As teachers we ought to help create a potential for learning to occur rather than work on teaching learning. We help make it possible to produce spaces of learning. We don't create the space and then permit students entrance to it nor do we enter a space already created and then direct students how to use it. We produce space with the students and work in it together. In Korea and United States, the dominant mode of teaching is what I like to call teacher-ing. Teachers perform for the students. If you want to see heinous examples of this, go to You Tube and search for English Conversation Classes in Korea. You'll find many examples of teachers as clowns. Entertaining, maybe. Hard work, maybe. Not teaching. But the kids and colleagues think it looks like what good teaching should be. In a future post, I'll offer a further critique of this kind of teaching.

Teacher-ing contains things: information, data, language, personality, ethos (both habit and character), intention and equipment. Students are offered an opportunity by teachers to learn what is provided within the well-rehearsed performances. Students who figure out how to score well on exams are rewarded. In addition, students who behave well are rewarded. Some teachers are great performers, but the learning that occurs is never related to the performance. We're all too aware of this; some teachers and administrators love the performance so much that they are unwilling to actually give up and teach. They're dedicated teachers, for sure. They're just not good teachers. They're good performers; good at being the center of attention; they're good graders. In fact, we're learning, much to the chagrine of the education business and its biggest supporters and benefactors, that scoring well on exams and good behavior are not only inaccurate indicators of learning, they may measure something other than learning altogether.

Teacher-ing is the performance of the material in a lesson combined with a sincere hope that students will model the performance and through modeling learn the lesson. I use the word teacher-ing because I believe the performance is actually one step removed from teaching: it's a teacher doing teaching. Good teachers look like good teachers because they're doing things teachers are thought to do and thought ought to do and their students react well to the performance. Teaching, on the other hand, is about working within the public discourse community to produce a space in cooperation with students, school administration and others in the community in which learning occurs through purposeful discourse about different subjects. The objective is that students learn to actively participate in the subjects in a manner that can benefit themselves, the teacher, the school, the community. They learn how to do, to think and to create in cooperation and work with others. Teaching is something one does in a discourse community. It's a role, certainly, but not performed as if on a stage. A teacher's work is performed in media res.

I could continue to make this issue more complicated. In the US, for example, individualism is tied up with the idea that we are sovereign unto ourselves though we are citizens of a state and as such participate in the maintenance of a social contract, whether or not we are conscious of what that means. In Korea, this sense of sovereignty may in fact exist but is not much permitted in school. It's just not encouraged. Here, school is a place of highly structured collectivist culture. And not in the way Americans often think of it: school spirit, clubs, fraternities, sororities, etc. At any rate, I'm not addressing this significant aspect of teaching in this post. I'm trying to articulate I believe we ought to create lessons that promote teaching rather than resort to teacher-ing.

My classes are 50 minutes in length. I like to have 15 minutes of group work each week, and I usually explain/lecture for about 10 minutes. Half of each of my classes is spent either speaking with the students and them speaking with me, so in some sort of conversation, and/or listening and observing something that is presented in English. This year I'm using short films with little to no dialogue. The films tend to be around 2-3 minutes in length. My rule is that they never be more than 10 minutes. I want at least 15 minutes of conversation in each class.

I can't assign reading in my classes for two reasons. We have few materials and little money for materials and I have no way to insure the students will complete homework. Basically, I get 50 minutes a week with 20 classes. It's very difficult to cultivate a productive and useful space for English language learning and acquisition to occur in a meaningful and consistent manner.

I must bring all materials to class and leave with them and must be able to set-up the classroom in a matter of minutes or else I lose valuable time with my students. I decided that bringing a laptop and necessary cables was the best solution. I can start a class in the time it takes for a projector to warm up. While I get the computer, screen and projector set up, my students form groups and distribute my weekly handout. I'm going to focus on one lesson rather than all three, but describe to you the procession of lessons in summary. Though I've created a routine for my classes, the lessons build on each other. In my classes, we really do work together to approach a useful, meaningful and somewhat interesting English conversation about our subject.
Over the last month, my students have practiced speaking first about setting and characters, second about themes and kinds of stories, and third about how stories make us feel. The fourth week, we sat back and watched all three short films, one after the other, with the volume down low, and we spoke about each scene using the vocabulary I provided them on the handouts.

My next post will present, in detail, one of the three lessons. The following will discuss the speaking test. The third will offer a critique of what I think about the kind of teaching I have witnessed in classrooms here. Needless to say, I am not impressed and happy about it. I have to attend a teacher training session next week, and I'll pan my third post so I write about it as well.

Concerning Left-Libertarianism, Edited

2011-04-20T07:30:00.000+09:00

Readable version. I finally found time to edit it. The past ten days at school I have tested 500 students. I'm tired. Pardon the repost, but this really is much more readable than before.

Most left-libertarian principles are hard to disagree with when you look at them as statements, say on a flier about why you should join the libertarian cause. On Anti-Statism: Who doesn't want to embrace anti-statist principles? It's a wonderful idea to be free from oppressive state ideological and legislative structures. On Labor: Who doesn't want to support labor? Not many people out there like the idea of sweatshops. On Corporate Corruption: Who doesn't want a society free from corporate corruption? I have yet to find someone who believes corporations are free to be as corrupt as they want to be. On Pluralism: Who believes in freedom and liberty who doesn't see the need for pluralism? Only the fundamentalist religious communities argue against pluralism. I could go on.

Again, there isn't a left-libertarian principle with which most of us would disagree. It's ideological and political theories like these that we should distrust the most. In other words, I say, what is it then with this fabulous idea that is being hidden? And, Why aren't we doing that? Where's the weakness?

To accomplish left-libertarian goals insists that we maintain an in-the-free-market approach to thinking about and living in Nature. This is troubling because the free market is a capitalist and Capitalist's machine. More on that in a moment. The goal of left-libertarianism sounds great: to achieve socialist ideals within the framework of a free market. I don't think it's possible. It's only effective in service of a greater cause: for example, libertarianism or capitalism. Socialism doesn't really work that way. So, the use of it is suspicious. The idealism in it is the fuel to power cooperation within the capitalist free market.

Left-libertarian philosophy never rises above common sense. Common sense philosophies encounter problems handling paradoxes and complex mechanisms; actually, common sense tends to deny paradox altogether. It's practice is often antithetical to philosophical study. I think the common sense mindset helps shelter left-libertarians from exploring serious problems with their reasons for being libertarians.

A free market cannot exist, in the way we conceptualize it, without a capitalist state to regulate it. Freeing the market from government coercion (regulatory action in libertarianese) is not necessarily going to produce a truly free market. The apathetic adjective "free" to mean the things we mean when we say the noun "freedom" is awfully lazy. Moreover, anti-statist principles within a capitalist framework require a state. It's as if libertarians believe they can accomplish principles developed for a free state outside of that state.

This is ontological, I suppose. Very complicated stuff. And I don't want to oversimplify because I disagree. I've not got the time to write a chapter on this technical point. (I could do a better job than Hayek in his first chapter to The Constitution of Liberty where he frames the definitions for freedom and liberty to fit his ideological cause.) I have yet to see anything describing how to achieve anti-statist principles within a free market. However, we can allow our friends to have their ideals. I don't have a problem with ideals.

There's a bigger problem with left-libertarianism and its rather practical. They simply have no clue what to do with accumulated wealth and corporate power. You'll hear a lot about rejecting wealth and rejecting corporations. You'll hear a lot about instilling the free market with a moral spirit. Ok, good. Reject immorality and corruption. Then what?

Left-libertarianism is not quite up to the task of coping with the social order in the free market. This is the linguistic and philosophical pretzel libertarian theorists developed for their anti-regulatory, anti-socialist beliefs. It's the main reason I'd argue that left-libertarians should give up libertarianism. It's untenable. For libertarians, a free market as such is proof that the natural order is a liberal social order in the free market and capitalism is that order as it functions. Freedom within a free market means being bound to do nothing on behalf of others. This is, in itself, a regulation and in a community would only function to form a state. You don't decide to form this state, it's there. And to wrangle its attitudes, directions, and machinations, you must regulate the state with rules. I sometimes think that libertarians believe The State has an address, one location, that can be smashed, trashed, done away with and that'd be that as long as we agreed not to build another one. But the state is actually bound up with culture, the spirit of place, not an actual place. (And we can read Ludwig von Mises whine about the failure of people to realize this important fact. Of course, his theory goes on to claim that consumers can steer the ship. So, he scolds people for thinking the market is a place and then asks them to think of it in the form of a ship at sea.)

The libertarian theorists and acolytes of Capitalism remind me of the characters in a scene in Wim Wenders' film Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Move) from 1975. The characters, none of whom are satisfied with their lives and are suffering from an inability to realize their desires, try to run from the camera itself. It's a valiant attempt, I suppose, to try to escape the social order. But they aren't permitted to escape and they simply cannot seem to want to do much to actually transform their social space. They merely want to escape. I'm taking the scene out of context to make a point, but it's worth thinking about. Are we willing to work to transform our lives, to produce a new social space, or are we simply looking for an easy escape?

Left-libertarians will say, Hey guys, morality matters. What good does that claim do when you've liberated us from our social contract? What interest exists in self-interest for morality based in a social contract that binds us to the welfare of others? The common sense in progressive libertarianism is not capable of answering these questions. What do libertarians believe morality is? I don't think they know. And I'd venture to claim that in the general scheme of libertarianism it actually doesn't matter.

Self-interest is not complex, not paradoxical. It's at work now. Capitalists understand self-interest. And I mean Capitalist in the Marxian sense: A Capitalist is a rich guy who own the means of production and has accumulated enough wealth to exploit labor. A Capitalist can cooperate with workers, pay them, to produce the means for him to make a profit. Workers understand self-interest, as well, in that it's in their self-interest to cooperate with Capitalists. This is not in itself moral nor an accurate description of the way self-interest should work according to libertarian idealism.

This is another place where left-libertarianism is on shaky ground. They say they support organized labor but only without state interference. It's in the self-interest of Capitalists to resist negotiating with organized labor. An insidious nature to left-libertarian discourse here: They insist that we shall agree to recognize that certain bad results of wealth accumulation and exploitation of labor are the results of state intervention. This is not the same as asserting that no state would lead to better negotiations and less exploitation. The entire "As we begin, let's agree to believe X" formula for their most important concepts is not philosophical nor scientific. It is, on other hand, what we could refer to as coercive regulation.

Left-libertarians created a category that is meant to assuage my concern. They created a category for the wrongly oppressed that strips individual oppressed constituents of difference and then refers to them as "the innocents". Left-libertarians say they oppose "aggression against the innocents". That's fine, but do realize that with that promise, we now have the initial formation of an involuntary social contract within a state.

To return to self-interest for a moment, more significantly, we do not live in a world where self-interest can be equated in any way to freedom and liberty as such. In other words, being able to be self-interested individuals without interference from, say, the state does not seem to me to guarantee more access to freedom and liberty. We do not have a definition for self-interest without capitalism. The word itself is tied up in the enfranchisement of the middle class and self-help literature. We have shaped the literary canon regarding self-interest in service of history as a process justifying capitalism and its conceptualization of the free market. See the pinnacle of this in Samuel Smiles' work on Character and Habit (self-interest as self-help) and Hayek's work on the principles defining the liberal social order of the free market. Both are disingenuous theories, by which we could say they are both self-interested. Funny how that works, isn't it.

Libertarians, left or not, appear to reject any philosophical framework that moves beyond the free market, in other words capitalism. In my opinion, this makes their critiques of socialism, for example, completely inauthentic and hypocritical. Left-libertarians use the crutch of volunteerism and the crutch of opposition to crude, cold war, anti-socialist libertarianism to make an argument for reassessing libertarian principles. It's like polishing a turd, in my opinion.

On Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty (Part One)

2011-04-19T14:51:00.001+09:00

This is the first in a series of notes from my reading of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. I'm working on something about the culture of meritocracy. And so I'm dwelling in some theory I haven't read in a while.

1. Hayek would be outraged at the Tea Party and its constituents.

One of his chief critiques of liberalism is that progressives fostered a transition of defining liberty as individual liberty to liberty as power. In other words, infringements on liberty became more about people being prevented from doing things rather than being made to do things. Hayek wants to focus on coercion and constraints and thinks liberalism caused us to focus on restraints. Hayek would need look no further than the contemporary conservative movement for proof of a movement that is super-focused on restraint over constraint. The Tea Party was initially about being "taxed enough already," supposedly about the constraints the current tax code places upon citizens. But look at the language of most Tea Party protests and we can easily see that taxes are viewed not as a constraint but a restraint.
I don't think it's too difficult to recognize that Tea Party members are more than willing to accept specific constraints, being made to do things, in order to receive fewer restraints. White conservatives, in particular, are power obsessed. It's an old bargain they make with Capitalists.

2. I'm not at all comfortable with Hayek's introduction to the book, which reads like he set-up the discussion to prove liberalism flawed rather than to honestly explore liberty and freedom. But we'll see. I'll reserve judgment until the conclusion.

3. In particular, I don't like the transition between points 4 and 5 in Chapter One, "Liberty and Liberties". He writes:

4. (. . .)Such recognized intellectual leaders of the "progressives" as J.R. Commons and John Dewey have spread an ideology in which "liberty is power, effective power to do specific things" and the "demand of liberty is the demand for power," while the absence of coercion is merely "the negative side of freedom" and "is to be prized only as a means to Freedom which is power."

5. This confusion of liberty as power with liberty in its original meaning inevitably leads to the identification of liberty with wealth; and this makes it possible to exploit all the appeal which the word "liberty" carries in the support for a demand for the redistribution of wealth.

This transition permits him to assign left wing association of liberty and power a desire to accumulate wealth. In my opinion, this is Hayek at his least self-critical, least self-aware. His desire to denigrate the left wing (often hidden as a critique of liberalism and/or progressives) is apparent as he implements insipid anti-progressive propaganda in the important foundations of his argument. Built-in to his definitions is the implicature that liberalism is wealth-obsessed, that what the left actually wants is the wealth, that what progressives do is radically redistribute wealth, that what liberals will do, if liberalism is heeded, is to come for your money.

When I go on about how libertarianism is horseshit, this is what I'm talking about. I find Hayek to be utterly insincere here. His arguments are so well-composed, I cannot think that this was a mistake. It's one thing to criticize liberalism. Indeed his observations about the way we think about and use the words free, freedom and liberty are instructive and useful. But this uncritical transition from liberty as power to the identification of liberty with wealth is problematic. Not because it hasn't ever been the case, but because of how it permits him to suggest that it leads to a call for redistribution of wealth. Never mind the use of a very old trope about radicalized poor people organizing to come for your money, what we can say of the left wing is that any calls to redistribute wealth result from a poorly defined sense of liberty. It seems wrong to me. And I think he knew it.

Legend of the Persecuted White Guy

2011-04-19T11:15:00.000+09:00

David Sirota's new essay in Salon is good reading. Here's the article from Newsweek asking whether or not white masculinity can survive the recession. With a straight face.

We all know the truth about white male privilege. Even now, white men are statistically the most insulated group in society.

The legend of the persecuted white guy (and his girlfriends) exists even in Korea, where white guys love to write I Hate Korea blogs because Koreans don't privilege white people by default. The white power structure is in full effect here and the privileges white skin with good English with good education affords translates into a standard of living that is, in fact, more comfortable stable than for the majority of Korean citizens. Koreans know it and some--not all mind you and nowhere near close to all--resent it. White people are massively privileged in Korea.

Imagine what would happen in the US if our government used tax revenue to bring native-speaking Spanish speakers from Mexico into public elementary, junior and high school classrooms--and paid those native speakers with graduate degrees more than many of the citizens who teach at those schools get paid, paid for their flights to and from the US each year, paid for much of their housing, paid for their medical care, paid for their pleasure, paid for their pensions, and when they left paid them nice bonuses. Imagine what would happen then.

White people, especially white men, hate unpackaging privilege and thinking about it. Talk to a libertarian about privilege and you'll see where I'm coming from. Bring up white power structure with many liberals and you'll get a fight.

The many are one and are increased by the one.

2011-04-15T12:34:00.001+09:00

In my last post I wrote:

The longer I teach, I began in 1999, the more I become a student advocate, the more I see my role in the school and classroom as vertically integrated with role my students perform. The more I see our role in direct opposition, in a healthy and productive manner rather than destructive, to the administration and state. Being a student advocate permits me to be an advocate for teachers.

(Updated on April 16: Beginnings of an essay I'm writing about producing space in classrooms. I'm trying to figure out how to address my concern with space and horizontal and vertical just don't cut it. The two words are shitty training wheels for me to get my thoughts straight as i try to find a better vocabulary. One-dimensional v. multi-dimensional and horizontal v. vertical aren't the best way to put it, but it'll do for now. Maybe i need to think about words like transversal. Your suggestions, input are always welcome. Love dialogue. Also want to note i'm using a Whiteheadean concept, the many become one and are increased by that one. I didn't write that. I'm citing it, implementing it.)

I'm going to go with the flow of thought here and see what I can get out of it, so I can see what I think about the ideas implicit in my statement. I'm not sure vertically integrated is the best way to put it. I'm trying to argue that classrooms are spaces typically, uncritically and horizontally constructed to reinforce and passively instruct traditional power structures. Most of us would likely agree with this. Only an authoritarian would take issue so soon.

I believe teachers have the ability to dis-include--in this case, I like dis-include more than exclude--and disrupt traditional, passively accepted power structures by teaching in media res so to speak. Simply describing a teacher stepping from the front of the classroom into the middle of it may seem trite but to accomplish such a small step first requires many more complex rhetorical moves than may not be apparent. Many theorists have discussed what it means to teach in media res. It's not a new idea. So, I'll leave the groundwork alone at the moment.

Rejecting traditional, horizontal hierarchies in the classroom in favor of a vertical framework permits active critical thinking, promotes a tolerance for social difference, insists that conflict can be resolved peacefully, and instructs students and teachers that there is more to cooperation in our society than the future cooperation between employee and employer, boss and worker, master and slave. In addition, it allows for the cultivation of a multi-dimensional classroom.

The traditional classroom is one-dimensional. It occupies a particular space in time and insists that it stays put statically reinforcing an important power structure for future members of the workforce, of consumer culture. It becomes a voice in the unconscious, dogmatically instructing citizens how to behave. Students can look back to their notes only to point to what they learned because the traditional, horizontal structure is not dynamic. It's remembered, stored away, celebrated on anniversaries, nostalgic, lifeless.
I'm trying to get at intention. The horizontally-constructed space of traditional classrooms promotes the worst aspects of rugged individualism in our culture. Traditional classrooms are populated with students and teachers who are permitted to possess their own intentions, goals, objectives, and points-of-view only in so far as their claims are articulated within their appropriate positions within the hierarchy. For example, a student can disagree with her teacher as long as she agrees to obey the teacher. (Two things about this need to be developed further: the agreement to obey is silent and conversation about it is generally not permitted; students are taught that they are free to participate (see freedom of contract and employment at will) and that they can have opinions, but they must decide to choose the authorized correct answers exams. Both of these things are considered good cooperation.)

Traditional classrooms construct and model social space that prohibits critical thinking from successfully working. Traditional classrooms conduct discourse that insists dynamic rhetoric exist in static positions. We really do dis-empower the radical potential for public discourse and habituate participants to embrace self-interest as an interest that knows its proper place. Moreover, a student who competes for the highest position must also be willing to dispossess classmates. Self-interest as an interest that knows its proper place is a grotesque representation of the democratic ideal that the many become one and are increased by that one.

This is why selfish and static ideological and political positions represented by libertarianism are so popular with young people. Libertarianism is the unapologetic acceptance of self-interest for benefit of an individual in competition with everyone else and companion to none. For no rational reason, we teach students that this is in everyone's best interest. We instruct students to become individuals in spite of their communities rather than individuals that produce their communities. Community is represented as a burden. We teach that John Galt is a heroic individual rather than the reality about his static, lifeless, dreadful existence as a sycophant to the wealthy elite.

In traditional classrooms, teachers insist that a community is only as strong as its weakest link. Teachers and students together work to create value for their classroom, as the best communities can make more money, can learn more, can enrich themselves. (See Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan and Race to the Top.) The traditional classroom passively models the market in such a way that knowledge and experience become much less important than a good work ethic no matter what the task. In this way, the traditional classroom produces a society of slaves to the authority of an elite class.

If we reject, even silently reject, the traditional classroom and produce a vertically integrated space in which to conduct lessons, we can provide classrooms wherein multiple intentions can conflict and daily discourse permits original social difference yet requires grand attempts to reach a healthier consensus. This is the fulfillment of the many become one and are increased by that one.

I suppose the key to what I'm thinking about here is that by teaching in media res--refusing to (re)produce a horizontal space that promotes status-seeking behavior and refusing to play master to a student's slave--we can actively destroy the worst aspects of capitalist culture, combat Empire without aggressively politicizing the classroom, encourage students to understand that thinking for themselves doesn't mean competing with other self-interests, fully recognize a healthy consensus in a society that embraces original social difference, and empower students to be strong, confident, critically-minded individuals because they're confident that we're all working together for different ends with similar means towards a common cause.

My Students and I will kick your ass. Have a nice day!

2011-04-15T11:00:00.000+09:00

The longer I teach, I began in 1999, the more I become a student advocate, the more I see my role in the school and classroom as vertically integrated with role my students perform. The more I see our role in direct opposition, in a healthy and productive manner rather than destructive, to the administration and state. Being a student advocate permits me to be an advocate for teachers.

This manner of approaching pedagogy and labor permits me to extend my beliefs about open and democratic discourse based in original social difference from the classroom to the school to the community to the state. It transforms the site for learning into a site for radical social work. It resists compartmentalizing experience in the way capitalism encourages us to do. And it does so in a manner that is much more inclusive than any contemporary debates about speech in the classroom permit.

The students need not be aware of this for it to work.

This is a fact and it's what irritates conservative theorists and politicians about the nature of the classroom. By definition, it's a radically transformative space. Without regulation of discourse, there's no telling what might happen.

My vocation is a consistent "Fuck you!" to the white power structure in the United States, and in Korea for that matter. And it's a reminder to Conservative Culture that it will lose every time.

On Free Market & Market Discipline

2011-04-14T13:55:00.002+09:00

A cultural term, "Free Market" has a specific use in contemporary capitalist societies.

Free Market is used to remind people of the principles of freedom and liberty that are supposed to be a significant foundation for our most free and ideally-open democratic societies.

Free Market is used to comfort people, intends to allay the anxiety and dread citizens commonly experience as they encounter very precise and accurate market actions. The oppression citizens experience as a result of the real results of technical market actions is often referred to as "market discipline". A free market cannot/has not exist/existed without market discipline.

Market discipline oppresses because it disciplines a specific part of the citizenry: the poor and defenseless. Market discipline disrupts attempts to achieve equality, disrupts attempts to achieve civil rights. Market discipline promotes the sense that the wealthy have a basic right to their wealth. Market discipline is consistently oppressive.

Market discipline is oppressive because its disciplinary action directed against the poor and defenseless provides, nae produces, space for the protection of freedom and liberty for the wealthiest and most privileged to conduct business, make profits in the short term, and guard wealth and property over the long term regardless of the results of their business practices. In other words, for the wealthy to maintain and (re)produce wealth, the poorest and most defenseless citizens must be oppressed.

Market discipline is a sine qua non of free-market capitalism.

A quick comment on my recent engagement with Tumblr Libertarians and Neoliberals:
When libertarians address the ideals of a free market--how beneficial it could be for all of us should we actually embrace free market capitalism--we should remind them that we disagree and know how to address why we disagree.

The Why is that the word free in free market does not correspond to the free in freedom and liberty. It refers to those who can afford to be free from the oppressive effects of market discipline; it refers to those who are more free from care, more free from the dread and anxiety that is a result of market discipline.

Libertarians are, in a very meaningful way, not class conscious. Many appear to be privileged and educated enough to be able to afford to be free from the results of market discipline. In this way, they are disingenuous at best.

On the other hand, many libertarians and neoliberals are victims of market discipline. And all I can say about that is some citizens are willing to accept a bargain with the Capitalists. The bargain struck results in a promise: "You promise to fight for our cause, our Privilege, then we will give you a shot at one day becoming one of us." I feel that these libertarians and neoliberals ignore the well-established foundations of modern thought regarding markets, capitalism and economics in order to embrace a highly suspicious structure/framework for an ideal society that simply cannot ever exist for them.

Testing, Testing

2011-04-13T13:06:00.002+09:00

It's tricky. My students' English is below average for high school students in Seoul. The standard lies about their potential to use English. Many have as much English education as the high-performing students, but are not as good accessing it, using it. Their confidence, as a result, is rather low--lower than it should be.

In Korea, the poor kids at the lowest-ranked high schools do not feel smart, are not comfortable being treated as intelligent, are in no way what an American teacher would call entitled. In fact, their teachers talk about them as if they aren't capable of anything better. Their lack of confidence creates a difficult environment for English conversation in the classroom. I know at least 40-50% of the students in each class, around 300 students at my school, simply see no reason to try any longer. A good portion of those kids will not attend university.

I'm a teacher who respects a students' choice to not participate. I'm not happy about it, but I know it doesn't create a better classroom community, better discourse when ten of the thirty to forty students aren't interested and, quite frankly, need not be interested. The kids know more than anybody else that high school is not mandatory, university is for privileged Koreans, and they'd likely be better off doing something more productive with their time. The difference between conversation with and about students is strikingly different here. There's a pragmatism about the future in Korea that, though it may have been useful in the past, serves to paint a rather thick line of boundary between the privileged upper-class and everyone else. And my students are woefully attuned to it without protest.

This week and next, I'm conducting 750 or so two-minute conversation exams. I'm halfway through the first week and have seen almost a quarter of my students. It's tiring, a little boring, yet I find these tests an interesting commentary on the value of the work I plan and complete with the students leading up to our tests.
I'm working on two posts that I'll soon publish. Maybe I can complete them this evening. The first will explain the work I planned for my classes and illustrate the expectations I had looking ahead to the tests. The second post will illustrate the test and discuss the results, student reception, and their apparent study habits. I'll try to offer an honest evaluation about the success of the lessons and exam. I try to be as self-critical as possible. It's too easy as the only English-speaking teacher on a campus of 1200 students, teachers and staff to become over critical to the point of pointless dwelling in shit.

I often feel unfocused, un-implemented, if you will, here. And it's natural to blame my colleagues, the rather rigid dogma of Korean culture, even the idealism in my pedagogical perspectives. Fact is, my presence here is an imposition on everyone, me too. I've had to come to terms that I'm over-qualified for this job and improperly placed. I was put at this school by request from a principal who wanted an experienced teacher for the school's first appointed Native Speaking English Teacher. I'd likely be much better used at one of the top-ranked schools where the kids could get much more out of me and my skills.

Yet, and it's a strong yet, I am over-joyed to be working at a school with kids Korea has more or less written off. I hate the rich with a passion, and since arriving in Korea, have grown more peaceful with my basic opposition to the upper classes. In the US, entitlement and privilege are often hidden because the middle classes delude themselves into believing they can one day gain elite status, and the poorest believe that hope is not futile. In Korea, the wealthiest people are assholes who flaunt their status as if they were born righteously privileged and any challenge to it is and will always be immoral and rude. I hate wealthy Koreans; they are disgusting, mean, irritating, arrogant pricks.

In other words, I love my school and look forward to seeing the students each day.

And speaking of tests, here are my students.

DagSound: Kill a K-Pop Fan For Rock and Roll

2011-04-13T10:11:00.001+09:00

I love Korea. Love calling Seoul my home. Love my Korean family. But boy do I hate K-Pop. I made this to sum up my feelings about mindless, corporate Korean Pop and its fans as it and they destroy music one unimaginative, stupid single at a time.

Korea actually has a very cool Rock and Roll history. (There are posts about it in the DagSeoul and DagSound archives. You can find good stuff on the good links left on this old post about Korean Psych and Acid Folk. Some of the links are dead, unfortunately. If I had my turntables in Korea, I'd upload everything I've found.) Some amazing artists. Even the old 노래 style is great compared to contemporary pop, which is actually little more than repackaged pop music from other places, sometimes simply plagiarized, accompanied by awfully boring lyrics, and mostly intended to sell junk Samsung, LG, Doosan, Kia and other corporations produce.

Manipulated Image produced from the wonderful Marty Perez "kill a punk for rock and roll" photo that was eventually used on the great Oblivians album, Popular Favorites. Love this photo. Perez took it at a Black Sabbath concert in Seattle, 1982. Sabbath was opening for Dio.)

my tumblr

2011-04-12T20:59:00.002+09:00

hey readers! just a reminder that when you stop by you should check out the link above for my dagseoul Tumblr feed. I post much more often on Tumblr. Shorter posts on everything from politics to korea, music to literature. thanks for stopping by.

if you have a tumblr account, look dagseoul up while your at it and follow me.

A Tumblr Gay Republican Thinks We're All Stupid. Joke's on Him, I Guess.

2011-04-09T16:59:00.002+09:00

Here's what "thegayrepublican" (tumblr blog) had to say about the above image:

This is the most stupid thing i have ever seen.

NO NO NO Gay Republican NO.

The GOP is using women, images of women, women's health, reproductive health, and other nasty feminist things as tools to cause a stir amongst its vocal minority the socially conservative far-right wing motivating them to picket, protest, hand out images of aborted fetuses, and scream and yell about the immoral left and feminism gone awry. This pisses off the activist left. Much social debate occurs, the media picks the story up and runs with it.

Meanwhile the GOP writes bills, riders, amendments, and lengthy, complex legislative proposals meant to cut the heart out of social welfare programs to cover its tax and regulatory reform for the wealthiest Americans and their corporations.

You're correct: it isn't a war on women. It's a war against the hardest working, most oppressed, most needy, youngest, oldest, and most deserving Americans using the images of women on behalf of the wealthiest, least needy Americans. It's a war on most of us, not women, making it a hateful and sexist culture war because it focuses on one aspect of women's rights when so much more is at stake. You'd have to be a crazy anti-woman zealot to believe the GOP is really out to get women; I mean, really want the GOP to defund something awesome like Planned Parenthood that helps so many for so little and to believe that is something good for the GOP to do, among other social reforms it's pushing. But, you know, the GOP doesn't give a shit about women's rights, women's health, women's issues, and how these issues affect all of us.

In other words, the GOP uses women and specific health issues in a horrible and misleading fashion. Just like the Republican Party uses homosexuals. And I'm not just talking on holidays and airport restrooms, honk honk.

행복한 비가 오면

2011-04-07T09:41:00.000+09:00

It's springtime in Seoul. And Spring offers respite from the dry cold of Korean Winter. The dry, cold, gray, dirty winters in this city can be downright depressing. The wind and rain of early spring bring budding trees and bulbs, thawing feral cats. I get to ride my bike to school, hike on the weekends, play soccer.

My favorite part of spring is the rain. I love walking to work on drizzling mornings sans umbrella in my raincoat. It become a routine--my rainy morning routine.This city is filthy. The rain cleans, smells good, refreshes the skin. Or, so I thought.

I was scolded this morning by my colleagues for walking without an umbrella. On any rainy morning in Korea, you'll get a scolding for not carrying and using an umbrella. Scolding is consistent in Korea, with or without the rain--a scold for everything, a nag for anything. It's the national pastime. Today's scold was unique because this year's spring rain is unique. It's "Japanese Rain," which I take to mean: it's more toxic than usual because of the post-tsunami nuclear reactor tragedy, so watch out because if that rain touches your skin it will make you sick.

I have been scolded at least twenty-four times in three years for walking in the rain without an umbrella. Now, I've been scolded at least twice about "Japanese Rain".

I like all kinds of rain.

(cross-posting on dagseoul.)

A (Rich Man's Utopian) Wish + Some (Libertarian) Bullshit = The Path to Prosperity

2011-04-06T09:05:00.005+09:00

Hire the Heritage Foundation to make up numbers about what might, nae, WILL happen once tax cuts are extended into infinity and you know what House Republicans get? The Best Economy Ever!* And a budget with a title straight out of an Ayn Rand fan's wet dream.**

*According to projections. Reading actual theory helps. You know what I mean? Going to the source and reading that rather than reading the utter nonsense politicians, their researchers, Reason, propagandists, and their fans tell you about the sources. --Now I'm scolding. My wife calls me a nag, but I promise I mean well. Anyway, ever play Telephone? The lesson is Always go to The Source.

When we read the sources, study the theory and its history, we need not be geniuses to recognize that American libertarian economic theory is not much more than a grandiose expression of a capitalist wish. It's nothing based in reality and history, as in a scientific study of the market, like Marx's scientific study of Capital in his three volume classic of the same name.

Americans, borrowing from the Austrian School of We Don't Like Socialism, confuse ideological representations of How We Should Think About Markets & The Way Markets Function with The Market Itself & The Way It Works. Republican hired "theorists" are ideologues and propagandists; they are more accurately researchers. They take the idealism in American cultural notions about individuals and liberty and apply it to basic supply-side economic theory and rather complex utopian bullshit from guys like Hayek. (See the Laffer Curve for a legendary example of a "thought experiment" gone wrong.)

Democrats aren't much better. Of course, Democrats aren't attempting to give our wealth and resources to the wealthiest while cutting every social welfare program in health and education. Republicans are batshit crazy and their far right "libertarian" friends are even nuttier. (See, The Pauls.)

**Objectivists actually disagree with Libertarianism for some important reasons that I can care less about because they are both full of crap, but that always seems to get lost in popular culture and its representation of white people's fantasies of world domination.

Your Homework: Where does much of the conservative mindset about Our Destiny come from? It's rather complex. Nevertheless, Kant did a good job of distilling a conservatives vision of Man & His Destiny. We all know how the story goes. Read how it was written. Kant's not the first to attempt to describe this vision of our destiny, but his argument about an Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View is one of the most concise and easy to read.

The goal is to try to understand, to see, how we look at what Kant does in this study differently than what the Republican researchers and their libertarian friends have been trying to do for the last 40 years. Why are we willing to look at the philosopher's work as something worth criticizing, revising, working on, changing, interpreting, and so on, yet willing to take something like the Heritage Foundation's weak and tweaked research as fact? We can take it further: What is it about philosophical study and research that we find worth debunking as fiction and political propaganda worth supporting as fact?

Why No Strikes in the United States?

2011-04-05T07:35:00.001+09:00

Political campaigns do not unify us and our interests; a strike does.

You might wonder why a general strike hasn’t occurred. And as my last post’s author describes, there are several reasons.

One way of thinking about the politics of the decision not to strike, to continue protest in several states and to work looking forward to the next elections is that the union protesters, their non-union allies and their political leaders have made a rather strange decision regarding a general strike. They have chosen not to make a choice. They haven’t said, “We will not strike.” They have said, “Let’s wait and see.” They have rather passively decided, in the midst of a lot of action, to not act. We must ask, Why?

I suppose there are several methods we can use to solve the problems caused by the Republican-led attack on public workers across the United States. Listing all the methods and the reasons for supporting the most useful is not necessarily helpful. Such a task is always secondary to a much more subtle process that disrupts the collective, concentrated, useful power in our organized labor. In other words, before we can decide to strike, something else is already happening. My argument is that this something that is happening is political and aimed at directing the power in our unions, the public unions in this case, into an effort to support a political party that cannot (because of its role in society) protect our unions’ interests.

Never mind that much of American labor functions under the notion that it does not have the freedoms its employers have to make contracts, set standards and function in the market. Employees seem to feel obligated to cooperate under almost every condition for the benefit of Employers’ self-interest. Let’s apply this sense of cooperation to unions. The unions seem to have a similar problem with their political parties. The unions feel obligated to support/cooperate under almost ever condition for the benefit of Politicians’ self-interest. It’s rare that unions get much from their politicians other than press.

We have tied our ability to organize labor to the success or failure of politicians and their political campaigns, much in the same way that most American employees tie their self-interest to the success or failure of Employers and Employer interest. One thing we know for sure. The Employers and Employees do not have the same self-interest.

A general strike would put everybody’s interests at stake. A political campaign does not. And that’s the power in a strike. Where is this concern, right now? All tied up in politics. In ideology. And ideology is imaginary representation. And a strike is very, very real.

John Boehner, Resentment, White Power

2011-04-03T08:53:00.001+09:00

Young people and Unions are destroying America with their Xboxes and Facebooks and 40-hour work weeks and a living wage. It’s the typical old guy rant, right? Wrong. This is repressed resentment bubbling to the surface from a guy who believes he’s in a safe position of power from which to speak about his real beliefs.

Can any of you tell me what a typical white conservative man’s rant about youth culture and privilege has to do with our President? Because John Boehner’s rant to Matt Taibbi begins about those lazy good for nothing kids and ends with a shot at our President.

John Boehner would be funny if he wasn’t such a typical representation of smug white power. Reading the selections Matt Taibbi has released ahead of his upcoming story, you’re likely to feel Leader Boehner feels pretty secure in his job and his status in his community. That is, until you read what he says about President Obama: “Don’t get me started on health care- doctors study their entire lives and they barely make enough to live and yet Obama, who had his entire life handed to him on a silver plate wants to cut their pay.” You might well wonder what about Obama’s life Boehner is talking about?

Boehner is a once-poor white guy who is not ever going to be secure in his wealth and status. He has, like many successful white conservatives, tied his success to his whiteness, what many of these guys refer to as “the way I was raised,” and guys like Obama, who are more successful and more progressive than he is, and importantly, not white like he is, have had life handed to them because they cannot possibly have worked as hard as his folks did and he has to find success in life.

And I’m going to be frank here. Boehner is from Cincinnati, Ohio, and was born in Reading. He is from blue collar roots in southwestern Ohio. I can tell you from experience, that part of the country is rife with white resentment of progressive culture and with black Americans in particular. It’s a very racist place to this day. For some reason, even liberal whites from that region have a weird desire to stand up for the white culture there, often claiming they’re misunderstood. (See, Mississippi and South Carolina.)

I’m not calling Boehner a racist—just that his rant is typical white-people-talk in that part of the country.

In addition, we should be wary of Boehner’s poor personal opinion of places like Community Colleges. As we all know, community colleges are where many non-traditional higher ed. students find access to mainstream success. Community colleges have helped more than I can express in a blog post. For Boehner to choose the community colleges to slight shows just how invested he is in the white power line. He sees them as places that basically reward lazy poor people and illiterates with degrees so they can make more money than they deserve, so they can work above their station.
It’s vile stuff this white resentment. It serves nobody to ignore it.

Writing to our leaders works. If what Boehner says pisses you off, you should let him and other politicians know about it. Send him a note. Send your Rep a note. Encourage them to speak out on behalf of students and unions.

Michelle Rhee's Celeb Status in Jeopardy. FINALLY

2011-04-01T11:52:00.000+09:00

I wrote about how the corporate education reform movement is actually part of a wider tax reform movement the other day.

I thought I should share some links about Michelle Rhee and her growing scandal:

When standardized test scores soared in D.C., were the gains real? (USA Today)
Michelle Rhee is a liar … (The Reality Based Community)
Michelle Rhee's Cheating Scandal (The Daily Beast)
Shame on Michelle Rhee (By Diane Ravitch @ The Daily Beast)

Read and share.

dagSeoul's Tumblr feed

2011-03-31T10:16:00.003+09:00

I've added my Tumblr feed to my blog. If you look above, you'll see a link to it. If you're on Tumblr, please follow me.

URL: http://dagseoul.tumblr.com/post//fact-finding-missions-...

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How Education Reform is Really Tax Reform

2011-03-30T15:16:00.002+09:00

I've claimed it for years: because the wealthy elite (well educated, by the way,) and business owners/investors are unwilling to pay (more) taxes, we have had to find reasons to cut public funding from well-established government programs. You justify the cuts in education by promoting a need for education reform. In other words, reforming public education is actually a complicated, well-funded and articulate cover for radical tax reform. In this article, the culprits are big business, big media and the Obama Administration. All three are only too happy to help spread the message of reform to a citizenry that doesn't really understand the issues.

This article, from Truthdig, can help us illustrate the ridiculous binary that education reformers use to alienate and abuse teachers. It's teachers vs students, where the teachers are greedy profiteers and the students stand-ins for abused consumers and/or rugged individuals who only need a fair shake to succeed.

Also discussed: value-added teacher evaluation, privatization of public schools, tax breaks for businesses, increased class size. Very concise and detailed analysis. Please share.

Rangers Fan Organizations Support Sectarianism

2011-03-30T12:27:00.005+09:00

Love how Rangers fan organizations draw a false equivalency between rebel songs (Celtic fans sing) and sectarian songs (Rangers fans sing). The comparison shows how inconsiderate and disrespectful they are about people's right to sing songs about their history as opposed to permitting white, protestant fans to sing songs about hating non-whites, non-Protestants, non-citizens of the UK.

This article does a good job of illustrating why it is not sectarian to sing about the IRA. Even so, it's too legalistic for my tastes. The fact is that there are truly few pro-IRA "rebel" songs that are in spirit and fact sectarian. Very few. I think I can count them on my hand. And there's only one that Celtic fans ever sing. It's been banned and most fans honor it. The fact is that Rangers fans singing sectarian songs is *the* problem.

I had to post this note on my blog because some Rangers fans have complained to Facebook that it contains offensive material. See, for Rangers fans, having to face reality and clean up their act, which means ejecting the hateful bigots from their fan base is considered offensive. They are hypocrites. They support sectarianism.

Until the fan groups stand up to the bigots, eject them, publicly denounce them, and stop blaming Celtic fans and players for the problem, there is no responsible choice but to continue calling the Rangers organizations out for who they are.

Also see: Celtic Quick News

The Korean Quotidian: Office Routines

2011-03-30T11:41:00.002+09:00

I'm sharing an office with one of those OCD guys every Korean office seems to have. He's very nice and constantly cleans. When he's not cleaning, he's teaching; when he's neither teaching nor cleaning, he's hiking. He's mopped our office floor five times in three days. I think he needs some help.

The mopping at my school involves the coldest water and a mop. Nothing becomes clean: doesn't look clean, doesn't smell clean, isn't clean.

Constant dirty pooled
Water and wet smell,
Dust and mop cotton.

Keywords: musky, dusky, dank, dirty.

Wet concrete, kept wet, only slightly visibly erodes leaving a fine and consistent gray dust on its surface. It's a sneaky erosion. It makes my obsessive and anxious office mate believe the floor is never quite clean enough to leave alone. He's expediting its erosion. A wonderful signifier for his state of mind.

His look betrays the kind of anxiety that quietly unsettles the daily order, gives the appearance of cohesion and adherence to a routine that is always unraveling. Where am I going to find enough time to clean this office before I have to teach. It suggests when he returns from the classroom, fifty minutes later, he'll have forgotten he worked so hard to get it right the first time. He'll clean again.

Tea Party Ethos: Eugenics, WASPs & You

2011-03-30T08:36:00.001+09:00

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/03/tea-party-nation-whites-ar...

Good Mother Jones note about what's up in The Tea Party Nation. I’d like to direct everyone to a chapter in Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, “Two Men and a Bargain”.

It’s bad enough that white people fall for this hateful ideology and its social processes. That we have citizens who respect people who talk about the extinction of the white race is sad. But eugenics has a more nefarious purpose: to encourage racial anxiety within poor white communities. In Smith’s book a bargain is struck between “Mr Rich White” and “Mr Poor White”. See a very good description of the book and its arguments here: http://tinyurl.com/4vlm2hr .

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Friedrich Hayek, Zombie (Krugman)

2011-03-30T07:03:00.001+09:00

URL: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/friedrich-h...

I used to teach Hayek in my Business Ethics course. Hayek was wrong about so much, but it's his reasons for his predictions and economic beliefs that libertarians and conservatives love so much. Many of my conservative students ended up enjoying slogging through Hayekian theory about the liberal social order of our capitalist market. Truly zombie economics, undead ideas. The stuff will not go away, and it needs to.

And isn't this the problem with what Conservativism has become? It's a system based on ideals without any grasp of reality.

Anyway, Brad DeLong had written about this and Paul Krugman has now had a go. Good reading.

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Recent Stanley Fish in the NYTimes

2011-03-29T09:19:00.001+09:00

URL: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/crucifi...

I'm a sucker for good writing. Fish's recent essays, especially on supporting teacher's unions and his latest on religion, have been wonderful. And I'm often not a fan of his rhetoric. Highly recommended.

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American Thought Police (Krugman)

2011-03-28T12:45:00.001+09:00

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/opinion/28krugman.htm...

Paul Krugman's piece in the times is a good one.

David Brooks was on Real Time with Bill Maher last weekend defending Conservativism from the right wing antics of the Republican Party. I often hear from my Conservative friends that I shouldn't confuse Conservatives with Republicans. It's a bit self-righteous and precious, and hides a more complex truth. The claim is an implicit refusal to do anything at all to change the popular Conservative movement and its tactics, which are managed by the Republican Party and a growing, strong far-right-wing movement. So while conservative intellectuals, like Brooks, explicitly denounce the members of the Conservative movement who behave improperly and hurt civic discourse, they nevertheless politely refuse, hesitate is to kind, to act against it.

I think the damage to discourse has been done. The Conservative movement has been working since the 80s to control educational and market institutions via legislation and local activism. Academics and researchers are already forced to be quiet for fear that local conservative groups, at the service of the national movement, will smear them and their work. Even I experienced conservative plants in my classrooms at Metropolitan State College of Denver, of all places, during the Academic Rights nonsense pushed by David Horowitz in the early 2000s.

We've been forced by centrist culture to accept conservative binarism into intellectual discourse, to acknowledge paradox-denying common sense into our pragmatism, to permit ridiculous religious dogma into our educational discourse, et al. And while we all seem to agree that the minority who insists we continue moving to the right is, in fact, bad for our culture, our nation, we continue to do nothing about it.

I don't know if there's much we can do about it except by putting our careers at stake and telling the truth in spite of the potential smear campaigns. I promise to continue to do so.

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White Power 101: Apologetics

2011-03-28T08:20:00.001+09:00

URL: http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/chris-matth...

Two things about this clip from the Chris Matthews show.

The first thing I'm quite accustomed to; we all are, in fact. The privileged white man who has a checkered past is given another chance to lead, to succeed, to be all that he can be; he's given a pass for all past indiscretions. He is mindlessly afforded this pass because he is privileged. In the US, this kind of privileged is tied to race and bolstered by wealth.

The second thing is much more mundane, but more troubling. It enables the white power structure that privileged white racists Haley Barbour rely on to remain powerful, healthy and wealthy. To not be able to see beyond the white power structure itself; to refuse to recognize privilege; to destabilize critical thinking in the face of racism. In fact, Chris Matthew's panel permits Haley Barbour "to do it". What can he do? He can run, as Barbour has said, as "The Anti-Obama." Not one person on the panel said, "You know, we can permit him to run, but we shouldn't. He's a bigot. He's bad for our nation, our kids, our culture, our credibility."

And I'll add a bonus thing. The third thing is that, once again, the media presents Obama's problem as his intelligence and success. Apparently, it's still suspicious to be black and smart in the United States. Fortunately, we have stupid racist hicks who have enough money to run for President to counter black intelligence. (See Real Time with Bill Maher's hilarious video about The Anti-Obama, Amabo.)

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Labor History: Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

2011-03-25T10:09:00.001+09:00

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2010/03/mind-set-that-surv...

March 25, 1911. Good post about it, the mindset that caused it. You know, the mindset that persists. It's called "libertarianism," and it's dangerous to your health and our national well-being.

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Lists: Sociology of Space

2011-03-24T10:17:00.001+09:00

Working through a reading list

Hovering above it all: Hegel

Lefebvre's Production of Space. that Imagination is involved in producing space, effects the rhythm of space, marked by time, etc has gotten me off course with what appears to be Lefebvre's most well-read book. Must return to it.

Where does Simmel fit here? Thinking of his discussion about time and counting, how it changes the basic structure of our minds--imagination, thinking, thus space...

Martina Low--ordering of things in space--discourse.

This all effects Poetics, certainly, our ability to describe something within a line, in so far as versifying is a turning of language we can assume that the ordering of things (concrete and abstract) in space determines, more or less (to what extent?), what we can put down and how it will be read by others? as opposed to the more common, and trite, notion that what we write shapes the present shape of things to come...

Maximus, then. Williams' Spring and All and Paterson. Creeley decrying young poets in letters to Olson, complaining they do not understand form. Makes more sense. I agree and believe it's an institutional, foundational, linguistic problem. How can we approach form when, say, our poetry is everyday further removed from everyday life. Must keep it formally anchored. Innovations may release writers from stale formal constraints but also permits a resistance to understand what permits innovation in the form itself.

See: poets complaining about the lack of a marketplace for their ideas. This is a lack of readers. More importantly, it's a lack of space. We've mistaken publication, being published, for being read, reading together, doing the work of poetry.

Can't be disobedient when you're unaware of the space you inhabit. Its contours. As if the page were a replacement for a place. Imagine a space--it's already shaped by your perceptions of similar spaces. This isn't a discourse thing, it's a concrete limitation, a prohibition that has everything to do with the market as it does with knowing how to compose a line of prose or verse.

Look at Alice James. Invalid. Space.

Trying to find more about Marx's concept of a concrete abstraction.

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Hegelian Triads

2011-03-24T09:37:00.001+09:00

URL: http://marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/triads/inde...

Re-reading Hegel and digging around online for articles and such. Found this. Remember when hypertext was going to be the next big thing. Still, it's kind of helpful. And the Marxists.org Library is a great resource.

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HOW TO: A New Routine for Taxes in Korea

2011-01-20T11:26:00.005+09:00

UPDATE: Do you really need to use the NTS site I outline below? It depends. My school insisted I needed to, but I've just learned it's not necessarily so. In my case, I use my bank card for almost everything. So, it behooves me to use the site because I'll get some sort of deduction.

February is tax time in Korea. The important thing to remember is tax is assessed as a payroll deduction. Some employers forget to remind English-speaking employees about this deduction. Moreover, many Americans seem to believe we get an automatic tax-free, first two years here. They forget to fill out appropriate paperwork before arriving in Korea to receive the 2-year tax holiday they get via a US-Korea agreement. If you never applied to receive the tax holiday or this is your third February in Korea, you will pay taxes with the rest of us next month. If you don't make much money, you might miss the 200-400,000Won you'll be assessed.

You need to use your credit/debit card for more than 25% of your annual income to get a tax deduction. The NTS site I describe below will tell you how much you spent using your bank card. So, it's worth checking to determine whether or not you need to file for deductions.

Your employer should automatically calculate anything having to do with National Health Insurance. I don't know anyone who doesn't work here without carrying the national insurance. In addition, your employer will calculate your pension information, if applicable.

If you spent more than 3% of your annual income on medical expenses, then you should qualify for some sort of deduction.

If you made large donations, pay mucho mortgage, or are receiving some sort of government benefit, you'll need to use the site.

As I learn more, I'll post more. It's very difficult to glean this information from the Internet; each year I learn a little more. The amount I learn is pretty much in line with the amount my ability to speak the language improves. As always, I like to remind my readers to stay off the ESL Forums. They're full of angry misinformers and lurkers who like to spread useless misinformation. Talk to your colleagues here. I know Chris in Korea will likely post about taxes soon. He's reliable, and like me, he'll attempt to answer your questions. Don't listen to foreign teacher gossip. Well, do listen and then ignore it. If you're with SMOE/EPIK/GEPIK, you can talk to your school's administrators directly.
_______________________________

Some of you may have heard about this already, but if you have not:

If you have to pay taxes in Korea, and whether you have to or not is always confusing, there's a new requirement. You must/may need to present your schools with personal financial information that's available via Korea's NTS website. Even though the website is only presented in Hangukmal, the process to obtain your financial data is relatively easy. It takes a matter of minutes.

However, to access your information in the NTS system, you'll need a security key, a bit of script that is saved onto a USB drive, your handphone or your computer. The security key is available via your bank. If you've set up Internet banking through your Korean bank account, you no doubt already possess this key and use it each time you log into your bank account, possibly when you shop online. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you'll need to visit your bank and ask for help acquiring the key.

This process will likely cause thousands of foreigners serious frustration because of the language barrier. We all know how communication quickly disintegrates at work and in public when our Korean colleagues must talk with us about technical details about our obligations as employees or at places like a bank. My suggestion is that you acquire your security keys, access the NTS site, print out your info, and take it to your employers without being asked. Do it. They'll really appreciate it. And you'll avoid the nasty headache that comes with doing things at the last second as is custom around here.

Moreover, if you cannot speak and read Hangukmal: get a Korean friend or co-teacher to help. If you can't get help, you'll have to insist that your employer does the work for you. I know my high school admin colleagues were willing to help me with everything and were super-elated this morning when we dropped off the info unannounced. I don't think they believed we would do it on our own. (My wife helped me obtain my security key at Woori Bank.)

At any rate, obtaining the security key from your bank is going to be the most difficult part of this task because you may find it difficult without somebody to translate for you.

Sungkyunkwan University provided their English profs a very helpful, step-by-step presentation on how to use the NTS website. I'm going to post it below with a few notes; their admin staff deserves kudos for the work, not me. Your bank will, I'll say should, walk you through obtaining a security key. Remember: insist or you'll never get help. It sounds rude to English-speaking ears, but you may have to get in somebody's face and demand help before you'll get it. That's just Korean-style customer service. And it doesn't sound as bad in Hangukmal as it does in English. Trust me. You must, must, must obtain the key. You cannot access your financial info without it. And you cannot properly complete your taxes without out visiting the NTS site.

First, visit the NTS home page and select "log in"/"로그인", which is a button on the left hand side of the button bar on the top of the home page, under the logo.

After you log in, follow these steps: (click on the images to show full size^^)

The above step is where you choose how to access your security key. If you look, you have five options where from to select the key. You'll want to choose the first one, if you're using a key on your USB drive, or the fourth one, if you're using a key on your computer. Some of you may have one installed on your smart phone; you can select that option as well. You may notice there are smart card options as well, but I don't know foreigners who possess these. Once you select the method of acquisition, you'll need to select the key itself. Then you can proceed.

___________________________________________
Just remember, most of you will have nothing to declare. So, all you're really doing in the NTS system is accessing the info and printing it. Make a copy for your own records. I found it impossible to save using Adobe Reader on a PC (maybe FoxIt Reader would work???) but using Preview with a Mac permits you to save the info. Bring a copy to your boss at Hagwon or to your Kyojangsil/Principal's Office at your public school. Even if they haven't asked you for it yet, they will need it.

Hope this helps. If you have questions, leave them in the comments.

Wandering Korea and Europe until March.

2011-01-18T11:30:00.000+09:00

traveling. back in March. daily writing regimen. i've even got Praise keeping a dream journal. much more interesting than my work.

it's the time of year that high school teachers get a break. no teaching until March. i'm ecstatic. full of anxiety. never fails that when i'm free of most worries, free to wander, free to write that my neuroses peak.

much in store for dagseoul, dagscreen, and dagsound come March. stay tuned.

Larry Wilmore on Huck Finn Censorship (The Daily Show)

2011-01-12T20:26:00.001+09:00

The Daily Show (1/11/11): Wilmore's commentary on the censorship of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is wonderful. Check it out:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Mark Twain Controversy

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog</a>

The Daily Show on Facebook

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Things Foreigners Do in Korea That They Aren't Aware They Do

2010-12-06T10:56:00.001+09:00

Use KOREA and KOREAN as pejoratives.

It's a patronizing, paternalistic and lazy way to criticize and complain. Don't do it. You have a problem as a teacher? Don't address the issue vis a vis Korea. Why not take a stab at doing the critical work necessary to actually attempt to solve the problem?

Korea's full of haters; 50% of them are foreign teachers.

Working On

2010-11-22T14:00:00.001+09:00

1. I'm reading Volume One of Karl Marx's Capital again. This is the second time I'm reading it cover to cover; it will be the third time re-reading many of the more famous sections. I found a copy of David Harvey's lectures about Volume One and am reading it as if I were taking his popular seminar. It reminds me of the class I took at University of Denver (DU) with Robert Urquhart. I miss that man's company. A lot of fun reading Marx and watching John Wayne films. Well, his love for John Ford and Wayne always made me groan, but his screenings were a kick.

2. I'm trying hard to get reinstated as a student at DU while finishing my dissertation. It's difficult trying to do this from Korea. Handling registration and, as a result, student loan issues from overseas is a real headache. What would have taken a day or two of walking papers with signatures between departments on campus is a year-long odyssey of unanswered e-mails and phone calls. I blame nobody on this one, but it does illustrate how educational and financial institutions have failed to usefully implement technology in order to make the students', teachers', consumers' and employees' jobs a little easier.

3. Reading Slavoj Zizek has become a hobby of mine. I follow his lectures as well. I really like the guy, especially his ability to piss off establishment academics and right wing ideologues. His recent work has become much more readable, I think. Whether we agree with everything he argues, his take is creative, aggressive, and concerned. I like the fact that he insists we revisit Hegel. Hegel is one of the most abused western philosophers. He's often misquoted and misunderstood because researchers and theorists use two or three of his most famous works without fully understanding his conception of logic and his entire project. The abuse could be prevented with a little more reading and decision to cease using other authors using other authors using other authors. And of course, literary theorists are always misusing him. Anyway, my engagement with Zizek has me revisiting Kant, Marx, Hegel, Butler. Makes me happy.

4. Wrapping up another semester at Samsung High School in Seoul.

The Right to Assemble & Speak & Distribute Information

2010-11-09T09:16:00.004+09:00

From The Boston Globe, "SKorean police arrest 4 people over G-20 protests." (I'll try to get out and snag a few photographs of protests and other activities in the next few days and during the summit.)

The G20 looms in Seoul and Koreans will show up in thousands to protest. There will likely be hundreds of arrests and as many news stories about the protests and arrests--as many as will be published about the political and corporate interests that are represented at the Summit itself.

I think we should remember what's at stake as Korea and Koreans continue to become more significant to the global capitalist market: Korean well-being. For me the highlight of this G20 Summit is the Korean people who have accomplished so much in the last 40 years yet continue to struggle with the cultural impact and realities that a fair and just democratic society imposes upon them as it promises to more or less liberate them. In my opinion, Koreans are at odds with the capitalist market and its ability to exploit democratic institutions to make a profit. Of course, foreign interests in Korea often get blamed and foreign laborers often receive the rhetorical force of the blaming rhetoric. We should not forget that conservative elements in Korea that are not Nationalistic but Corporate are at work behind organizing and disseminating the nationalist fear and rhetoric because it serves their purposes well: it makes the majority of Koreans, the working poor to working middle classes, look immature, petty, bitter, and unable to effectively lead. The resulting sentiment offers a slimy protection of Korea's ruling elite.

We should insist that the highlights of the G20 protests in Seoul, organized by Koreans, are the labor activists protesting cuts to social welfare programs. The Korean left is correct to be concerned and their early protests are a sign of their precise action rather than their often reported disorganization and vitriol.

Nevertheless, the conservative Korean press is likely to highlight any and all nationalist rhetoric within the Korean protests and amongst public Korean dissent. Such press serves an important cultural purpose: it protects Korea's elite. The unfortunate result is that the shitty expat blogging community will find further reason to hate on Korean activism via blogs regarding unfair treatment of foreigners by Korean bigots or regarding behavior non-Koreans find silly, stupid and offensive. It's always one or the other with foreign bloggers: criticize bigotry in Korea or illustrate their stupidity. Especially white bloggers: white folks love to illustrate others' bigotry. You know, it's white power's only effective use: Scapegoating.

Please support Koreans' right to organize, distribute information, protest, assemble and speak in public. Please celebrate that attempt to preserve their rights. In this celebration maybe we can find a little more energy to afford looking after our own back home, which are in fact in jeopardy. The democracy movement is alive and still struggling here. Without positive portrayals, like the Boston Globe's piece this morning, we cannot expect the remaining love of nationalist sentiment and protectionism to lose its popular appeal. And rather than the protests being about how the rest of the world envisions and represents Korea's nationalist sentiment, this should be about insisting Koreans are able to distribute information to shape policy and rhetoric.

Please do stop highlighting the minority nationalist interests as if those ideas are passively supported by the majority of Koreans. They aren't. It's about as silly as claiming the Tea Party represents the majority American sentiment regarding economic and social policies because the press pays so much attention to it. It's damaging to the progressive left (even the progressive right) who's image is often smeared in the right wing/corporate popular press.

시끄러운 교실

2010-11-08T11:18:00.002+09:00

The longer I teach in Seoul the more I'm learning about classroom ~~control~~ management as an active and sometimes aggressive yet covert struggle between between my expectations for my students and my students' expectations for me. I say covert because the traditional classroom does not permit never mind encourage student dissent. In other words, I don't see the students and me meeting each other in an ideal public space we call a classroom in which we work together to complete a series of tasks and conversations in order to learn. I see my and my students' expectations meeting in a rhetorical space through which we communicate with each other about lessons I'm more or less obligated to teach them.

I've quickly described two classrooms; neither is an actual room we could call The Real Classroom. One is an ideal classroom and the other a rhetorical space. Teaching in an ideal public classroom is an experience I very much want to have. I'd love to see the promise fulfilled, the promise of democratic discourse in a public classroom that results in learning and an exchange of ideas many of which derived from the original social difference of the individuals in the class. The latter space, which I refuse to call a classroom, is the space I'm obliged to maintain. It's a space wherein cultural difference, contractual obligation and the State all work to create turbulence that is always just slightly less than the natural noise in an actual classroom: students, teachers, desks, chairs, the A/V, the fan. For the students, this turbulence registers in anxiety and discomfort heard in their voices, seen on their faces. Some simply sleep through it. A few react violently to its presence.

I don't now how most teachers handle this. Actually, I do. Most teachers use their power to maintain order in their classrooms with more or less successful results. Most teachers teach to maintain order: order in the tradition, order in the room, order in their assumptions, order in their lives, and so on. In addition, I always assume, and I think I'm correct in making this assumption, that most teachers don't believe this turbulence (as opposed to the everyday noise) exists. Most teachers I meet seem willing to accept the classroom space a school district provides for what it is and that their task is to instruct students on how to do specific tasks more correctly, more efficiently. In effect, our public classrooms are nothing more than training students how to be good employees and consumers. I don't want to pick on most teachers, but I do have a problem with the attitude that for all its claims to appreciate the importance in education actually reinforces the notion that ranking is much more important than understanding and appreciating knowledge. I don't think it's good for us and I know it's not good for our students.

Most days, teaching public school in Korea is a lesson in humility. Even when what I teach entertains and educates my students, an honest assessment of the quality and usefulness of my lessons can lead to slight, if not heavy, depression. I never question my dedication to teaching; don't misunderstand me. It's that I get depressed when I think of the dirty rooms, decaying infrastructure, smelly uniforms, unhappy employees, horrible food, and incomplete lessons. Of course, there's much more we, as in society, can do to improve the horrible situation(s) of public education. In Korea, as in the US, much public discourse concerning educational reform embraces the ideals we all think a healthy democratic society has to offer the classroom. But much if not all the talk about teachers and students is focused squarely on the outcomes of tests that evaluate performance of students and now teachers. These ideals are, then, not at all about education, pedagogy, practice, knowledge, discourse and rhetoric. They are market ideals that help explain, encourage, inculcate, and distribute capitalist cultural myths. I don't care about these ideals when it comes down to it because I find them facile and vacuous; in the sense that we all know them already, some of us agree with them in spirit, and yet do absolutely nothing to insure we shall attain them.

I'm going to post a lengthy description of my last lesson and attempt to examine what I'm doing here at Samsung High School. I want to examine the usefulness of the language work I attempt to accomplish on a weekly basis.

I have titled this post "The Noisy Classroom" because I encourage noise in my classrooms. The noise in my classes is bilingual--Korean and English. The noise is outbursts, questions, casual conversation, friendly banter as well as scolding address: all the typical noises are present. I tend to have students work in groups. My high school students tend dwell "behind the curve." They are nowhere near proficient enough to meet Korea's standards for students their age. In each class, I can expect anywhere from 2 to 6 students who are at a solid intermediate level or above. I can expect 5 to 10 students who are at a low intermediate level. I can expect the other students to be at a beginner level or have little to no desire to use English at all.

This poses a problem for me. If I were a teacher who made demands of my students based on the standards, as most teachers do, I'd get no satisfactory work accomplished, no matter how good my lessons were. No matter what my colleagues think of ESL/EFL standards, theory and praxis, I'm not teaching in an environment where I can use traditional teaching methods to gain positive results. First, the students aren't at the level that Korea's standards insist we (teachers and students) maintain; second, I have no instutional support.

In addition, the standard serves to remind my students how poorly they perform in comparison to the standard. It serves no other purpose; I'd argue even at the schools where students outperform the standard the standards do not encourage learning instead instilling habits of competition. Students are, in fact, oppressed by the standard. I found in my first year at school that the lessons the Korean teachers encouraged me to instruct were of two kinds: 1) informative lessons meant to encourage students to memorize and repeat certain linguistic structures and/or vocabulary and 2) games meant to entertain as much as teach. These lessons fulfill two concerns Koreans have about classroom management: learning and entertainment.

I do believe that Korean teachers, in this respect, are very similar to American teachers. They want students to enjoy their lessons. The problem is that the kinds of lessons I was encourage to design, implement and teach do not take students into consideration. The lessons are actually much more about satisfying what the teachers, administration and culture of education demand. This is the turbulent noise that most adversely affects my classrooms in Korea. In the US, in my university classrooms, I could control this noise more effectively. I am, in fact, part of the problem in Korea. I'm the colonial presence in Korean culture, the physical manifestation of all that worries Koreans about English-language culture in Korean society. And my voice, if it is in tune with standards, is a repetitive You're Not Right. Most teachers I know are unwilling to work this into how they teach, this consciousness of oppression. Some are unwilling to admit it's presence. Still others seem to take pleasure in treating students like slaves to their cause.

With the next few posts, I want to share my lesson, consider my classroom, come to a better understanding of what it is I'm doing here and what my work means. Feel free to participate in the comments. Share your stories, questions, concerns.

back? i think so... more to come.

2010-10-29T12:14:00.000+09:00

i have no idea, and i have been tinkering for weeks now, what has been up with my access to Blogger and my blogs, but the problem seems to have disappeared as if it never existed.

the sites load from school and home without issue and i'm hoping i can begin blogging again. i've got a lot to share. it's kind of exciting.

this problem accessing blogger reminds me of the early days of blogger when such things happened quite often.

Two shows in Hongdae tonight

2010-10-02T15:21:00.001+09:00

If you're wondering what to do tonight, you should come out to Duriban at 7pm. (A short walk out of exit 4 Hongdae Ipgu Station. Come out of the exit, look for the building standing amongst the others that have been demolished. It's about 100m or so from the exit.) After the shows there, head to Children's Park. Then, end the night at Roots Time.

A Testing ONE TWO THREE

2010-10-01T10:40:00.000+09:00

Well, it's been some time since my last post. I've been unable to get into blogger.com from home and from school and have had to resort to a proxy. This post is little more than proving to myself that it actually works now and that I can get back to blogging about what I blog about...

Tropical Storm Kompasu.

2010-09-02T07:36:00.004+09:00

Trying to get accurate English information about typhoons on the Korean peninsula is a real pain in the ass. The expat sites list weather information sites like The Weather Channel, which absolutely blows unless you'd like to know if it's going to rain out your NASCAR or NFL or College Football event. {Ed. 942am: Here's one. Thanks, Cliff! Korea Meteorological Administration.}

Last year, there were no typhoons. I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. From five to fourteen, 1975-1984ish, I lived in fear that the Arkansas River would flash flood and drown my neighbors. It did once. In addition, we survived several massive tornadoes. I know the use of a bathtub or an oak closet and a mattress. I lived through Hurrican Gloria in New London, Connecticut. We had no electricity for a week after that one. These were all adventures for me. I remember them not with fear, but still my heart races with excitement each time a big storm passes my way.

So, I want to know about this typhoon that is now crashing its way across Seoul and the peninsula. The winds are strong, the gusts tremendous. Schools don't close in Korea, so I'll get to ride it out with students, faculty and staff. Our school is older and rotten. It's sturdy, of course, but it's nothing more than concrete and sliding-glass panes. We'll hear the entire storm as the building should act like a poorly engineered, rectangular ear. From what I can tell, after the brunt of the storm passes, we're likely to experience some grand thunderstorms through the weekend.

I love the thunder. I praise the rain. I like the gray days that sweep me away to my interior best self and blanket me. I fear the storms but always want to venture outdoors during their mad climaxes. A result of my young father, in his late twenties and early thirties during the storm years of my youth, dragging us out into the stormy nights after the worst had passed to survey the damage.

Apropos, then, that this great tropical storm, low-grade Typhoon Kompasu, kept me awake rattling windows while I've been negotiating my youth for my novel. Figuring things out. Cracking memories like the torn tarp flapping on my scooter, snapping my seat.

--------info

***4AM Woken by the trucking wind, rattling windows. Typhoon Kompasu is motoring through Seoul.

***730AM and the storm is not shutting down schools even as we learn that most subway lines are delayed and that the one or two are no longer running. I will have to walk all the way to school. Bound to get soaked. From what I can tell, it's a level one typhoon. Not a scary typhoon at all, but winds can gust up to 125mph and remain steady between 70 and 95mph. We're getting blown by massive winds in my neighborhood, but it's all mostly gusty right now. From what I can tell, the storm's center should be off the peninsula by late this afternoon. I'll update with info. Maybe some pics if anything interesting happens. ANyway, it's loud at times, but nothing is blowing around. No electricity out. I'm glad. I'm just recovering from my wedding and two week trip to Chicago. I'd love it to blow and rain a bit but I'd like to do it with comfort. I'm pooped. Off to school.

***930AM and the storm is over. Satellite images show the storm has left Seoul and moved Northeast. I'm sad that it passed through during the wee hours and early morning because I couldn't go out and snap photos of the wind beating the crap out of everything. Oh well. There's always the next typhoon. My colleagues are telling me that the winds were pretty severe with this storm. It sounded wonderful. At times like trucks passing by our windows. Fortunately, no damage was done to our school. I really don't have any faith that classroom or office damage would be fixed in a timely manner. Right now, all money goes into the decaying gymnasium. They've been working on that filthy place since I arrived in 2008. The rain falling now is that wonderful misty spray that quickly and thoroughly wets without much force, intimidation or show. I like it. What don't I like about this now: humidity. Lots of humidity. Adds extra pounds to everyone walking. Yesterday, the humidity rose so quickly while Praise and I were walking through Myeongdong that it felt to me like she had thrown a wet hot blanket over my back. I don't mind heat. I loathe humidity. Looking forward to autumn. Chuseok is an entire week off school this year. Just over two weeks away.

Guilt, the Ineluctable & the Post-Traumatic

2010-08-10T01:31:00.004+09:00

I just finished watching the newest episode of Mad Men.
I've learned two things.

I love my wife. That's not the first thing. In the order of things learned while watching TV on my laptop, I didn't first learn I love my wife. And I knew that already. Anyway, that's not exactly a lesson, is it? I think I learned to recognize the guilt I feel about not loving her enough and that this guilt is tied to fidelity. Not fidelity as in "Have you cheated or not, Gary, tell me the truth." It's not that kind of fidelity, or guilt--a being honest with myself, or her, sort of thing. Though, in the show, that's a big part of masculinity on display. But Guilt, nevertheless and capital 'G', in remembering how incapable I feel of doing what she needs done or I think she wants from me to properly love her. Guilt as an address. Guilt as an attempt. The Attempt: to try in spite of knowing I may continuously fail. And quickly after succumbing to guilt, coming to understand that this is my conscience and its means to find something similar to cold feet before the wedding because I don't get cold feet suffering instead, like many of us do, from hot feet. I'm too spontaneous. Too hyperactive. Too compulsive. Obsessed without end to obsession.

What do I have to feel guilty about? I guess, I feel guilty I'm doing this thing I never thought I would do and with this person who should know better than to hang out with a person like me. Certainly, I think that's warranted guilt. But on the show, two men drink New Year's Day away first with one another at work over their loneliness and Separations, then with one another at an early New York City grindhouse over Godzilla, then over steak, then comedy in The Village, then with prostitutes. And the shy one was only too willing. I sympathized with him. And that sympathy made me feel guilty and that feeling got me writing and thinking. The feeling, not the illicit behavior, led to writing about my wife. And that, of course, nourishes further guilt.

I could make the funny pun about being Catholic, but there's the first thing I learned while watching Mad Men. The first thing is that I'm more than a little embarrassed to have discovered I'm still suffering from post-traumatic stress. I mangled my finger beyond repair in the fall of 2005. Well, I was mugged and menaced with a gun on Memorial Day Weekend 2005, as well. And that comes with its own gifts. But this second unintended violent event is what I'm now coping with.

In the fall of 2005, I inadvertently stuck my finger into the moving flywheel of my Vespa while working on its carburetor. We say, I cut if off in the flywheel, but I didn't cut it off at all. I turned it around so that it was pointing at me, tearing everything up inside the finger, including the skin all around the middle joint. I was calm, then. When it happened, I made no sound and asked for an ambulance. I sat on the front porch and waited as firemen showed up as they do for traumatic injuries. I didn't speak when they freed my pointing finger from the hardened pudding of blood and skin within supportive arm. I didn't speak to the man who permitted me to lean against him while we waited.

Eventually, I walked on my own into the back of the ambulance. I smiled at the paramedics. I patiently occupied an Emergency Room bed with a synthetic morphine drip for several hours waiting for the hand specialist to arrive. And while he amputated my torn finger from the middle joint up, I talked with him and his assistant about wine. Though they hid the amputation from me and refused to let me watch the insertion of three pins, they permitted me to observe my finger being sewn shut. It was a nice reward.

You'd think I was over the incident. I behaved like a regular tough, an expert in violence on my own body. And in many ways, I am. Outwardly, I am. Inside me somewhere, though, a whole mess of mangled nerves still reverberates with the violence of a flywheel snapping bone and tearing tendon. Tonight, Joan cut her finger while preparing her husband's dinner. It led to a touching scene for her character and a rare kind moment from her husband's. I just about vomited and had to stand in my kitchen until the scene was over. I can't really describe the intensity of this attack, but it reminds me of what I went through during the months after my amputation. The panic was strong, real, as if it had never not been present.

And so there's the lessons. The practical aspect of tonight's watching me and my wife's favorite show alone: I was reminded of how strong my love for her is and how fragile my grip on reality can be. A twisted moment combining is and being but sewn together only after a violent event. Call it recognition. Call it recollection. I may call it forgotten. But there will remain the persistence of this note.

I'm thinking of Daedalus now, as I often do, blindly walking along a strand. It can be any strand. And in the first novel, his terrible, terrible love poetry. I think I understand what it means now: ineluctable, without light. I exist in the moments I don't think about it all and then, well, it all stops while I find another excuse to continue walking on away from yet another violent event.

Back in September.

2010-08-05T15:41:00.001+09:00

The World Cup, Summer Camp for students, and now preparation for my wedding and travel to the US is keeping me away from writing. Back in September.

Some Very Big Bullshit

2010-07-09T10:40:00.007+09:00

The World Cup has kept me in my neighborhood and sleepless. It's almost over, but I'm already transformed into a football zombie. It's going to be difficult to return to my routine.

I posted this morning to my blog, Some Very Big Bullshit. If you follow dagSeoul, please follow the new blog, too. The newest post is relevant. White folks in Korea love to claim minority status. I want to write more about this phenomenon because it exists on the most amateur blogs as well as the most academic and professional. Almost every blog about Korea by a white author includes posts illustrating Korean bigotry and, especially on American blogs, how Koreans hate white people. It's tiresome, lazy and repressed nonsense that I'm too happy to write about at the moment. But I'm compiling links, quotes, sites and other data to include in a post discussing it all sometime soon.

Two more World Cup matches to go. These 3:30AM game times are murder.

Korean Celebrity Edition.

2010-07-01T13:57:00.004+09:00

Song Hye Kyo will never do anything better than this McDonald's commercial. Never.

World Cup Break and Things White People Like to Do

2010-06-26T20:29:00.002+09:00

World Cup is keeping me busy. I'll be putting a series of posts out about lesson planning at my high school when classes break beginning next week. Until then, it's crickets time in dagSeoul. We're watching football.

I thought it's worth mentioning. If you're a white girl living in Korea who likes Japan and fancies herself an apprentice courtesan and dresses up in white face for a photo session and posts those pictures for all to see on Facebook as if it's simply wonderful and innocent and amazing that you got to do something that cool, I'm the person on your friend list who's going to burst that white bubble and ask if I'm supposed to take you seriously any more.

Just saying.

Comments

2010-06-21T09:17:00.000+09:00

After some consideration, and friends' good points on the subject, I've returned anonymous posting to my blogs. I have reinstated moderation. If you post a comment, give me some time to moderate before posting again.

I agree that my readers' internet privacy is more important than the few minutes it takes me to moderate.

Teachering: Useful and Useless Teaching habits

2010-06-15T11:19:00.021+09:00

[edited twice as of this morning, 6/17/10)

I've been thinking about my role as an English teacher in Korea more often lately. I know it's likely due to my approaching contract renewal. I should probably just relax. I know I'm a good teacher, but we don't get much peer review in Korea. Certainly not as much discourse as I'm used to in the US. So, I am anxious.

I took a little time to reflect on my work the last week and discovered, since my 2008 arrival in Seoul, I've weathered a strong revision of my teaching practices yet a strong reaffirmation of my pedagogical principles. My principles are renewed and my practice is more vital than it has ever been in the past. I feel like I know what I'm doing yet I'm doing something new.

I think a lot of Native Speaking English Teachers (NSETs) arrive in Korea with vague notions about how to teach English and little experience. That's problematic and for what are obvious reasons: new teachers, little support, no training, rigid contract, et al. However, many people coming to Korea to teach are dedicated teachers looking for work in a country that respects teachers and looking to teach in Korea, a place they want to know more about. Many teachers arrive here already trained, with strong pedagogical principles and practical experience. As one of the latter, it's often painful and frustrating to be compared to the former. Teachers should be able to gain experience, certainly, but I do believe that experience should be developed at home and in conjunction with the direction of their own teachers. That's for another post.

I'm tired of hearing from my surprised Korean colleagues that I'm such a good, dedicated teacher who has good ideas and loves Korea. (They're always happy I don't show up late, smelling of soju and kimchi, with my shirt untucked, dead tired and unable to teach. Koreans seem to expect the worst as a rule.) I always want to crack wise and stand up for myself. I don't. I just smile and say, Thank You. It's the Korean way, for sure.

I've always thought English is useful as a global language because it's capable of assimilating essential everyday language from other languages without much of a hassle or misunderstanding. However, the teaching of English can be much less democratic and accepting of difference than the language is. For many reasons, many teachers act as if they are guardians of the English language. It's not enough for them to teach it; they like to act as if they own it and are protecting something they bought with their knowledge of it.

One thing I've learned in Korea about English instruction and that I'd offer to anybody seeking advice about teaching ESL and/or EFL in a foreign country is that a teacher must have the ability to strive for excellence while setting classroom standards and expectations appropriately with respect to the students' current needs and demands in contrast to the teacher's own desires. Teachers really do have the power to set this conflict between desires and demands aside, to disengage from it for the benefit of the class by stepping down from doing things for the students and actively engaging with them in classroom discourse. English language instruction and acquisition can be a coming to terms with the language rather than enforcing it: a negotiation rather than a standard.

What I have been coming to terms with in Korea is a strange disconnect between my radicalism (pedagogy) and my pragmatism (my objective). I have learned that balancing the desire to express ourselves in the classroom and department successfully and meaningfully is not the same as managing a classroom in a manner suitable to the students. Only the teacher is in a position to assess what the students need and this gives teachers a lot of power. We know that government is always seeking to proscribe this power. And students often like to rebel against it. Regardless of the situation outside of the classroom, a teacher can make the decision to empower student participation and activate learning in useful and meaningful ways no matter what interference exists.

Judging from the bulk of lesson plans I see circulated and the general discourse about teaching (in Korea,) the less-experienced teachers seem to make the wrong decisions for what may seem like very practical (read, good) reasons. Teachers tend to decide that the requirements of the lessons and demands of the culture are so significant that they must insist students accept a classroom environment the teacher thinks will work best for them to meet curricula-determined goals. I disavow this practice. I guess this could be my reaction to useless lesson planning practices. After all, how long have teachers been composing plans based upon concrete goals that are met only after imposing a strict outline of timed classroom activities? It's stale; it ignores students.

A good lesson plan illustrates a teacher understands how to define an attainable goal. A good plan never addresses how and what students think about it. Moreover, detailed plans always determine how students should approach a lesson. Therefore, plans limit creative and critical discourse. Nowhere in these lesson plans are students visible. Students are unnecessary to its implementation, and they will be present when a lesson is discussed and assigned. They will be given a lesson. I know many teachers who can compose wonderful lesson plans who cannot teach, aren't interested in teaching. They are good plan implementers. And the students' grades are merely numeric representations of the quality of implementation. In fact, that's how both the US and Korean Republic see education. This is the prevailing theory of education: if students receive high test scores, then they are learning.

My Korean colleagues often sadly approach me and apologize because I have had to "lower my expectations" since coming to Samsung High School. When I first arrived, I thought this was because my school's Principal had read my CV to the teachers in a faculty meeting before introducing me. It was embarrassing. I'm proud of my work but I don't brag. And some teachers were intimidated. What was I doing here? They asked it; I asked it. But I have learned that they're thanking me for working hard and trying to be respectful. I'm not good with gratitude. I have a real problem seeing myself as good. And it's even harder for me to figure out how to return gratitude. I'm terrified of obligation and never quite get it right. This, too, is for another post. But it shouldn't be overlooked that when I first arrived, were it not for my experience, I would have been shocked to discover that it's close to impossible for me to properly complete my contracted tasks--that much of my work, in the traditional sense of teaching lessons, is pointless.

But I have learned to stay focused on the students. To love my students and not necessarily their work. And so, when I'm reminded how sad it is that I have to lower my expectations, I respond with a smile and say "No problem." What's the point of explaining that I find such apologies demeaning to the student body? It's not worth it. I know how my colleagues think about my most recent approach to developing lessons: they see my newest take on teaching students here as a lowering of expectations. It is decidedly not that at all.

The level of English in my working-class district is lower than you might expect. I have 2 or 3 out of 35 to 45 students, in 20 classes, who can listen to a question in English and answer using complete sentences or meaningful clauses and phrases. That's about 60 out of 600-700 students I regularly see. As a result, the first thing I ditched was the English-Only Classroom. For me, that was the easiest part of the environment to change.

Even before arriving in Korea, I wholeheartedly disagreed that enforcing English-only in classrooms encourages and supports the students. Now I can say without a doubt that it's merely wishful thinking to suggest a classroom can be English-Only. It's a ridiculously limiting conception of language as well, as if language were only spoken. The students are not thinking in English. No matter what they say or think, the English language is always already in context with Korean language and culture. We might as well use that to our benefit. English-Only classrooms in Korea are much more about making English teachers more comfortable. I hate classroom power trips. Thus, my classrooms are proudly bilingual.

I would suggest that newer teachers in Korea think about ways to assert themselves in the classroom. Co-teachers will attempt to dominate younger and inexperienced teachers. They'll attempt to police your classrooms. If you need help and are a brand new teacher in search of guidance, this might be a happy coincidence. On the other hand, many teachers have practical experience and will find that Korea's classroom culture is odd, possibly alienating. One of the first things to learn while teaching here is how to fairly and positively manage a Korean English classroom. It takes some work. But the conflicts that will arise and headaches that follow are worth the stress. If you're a good teacher, they will respect your different style. If the students dislike you and you can't teach, they're going to get rid of you as quickly as possible anyway. And I agree with them. Korean students shouldn't be the lab rats for Western teacher wannabes. (I don't mean to be overly cynical or rude to younger teachers, but using another culture's student population as a tool to explore your options back home is unethical to say the least. It's something a teacher wouldn't do.)

The second thing I have learned is how to see the classroom as my students do: a boring, uninspired series of lessons about how to properly answer multiple choice questions based on reading, listening and thinking about ideas in English. Korean English teachers handle this aspect of the job. It's a teacher-stands-in-front-of-the-class-and-tells-you-what-things-mean kind of situation. And Korean students are often much more accepting of receiving such lessons from a Korean than a foreigner. Korean education culture mandates this approach as necessary to teach the students how to prepare for their standardized tests. The advanced students take notes and passively listen and the students who are slightly behind sleep or daydream. The issue for me, as an NSET, is a matter of role: What is my role in the Korean high school classroom?

I've decided my role is to be the one consistent English-speaking presence necessary to acclimate students to the sounds and logic of the English language. By using English with them, I'm performing what it sounds like, how it acts, what it means, and when to use it. In addition, I am what it looks like. This role is in opposition to how most foreign teachers work. This is not to say that they aren't well-meaning teachers with strong lessons. But who are they kidding? I have seen videos of lessons about idioms that drive students mad with laughter. But a PowerPoint presentation with videos and an active classroom is still a lesson about an idiom that relies on a stupid comparison between Konglish and English usage of English language words. It's simply not teaching language. It's teaching jokes. At best, it could be referred to as "reaching an understanding" about a routine. And, in many cases, a teacher risks reinforcing bad habits and lazy routines.

Many NSETs attempt to improve on the Korean English teacher's work and talk about teaching as a competition between co-teachers. At times, they wish to correct the mistakes and to encourage more contemporary usage. Many of the lessons online are based on improving the language the students already know. I think this approach almost gets it right but the flaw is in the pedagogy. NSETs like to be The Expert English Person on Campus. They like to own the language. They complain about the mistakes Koreans permit in their lessons and textbooks. They like to correct cultural errors. They like to transmit Western cultural lessons via language lessons. And as a result of playing the leader, they often find themselves very much an outsider in their schools. They become English Language Informers--the tool in their schools to illustrate who knows English well and who doesn't: somebody who is approached only when the locals can't answer a language question without an expert's help. I want nothing to do with this role. It's a means to alienate myself from my students. In addition, I may be an English teacher, but I do not own the language.

All NSETs should meditate on this mantra: I know I am not in Korea to change Korea.

On the other hand, I love Korea. So, why is it not enough for me to simply be myself using the language and being a teacher being myself using the language? It really does boil down to being a teacher or being like a teacher. Am I teaching or teachering?

I do everything I can to work with students on improving classroom discourse to permit as much student participation as possible yet insist that we maintain a useful direction. After all, we must succeed at focused study with a purpose. In my classrooms, even when I'm evaluating the students, I try to encourage them to use the language they have already learned in order to practice it and become more familiar with it. I insist they attempt to speak in coherent sentences when possible.

You may think I have set the bar rather low. I'd disagree. I have renovated the English classroom. Once a week the students feel at ease when an English teacher walks into the room. At ease because I am the Native Speaker, not in spite of it. (Although my co-teachers often feel alienated in my classroom. Yet again, for another post.) This serves an important purpose. I'm the guy you can speak your lousy English with because I'm patient and kind and want you to succeed. I'm not here to inform you that you're incorrect. Quite the opposite, I'm the one who will tell you, "I understand." I'm not concerned with your ranking nor your grade. I'll insist you use English, but I'll support your attempt. In addition, I'll not cater to you nor insult your intelligence. I'm the teacher who knows you know the answer but can't figure out how to say it. We'll figure out a way to say it together. Consequently, I'm the teacher who will insist that English is only possible in conversation with others no matter how much the government and anal Westerners insist it's about correctness.

I'll give you an example. This month we're working on illustrating six themes from the film, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. While some of my students are preparing to find jobs and begin a life of hard work, many students are working towards University life. So, it's important that they begin thinking critically about ideas they encounter in texts. They need to be able to generate reasonable statements about those ideas. They need to know how to use examples from texts to support their statements. And they need to improve their English speaking skills.

I don't have enough time with them to work on reading and discussing texts. I do have time to screen films. We watch a film; I hand out vocabulary. We discuss the language in the film and homework is to familiarize themselves with words and phrases that are new to them. I encourage them to use dictionaries but require their answers in class be in their own words. They aren't permitted to speak in dictionary-ese. The following week, groups have to stand and answer questions about the new words and phrases. We spend one week writing sentences about the meaning of familiar words from the narrative. I assign homework to group leaders who must organize their groups and get them to present a discussion about one of six themes. In their presentations the following week, they must use the language from our earlier vocabulary work. Again, I assign homework asking the students to draw an illustration of their group work about a theme. Their illustration must contain a slogan that captures the spirit of their chosen theme. I sneak a little practice on writing a summary into an art project. The following week, group leaders present their work and the class evaluates the presentations.

It sounds like difficult work, doesn't it? It is and it isn't. These are smart lessons that permit duplication. In other words, in any given school year, I can help the students develop comfort with new vocabulary and English language culture using a format that entertains them. The material in each lesson is new, yet it recalls prior work. The students can become comfortable with my teaching style and a classroom routine without me having to give up the complexity I think is necessary to actually promote learning. I have a lesson ideal and a general direction that maintains a focused and accurate purpose.

The most time-consuming part of the preparation is putting students into groups because I make sure the groups contain high-performers and low-performers, students who both know and don't know English. The students teach one another by listening to their group members discuss how to complete the work and other groups present their work. They become the experts. Students learn who to trust and ask one another for help. I encourage the groups to routinely give others the answers. I encourage students who know the answer that a person standing doesn't know to share the answer. Students know there is nothing wrong with hearing an answer and then repeating it. Of course, they must learn to hear the most correct answer. As a result, I have discovered a way to permit a noisy classroom.

It's much more complex and demanding than anything they're accustomed to as students of English, yet they enjoy it. The difference is that we work in groups and share our results and discuss our problems understanding the meaning of the English language in both Korean and English. The classroom becomes less about the assignment and a teacher's evaluation than it does about the discourse needed to address the questions at issue within each stage of the assignment. Moreover, the students are involved with evaluating their performance as the final lesson requires classes to discuss group performance.

Ultimately, I'm satisfied because this is a practice I'd use with Seoul's most privileged students. It's not something developed with my students in mind; it's something that works regardless of social class. The lessons permit useful participation from all kinds of students, and their participation is required to be in concert with their classmates' work. I'm engaging with them on what can be thought of as their terms. In other words, I'm not reinforcing the stupid ranking system where the best and brightest are rewarded as they shame their classmates who haven't scored as high on their tests. (This is a problem in US classrooms, too, where teachers use the smart kids to motivate the kids who aren't doing as well. It's demeaning. As far as I'm concerned, it's a kind of training for corporate life that should be banned from the classroom.)

I've been using a word lately to distinguish between useful and useless teaching practices. Teaching is always useful teaching. Teachering is when what you do in the classroom fulfills your obligations but does not necessarily have anything to do with your students. Teachering is always useless.

잔소리 (jansori): Scolding, Nagging, Grumbling

2010-06-09T09:15:00.009+09:00

This morning the girls in my first class were more interested in applying make-up and chatting than they were in forming their assigned groups and beginning work. They simply ignored me for the first five minutes of class. They looked at me while chatting, or with one eye still in a mirror. The disobedience was supposed to be a cute challenge to my authority. We had a lot of work to accomplish today, so I was not pleased. I returned their challenge with some rare anger.

Something about the way the girls ignore the teachers is much more of a power play than the way the boys do it. In fact, the boys aren't necessarily ignoring their teachers. They are playing and are always ready for their teacher to join the fun. It's hard to get them to settle down. In my opinion, scolding is useless in these situations. I'm not talking about a sexist "boys will be boys" moment. The girls can be energetic and playful, too, but there is something in the Korean high school classroom that the girls do to invite a particular kind of interjection into their social scene that the boys do not require.

This morning, the girls were evaluating how far they could go without getting in trouble in a way the boys wouldn't experiment with me. In fact, the boys expect to be scolded. (One reason I don't do it when they misbehave: not scolding them confuses them.) The girls will misbehave until they are scolded and then return the scold with practiced contempt. I say practiced in the sense of rehearsed: several minutes after I scold while they regard me with contempt, we are back to full cooperation and an active, well-functioning classroom. If I was to do this with the boys, they'd quit and be silently sad that their teacher is actually mad at them. Maybe it's a maturity thing? I haven't quite figured it out.

Today, I scolded the girls for five minutes. I've been practicing. A good scolding has to have a good pace and consistent tone. There should be well-placed pauses that last from a few seconds to a minute and a half. It can be slightly insulting but never rude. It must put the listener in his or her place yet requires an attempt to illustrate Care. It must require a response, even if only a nod or affected sob or sigh. Some teachers scold students and it sounds rehearsed and fake; good scoldings are sincere and represent a style unique to the scolder.

At school: when I interject, the girls always respond. Today's response: scowls, frowns, open-mouthed disbelief, sighs, slumped shoulders. Some girls nodded their heads, which was a sign that they understood I acted appropriately and at the right time. They were participating in it. Therefore, I can tell you they were scolded. I didn't nag them. I didn't grumble.

Jansori was the first thing I noticed after my arrival in Seoul. I had never heard of the word nor encountered discussion about Korean rhetoric. I got off the plane at Incheon Int'l on a Monday morning and was driven to my school. I was teaching less than two hours after arriving. And though I understood nothing, I was asking about jansori on my second day.

I didn't know the word for it; I didn't know what was being said. I had no context. All I had was a sense that there was some sort of rhetoric being used by the teachers and students that was different than regular discussion. I really did have to ask, What is that?

Jansori is a complex rhetorical system that often gets oversimplified by bloggers, tourists and expats. They (and Koreans) have a stock English language answer. Jansori is nagging. What's worse is the responsibility for the transmission of jansori is given to older Korean women with the ridiculous Konglish phrase, "mother's nag". Jansori is nagging, but it's so much more. And though mothers famously implement it, everybody in Korea participates.

The following are my notes on jansori (so far and minus some notes on scolding because I discuss it above):

Scolding is not nagging. Nagging is not grumbling. Although nagging and grumbling are useful when scolding. Jansori is scolding, nagging, and grumbling.

Nagging is both intentional and unintentional, and it may not serve a purpose other than to relieve anxiety. Scolding has a purpose, a direction; scolding is precise and accurate. Though nagging may be inaccurate and imprecise, it must have a subject and an object. Scolding can be desired and necessary, and so the right to scold can be abused. Nagging tends to be passive-aggressive. Nagging is always abuse.

There is grumbling, too. Grumbling need not be specific and needs neither subject nor object. Somebody might be grumbling near you at a bus stop. Grumbling is grumbled around and about not always at, to or for. Grumbling is small-talk jansori. It can be cute. It's often funny. However, it can be incredibly sad to see somebody alone and grumbling. Especially if you can understand the grumble. Grumbling may endear you to an older friend, stranger or colleague. Grumbling needs no language. A person can grumble with his eyes, eyebrows; her lips curled into a half-grin or quarter-scowl. Grumblers click their tongues, sometimes rudely spit. Grumbling has direction whether or not it's comprehensive or easily received. Grumblers displace and project. In other words, the grumbling might be directed at you even though you did nothing to receive it. This further distinguishes grumbling from nagging.

In Media Res: Neither for nor against, forever with my students.

2010-06-07T10:26:00.018+09:00

On teaching to the middle: I entered my first class this morning with no expectations, demands, concerns, or anxieties regarding the beginning of 150 minutes ( three weeks) of exercises designed to help my students acquire commonly used English regarding "hard work" and "feelings about belonging". Even though the next three weeks include the language work Korean students least enjoy, I'm confident about my lesson plans and tend to enter class ready to find a means to solve one problem: How do I reach the students with the least English knowledge yet encourage the advanced students to learn something new about English they already know?

Some teachers like to talk about teaching to the middle. I abhor the practice. I believe it's an important aspect of anti-intellectualism in the classroom. It resists conflict and complexity in most discourse and does much to insist that the teacher is the sole guide to classroom discourse, which could be called The Status Quo. I only mention this because Arne Duncan's and President Obama's educational policies are on my mind. Maybe I'll write more about this later.

I like to encourage group work in my Korean classes for two reasons. First, when Korean students do not know an answer and/or are confronted with a difficult series of complex tasks, they may decide to quit participating in class and will sleep if permitted. They simply give up. Second, critical thinking is not required in Korean classrooms where following directions and repeating correct answers is more highly valued. I've had to come to terms with my desire to make every thing and space look like me and admit that my job as a Native Speaking English Teacher is not to criticize Korean education culture, which foreigners often purposefully choose to ignore is a public education system with a complex pedagogy developed over many centuries. On the other hand, I am not required to give up my principles and practice simply because I am a guest from a different culture.

Creating groups that contain high, middle and low performing students and designing lessons that focus on specific skills that students should already possess is one very reliable method to insist that critical thinking skills remain a necessary part of my classroom work. I'll discuss my current assignment in the next post.

Monday Class & The Big Picture: My first Monday class is with second grade boys who are at an intermediate level. It's hard to accurately judge my students' English knowledge: they're purposefully reserved when they participate in class and, as a result of study methods, they often know many more words than they can use. It's easy to say they are low-performing when they have more knowledge or high-performing when they have little knowledge. There are maybe ten students in each class who are behind, yet the majority of the class can understand about 80% of what I say to them without needing an explanation from their Korean co-teacher.

My task is to find a way to activate the knowledge students already possess in order to encourage them to acquire new knowledge. I talk to my Korean co-teachers about language acquisition all the time. Korean students are inundated with English everyday yet encouraged to keep it at a distance via signs, fliers, TV, Internet, radio, classroom, homework, and hagwon. English is always something they are in the process of learning and it's implementation involves an objective ranking based on an exam or a promotion or some other opportunity to succeed. Therefore, English remains technical and foreign, always institutionalized and never satisfyingly realized. They're mostly overwhelmed with English, and oppressed by it. I refuse to implement strategies in my classroom that might reinforce this unfortunate, mindless and alienating process.

There are few opportunities for students to daily work on understanding the language in lieu of memorizing meaning. I use my weekly 50-minutes with them to encourage acquiring skills necessary to recall and recognize English they already know to address things using English they may not yet completely understand. It's like I'm teaching them how to construct a complex puzzle. They hold all the pieces in a semi-transparent bag that permits them to see and feel the shape of the pieces yet mostly obscures the images. They have an idea what I'm talking about but nothing approaching clarity.

I'm teaching them to put the puzzle together by teaching them to (fore)see what the final image should look like when the puzzle is complete. I describe the image and not the process of putting it together. They can remove pieces from the bag but are prohibited from putting them back. The pieces accumulate much quicker than an accurate and useful image is constructed. It's a difficult task that requires trial and error because many of the pieces look the same yet have easy to miss differences. No two pieces are alike yet some of them can be used interchangeably.

The key to solving the puzzle is learning to understand how the pieces fit together, understanding how they feel, as much as understanding the bigger picture. Some days it feels wrong and the overall composition of our classes deteriorates and the students can forget what they know for the difficulty in seeing the bigger picture. They don't have a picture of the completed puzzle; they have me. Because of this, I fear abusing their faith in me.

The problem with everyday language: In an attempt to permit them access to what they need in my classroom, I resist using convention to teach. I insist on working together to approach speaking English in everyday situations without insisting that English belong to me. For example, it's easy for Native Speaking English Teachers to teach idioms to their students. It's easy to entertain younger and older students with fun discussions and presentations about common and uncommon idiomatic expressions in English. I wouldn't mind if my students were advanced English speakers learning to fine tune their usage, but my students don't understand what makes the words used in common expressions work they way they do in English sentences. I'm not doing them any favors by skipping the basics in order to make them smile. In addition, teaching idioms is easy work and the first crutch for a lazy foreign teacher.

The longer I teach here, the more I understand why so many people either love or hate their English teachers. The love for teachers always comes from students who learn from energized instructors who attempt to communicate something more than English and its rules in an orderly and entertaining manner. The hate, often a mixture of contempt and frustration, is a reaction to teachers who resort to implementing methods of discipline and punishment through boring lessons that reaffirm the teachers are the masters of English rather than help students find a means to better use English.

I can predict your success as a teacher in Korea in one step: you will not become a better teacher and will not help Koreans speak better English if you teach them to speak and use English the way you use it. I have had to figure out a way to approach teaching my language that permits me to see it as something I need to learn more about. Once again, I insist that we resist finding ourselves in the language doing what we've learned is correct in order to see our students using the language as they will want or need to apply it. Then we should see ourselves in discourse with those students using English. The difference here is that our common perceptions we take for granted in everyday English are no longer there. Rather than teach the accepted cultural conventions for those perceptions to be held in common, we should focus on teaching the English language.

A wonderful moment: I was frustrated this morning when I asked students to get into their assigned groups and quickly discovered that they were not doing the work I had assigned them. They appeared to be working but were actually playing. As I encouraged them, they further ignored me. The students want to please me; sometimes they'll tell me everything I want to hear while doing nothing much at all. It can be infuriating because of the language difference. They address me in English and return to their other Korean conversations. They do this even though I'm studying Korean. They know I can understand them. It's a power trip: at moments like these, I can either compete with them or I can permit the refusal to cooperate until I find an opportunity to steer the class in a more productive manner. Anyway, the students used enough English this morning to move me on to the next group and, once I was out of earshot, they returned to gambling, playing, telling stories, and grooming each other.

I tend to let students help me guide classes. If they take us off course with good reason and we are actually learning something, I let them take control. American students tend to understand this liberty and will take advantage of it: class leaders will step up, understanding their classmates' desires and interests sometimes better than the teacher. They'll take the class into more engaging territory. Sometimes the students you'd least expect to see leading in the classroom take the opportunity to make a point or move classroom discourse somewhere more engaging. It's very empowering for them; it builds trust; it activates critical thinking. A well-prepared teacher can move with the students steering the class discourse to maintain focus on lesson objectives.

Korean students lack the training to create focused critical discourse in their classrooms. This morning my students reminded me of this. More importantly, they did not want to do any work whatsoever. I would have had trouble getting them to focus on an entertaining language game. Anyway, I scolded the boys and they apologized. I assigned them the classwork as homework and we covered two problems together.

While we worked together, I noticed something new. They trust me. I don't know when this happened. After all, I've only been here two years. My reputation as a good teacher, both in the school and community, is a new thing. When I first arrived, I was popular with the kids. I play soccer; I know music; I'm fashionable; I like Korea and the language; I know a little Korean history; I'm not a know-it-all foreigner; etc. My "kind eyes" and style went a long way to promote a welcome spirit. It wasn't hard for the students to like me.

I worried about it, of course. If they hate you, you can't last here. And when the students rebel against a foreign teacher, it's not pretty. There are many horror stories of teachers ruthlessly chased from Korea. It feeds the cynical blog and ESL site culture where critics like to troll. Anyway, my students liked me just fine, yet I didn't have their respect. My co-teachers were in control; I was tolerated. And, I admit it: it hurt my feelings.

This morning after I scolded my students, they quieted down and did the work with me. They actively participated. They smiled at me. They encouraged me. They were trust-ing me. I was touched. It's a rare moment worth sharing: my commitment to my pedagogy and consistent effort in practice was quietly rewarded with public regard not for the work but in spite of it in order to appreciate my effort as a teacher. I don't know if I can tell you how good I feel right now. (Yet, I'm editing this paragraph several hours after writing it and letting you know that this feeling was fleeting. Today was been a very difficult first day of a week that will be filled with frustrated students trying very hard to understand a difficult assignment. See next paragraph.)

The current three-week assignment I have developed is difficult. It requires a lot of classroom work from teachers and students. Though I love an opportunity to teach challenging material, it's not as if I'm looking forward to the inevitable frustrations that accompany attempting to take this job seriously. I think my students get this about me. I was very frustrated and their care transformed that frustration and a poorly functioning classroom into something that works.

The power a student has in difficult classroom situations is the power to (not) cooperate. I believe it's not a bad student who refuses to cooperate. I believe to refuse is an important liberty. Furthermore, my students seem to know that I'd permit their refusal.

Often when my classrooms get unruly, I'll step away from the center of things and silently stand in a corner. I'll patiently wait. In the US, these moments don't last too long. On the other hand, I've stood for two or three excruciating minutes in Korea: stood waiting for the students to be quiet and look my way. All of them. They eventually figure it out. Here, the recognition is often followed with nervous laughter. "What's he doing?" is often asked in Korean. I don't have to tell them they're upsetting me; they decide to participate. Anger is never an issue. Control? Well, you could say "Gary is always in control of his classroom" as my evaluators do say. Actually, I'm waiting my turn to participate. When I get my turn, I make it count. In the worst cases, a class leader will assert authority and invite me back into the class. When I continue, I don't have to raise my voice.

This is not a silly mind game. It's not about power. It's about wanting to talk with students about their work. After all, we both have important roles to fill within the classroom community. It's good that students understand what my role is by discovering that I actually do have one. The younger the students, the easier it is for them to forget. But I spent my first 8 years lecturing in the College and University classroom. I can tell you that they're as bad as the 15 year olds on many days.

Korean language: Tonight, I'm beginning my next class at Seoul National University. Looking forward to it.

Why do I care about "these issues"?

2010-05-31T15:01:00.005+09:00

An anonymous commenter wants to know why I care about "these issues." I guess the commenter thinks I am pretending. At any rate, he posted several times. The same question.

I suppose I take the time to write about "these issues" because I'm engaged with Korean culture and history. I'm learning the language. I have a passion for it. And I tend to study and write about the things I love. But you know this about me already. Don't get me and my motives confused with your messy life and its uncertain future.

Let me try something. My intentions are absolutely unlike my persistent stalking lurker's, who has an unfortunate obsession with sex, finding it easier to take aggressively flirt with women here than at home. If you strike out in the social scene here, you can walk down the street and pay for it. (What is it about straight white guys that they can't see bigotry and oppression in their prurient obsessions with Asian women? They're so geeky, liberal, post-modern, post-colonial until it comes to sex.)

I'm not guessing, am I? No, I'm not. After all, you're really not at all that anonymous, are you? You are aggressive, petty, mean, insincere, and the more I consider it, racist. But the latter might just be a pose you've adopted to try to engage me with your anon comments. I doubt it, but I'm still willing to give you the chance to change my opinion. I hope you're just an obsessed and self-loathing prick and not a racist as well.

Look, you've finally engaged me. But I won't publish your latest comment. And I've disabled anonymous commenting. I won't approve your future comments without a real ID attached. What's the point? After all, I think you should stop all of your creepy lurking and come out in public to debate the issues.

I'm more than happy to debate anything, if you're able to put your name to it.

Anyway, to honestly answer your question. I'll tell you one reason why I love writing about "these issues" online. It's hard to do all of this studying and not have some outlet for it. Most of my foreign friends are in Korea to teach and stay away from home for awhile while working. Many try to learn a little here and there about Korea. It's hard to: after all, we're all working hard while under contract.

As an American, I believe I have a duty to learn about the peninsula, its people, its language, and do what I can to live a thoughtful life that addresses my desire for social justice while I am in Korea. The United States, as you know, is so entwined with the Republic of Korea and yet the overwhelming majority of Americans know fuck all about what Korea is about. And from what I can tell, most don't ever intend to learn. It's not necessarily meant in a bad way;nevertheless, it's a fact.

So, I write about what I'm learning and try to encourage discussion. I also read many of the more thoughtful and thorough blogs by Koreans (written in English) and foreigners in Korea. I just want to be part of the wider and developing discourse. I want to learn from my contemporaries as well as from the books and texts I read online. I do consider Korea my home. I feel like I'm accepted as a guest by everyone I meet. Ultimately, why not participate in the culture?

All that good will and good intentions aside, I have to admit that I get the biggest kick out of how many white boys can't handle it. It's the race traitor in me, to be sure. White men can get annoyed when you write about race and culture. And I am happy to be a part of the cultural discourse that continues to purposefully annoy them.

I'd hope you'd be in the former group, actively engaging in useful discourse about Korea. However, I'm more than willing to accept you into membership of the latter group of cretins who everyday are becoming less relevant in a world aggressively becoming less interested in the cultural politics of decaying Empires.

ADDENDUM:

I forgot to post the question. I already deleted it, so in fairness I should say this isn't a cut and paste quotation, but from my memory: "Gary, are you pretending to care about these issues [to impress your girlfriend]."

You see, I am marrying a woman who isn't white. And because I'm doing that, I'm not permitted to critique white masculinity in Korea. And I will get similar, if not more intense, treatment back in the United States. I guess because I'm guilty of marrying a non-white woman. Apparently, if I were to marry a white woman, I would be permitted to freely criticize whomever I choose. I guess marrying into, in my case, Korean culture is cheating and is not permitted.

Reading Notes

2010-05-26T10:53:00.005+09:00

I'm reading Michael Breen's The Koreans: Who They are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies (Thomas Dunne Books, 1998. Revised, 2004.)

The book is sold as "[a] splendid work of explication and analysis" for and about Korea and Koreans. If I were Korean, I'd hate these books.

Maybe it's an easy critique to make, but Breen's writing is one moment fair and the next paternalistic, patronizing. He's aware of this and the book, so far, has several sentences sprinkling his intent not to be that way. When a writer has to tell his readers what he's not intending to do, then he needs to reconsider focus, direction, or genre. To be fair, much important work in writing represents an author's failure to accomplish his or her intent.

I don't mind anecdote and memoir, nor do I mind the critical analysis that often accompanies firsthand accounts of other cultures. Breen's observations are not trite. They are complex and careful, though often digressive.

As a reader, I do mind when interesting and anecdotal travel writing poses as vital cultural discourse and attempts to sell an author's illustration and caricaturization of an entire culture to his readers as authoritative vis-a-vis the author's own culture's view of the world and the subjects in his work. Breen is offered expert status on Korea and Koreans because he's an expat journalist who has extensively covered Korean business and politics. I'll write more about this in the coming days, but I can't shake this: when a foreign business and politics journalist claims he knows about the everyday lives of everyday Koreans, he's completely full of shit and gravitas.

It's not that foreigners shouldn't write Chapters on Korea, as Breen does, entitled "Korean Heart". Do share with your Western readers what you've decided is so complex about Korean passions and intellect: how, even though you admit you can't understand it, you have something valuable to say about it. Nothing at all wrong with the attempt. What's improper is the uncritical acceptance and implementation of a mindless binary about Western and Eastern consciousness that itself is based upon a complex series of mutual misrepresentations and generalizations about several cultures. It's as if the binary opposition is in itself an excuse for painting not one but all cultures with broad brush strokes for the purpose of making some rather simple points about other people appear poignant and complex.

Sounds like I am really having a go at Breen, doesn't it? I don't know about that. I'm dissatisfied with the state of intellectual discourse in books about Korea. I think he's a talented writer. It's clear he cares about Korea. I suppose I don't know what to do with his book. I guess I find it intellectually lazy. I'm reviewing it right now and yanking passages to illustrate my points. So, more to come shortly.

Rained Out.

2010-05-25T07:46:00.006+09:00

It's been raining for several days now.
My students experience weather depression.
Seoul Sunless Mood Disorder. SSMD.

I've always liked cool gray days, lightly
humid, dripping nights, windows open
listening to aimless water dropping on the sill.
Strolling along. Dwelling.

When Late Spring rains in Seoul, the classrooms go dank:
sweat-dampened clothes, unclean bodies.
Crotch. Ass. I'd take feet.
Too-long left unwashed uniforms: gray pants,
plaid or blue skirts. Stinking tights. Socks.
Damp slipper Vans.
Converse.

"Look at me enjoying something
that feels like, feels like pain
to my brain."

Stuff I like to read

2010-05-20T08:46:00.005+09:00

As I get back into gear, here is a blog worth reading:

Stuff White People Like To Do

Where you should be this Saturday

2010-05-19T00:45:00.005+09:00

I have been focused on language study for the past several weeks. My Seoul National University class was a lot of fun. My next class begins in two weeks. I'm looking forward to it. I'm going to get back to posting here several times a week. Sorry for being absent.

Testing Period at High School

2010-04-22T16:44:00.002+09:00

I haven't been posting for two weeks because I have been testing 700 students. I have met with all but 160 of my high school students and tested their conversation skills.

I am tired, but strangely elated and energetic: the kind of flighty feeling you get when you're hungry and tired. Giddy, I guess.

I have much to write about over the next couple of weeks. Keep in touch and don't drift away.

dagSeoul

dagNotes: on privilege and white power in Korea

Disappearer

DagSound: Burn Out Session, No5

Social inequality worsening in South Korea

dagSound: Burn Out Sessions, No4

Something Rachel Maddow Doesn't Know

Pessimistic Whiteness: It's your privilege catching up to you

Ignore my crappy Hangukmal, but not my privilege.

Annoying things white people do when they get to Korea

dagSounds: Burn Out No3 "Live Fast Love Hard Die Young"

Alien Registration Transformation & Changed My Address

On CISK

Thee Dreaded Sojourn to Korean Immigration

Recent Comments. Response Soon.

dagSounds: BURN OUT Sessions

Korean Wave is Corporate Corruption

Nobody creates jobs. That's Mr. Nobody to you, Mr. Wittgenstein

Rain Rain Go Away

My Rain

Keli Goff, Hater

dagNotes: On Whiteness, White Power, Capitalism & Anti-Capitalism

Censorship in Korea

Testing, Testing (Part Three)

밤섬해적단 : 20 minutes that'll make Saturday night great.

Whiteness in Liberalism: Down With Tyranny! on Natural Corruption in Asia

Got 눈치?

disqus

dagNotes: On The Perverted Foreigner in Capitalist Culture (Korean Edition)

Cornel West & The Neoliberal Response to Race

Privilege and Complaint

In Solidarity: UNIDOS Take Over Tucson United School District Meeting

On Teaching and Teachering (repost)

Testing, Testing (Part Two)

Concerning Left-Libertarianism, Edited

On Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty (Part One)

Legend of the Persecuted White Guy

The many are one and are increased by the one.

My Students and I will kick your ass. Have a nice day!

On Free Market & Market Discipline

Testing, Testing

DagSound: Kill a K-Pop Fan For Rock and Roll

my tumblr

A Tumblr Gay Republican Thinks We're All Stupid. Joke's on Him, I Guess.

행복한 비가 오면

A (Rich Man's Utopian) Wish + Some (Libertarian) Bullshit = The Path to Prosperity

Why No Strikes in the United States?

John Boehner, Resentment, White Power

Michelle Rhee's Celeb Status in Jeopardy. FINALLY

dagSeoul's Tumblr feed

How Education Reform is Really Tax Reform

Rangers Fan Organizations Support Sectarianism

The Korean Quotidian: Office Routines

Tea Party Ethos: Eugenics, WASPs & You

Friedrich Hayek, Zombie (Krugman)

Recent Stanley Fish in the NYTimes

American Thought Police (Krugman)

White Power 101: Apologetics

Labor History: Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

Lists: Sociology of Space

Hegelian Triads

HOW TO: A New Routine for Taxes in Korea

Wandering Korea and Europe until March.

Larry Wilmore on Huck Finn Censorship (The Daily Show)

Things Foreigners Do in Korea That They Aren't Aware They Do

Working On

The Right to Assemble & Speak & Distribute Information

시끄러운 교실

back? i think so... more to come.

Two shows in Hongdae tonight

A Testing ONE TWO THREE

Tropical Storm Kompasu.

Guilt, the Ineluctable & the Post-Traumatic

Back in September.

Some Very Big Bullshit

Korean Celebrity Edition.

World Cup Break and Things White People Like to Do

Comments

Teachering: Useful and Useless Teaching habits

잔소리 (jansori): Scolding, Nagging, Grumbling