Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves—that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives—experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories—each time in a new disguise—maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen. —F. Scott Fitzgerald
Anyone here who feels bad for how hard their co-teachers work have just drank the kool-aid just a little too eagerly. Koreans are very, very, very good at giving the perception that they are working hard and terribly busy. But when you dig deeper you see the truth.
I currently teach 10 more classes a week than my co-teacher. I do almost all the prep, and have an insane amount of paperwork for afterschool classes. But you know, it’s not so bad. Yet my CT will tell me everyday how busy she is, on the verge of tears sometimes. She’ll come and interrupt my classes (while she’s on a 4 hour break) and complain that she’s so busy. When I go find her at 330 to talk about class she’s usually either fast asleep at her desk or off gossiping with the other teachers. But if we can’t discuss these pressing issues then it’s my fault because I don’t work hard enough, and she’s SO BUSY!
I’ve had many co-teachers over the years, and the story is always the same. They’ll tell me how busy Koreans are and that teachers in my home country have it so good. They’ve never let the fact that they actually have no idea what they’re talking about stop them. I don’t carry on like teachers do here, but I am without a doubt more busy than them (I have 8 more classes/week than the next ‘busy’ teacher). But when I did student teaching in my home country I was way more busy. I was at the school from 8am to 5pm, sometimes later for coaching or whatever. And I was actually doing things that entire time. Then if you’re a new teacher, like I was, and thus don’t have things prepared you have to spend the evenings and weekends prepping. Sure, my experienced partner teacher didn’t have to do that, but he was expected to always be updating his skills. Recess? Yard duty. Before and after school? Remedial and/or sports/clubs. Oh, and school was 2-4 hours longer than it is here. Elementary teachers taught everything in my area (besides French). You didn’t drop them off with the music teacher or gym teacher or science teacher. You were the music, gym and science teacher.
Don’t be fooled by the production they put on here. They learn the game early. If you’re not forever on the verge of a breakdown due to being SO BUSY, you will be thought of as less and get more work. Kids are overworked, yet they never have homework done either in PS or hogwans. And the various PC bangs around my place always have tons of bikes parked outside of them fit for 12 year olds. Yet they’re tired the next day because they work so hard. I mean it still sucks, because Koreans can’t just do their work and then have fun because it’s a 24 hour a day job trying to prove to everyone within earshot how busy you are. So you sit at a desk doing nothing for 14 hours straight instead of doing your work for 8 hours and then going to the beach the rest of the day. Eventually they start to believe they really are busy and it’s a miserable life. But even so, they are in no way ‘busier’ than anyone else. Productivity and efficiency stats prove it.
But nothing you say will ever change their minds. Busyness is part of the Korean identity. It’s why on my walk to work in the morning there are Koreans ‘running’ down the sidewalk next to me, flailing their arms, yet barely keeping pace with me. It’s why your co-teachers carry around overflowing baskets they sigh over, yet upon further inspection it’s mostly scrap paper and superfluous pencils. It’s why their desks are messy with assignments that amount to outdated books and empty folders. It’s just the way it is. And us foreigners will always be the lazy ones, because Koreans can’t be busy if we’re not lazy. —orangeman on Waygook.org
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,# apt-get install oneko
$ oneko -sakura
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/u/koreathrwaway27 explains why Koreans and White expats don’t always mingle in Korea | reddit
Interesting stuff in this this thread and the linked one.
So when a new expat or immigrant arrives in a foreign country, his or her first assumption is to “judge” that culture, and set themselves apart from it. Food, even though it is common there, is “weird” and suspicious. Never mind that millions of people like it! If it tastes weird to me, it’s weird, period. This attitude extends to everything else. Expats and immigrants might try local things, but most likely they will do it as an experiment, a foray into a foreign culture.
Why? Because they have two choices: either they embrace the new culture and go through something like a second “adolescence” where they’ll be outside their comfort zone all the time… Or they retreat within their own culture and look at the host culture as something of an aberration, to be enjoyed in small doses, but nowhere near as good as their own.
It is of course vital not to fall into moral relativism.
A divisive issue in my relationship with my girlfriend appears to have been resolved. I’ve learnt a few things from the process. continue reading this entry
Future historians, pondering changes in British society from the 1980s onwards, will struggle to account for the following curious fact. Although British business enterprises have an extremely mixed record (frequently posting gigantic losses, mostly failing to match overseas competitors, scarcely benefiting the weaker groups in society), and although such arm’s length public institutions as museums and galleries, the BBC and the universities have by and large a very good record (universally acknowledged creativity, streets ahead of most of their international peers, positive forces for human development and social cohesion), nonetheless over the past three decades politicians have repeatedly attempted to force the second set of institutions to change so that they more closely resemble the first. —Stefan Collini
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Noam Chomsky: America’s corporate doctrine of power a grave threat to humanity | Salon (original)
Chomsky argues that corporate interests dictate US foreign policy in a very strong sense. It is not that corporate and humanitarian interests unite behind international action, but that any humanitarian story is purely to keep the citizenry quiet. Presumably this is true of other great powers, and it’s only because the US is the world’s only superpower that historically significant interventions in the name of corporations are almost always down to the US.
He tries to link this to Snowden’s revelations. That part is less convincing.
Did North Korea Kidnap an American Hiker? | Outside Online
With Chinese complicity.
Anyone who works with computers learns to fear their capacity to forget. … [M]emory is strictly binary. There is either perfect recall or total oblivion, with nothing in between.
[…]
The offline world works like it always has. I saw many of you talking yesterday between sessions; I bet none of you has a verbatim transcript of those conversations. If you do, then I bet the people you were talking to would find that extremely creepy.
[…]
The online world is very different. Online, everything is recorded by default, and you may not know where or by whom. If you’ve ever wondered why Facebook is such a joyless place, even though we’ve theoretically surrounded ourselves with friends and loved ones, it’s because of this need to constantly be wearing our public face. Facebook is about as much fun as a zoning board hearing.
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Philosophers who work outside of academia | New APPS (part 1 of 3)
I can’t see how they can be happy being part of the corporate machine. Only one of them has a first sector job. Their work might be fun but is that really enough to distract them from the soul-crushing reality of the meaninglessness of most corporate toil? Moreover, why are they willing to be so distracted?
When Women Wanted Sex Much More Than Men | AlterNet
The historical accuracy is questioned on reddit. However, the plausibility of the account makes me think about the degree to which sexuality is societal.
Being a Better Online Reader | The New Yorker
I find this section implausible:
She, along with her frequent collaborator Jean-Luc Velay, Pascal Robinet, and Gerard Olivier, had students read a short story—Elizabeth George’s “Lusting for Jenny, Inverted” (their version, a French translation, was called “Jenny, Mon Amour”)—in one of two formats: a pocket paperback or a Kindle e-book. When Mangen tested the readers’ comprehension, she found that the medium mattered a lot. When readers were asked to place a series of events from the story in chronological order—a simple plot-reconstruction task, not requiring any deep analysis or critical thinking—those who had read the story in print fared significantly better, making fewer mistakes and recreating an over-all more accurate version of the story. The words looked identical—Kindle e-ink is designed to mimic the printed page—but their physical materiality mattered for basic comprehension.
Stuff about having to develop new habits to read effectively online seems right.
The Franck Report, June 11, 1945
I’ll be in Hiroshima next week.