Month: April 2013

Most of the denoted points-of-interest were part of the same complex: Nakseongdae Park (낙성대공원). It seemed to be a kind of grand shrine that doubles as a kid’s park. The shrine part of it revolves around a Korean general (or warlord) Kang Gam-Chan who fought the Mongols in the 1000s AD.

Walking past the above-described park dedicated to the memory of a long-dead general, something calling itself “Seoul Science Park” materializes on the left. It’s a sprawling complex surrounded by some short walking trails in the hills.

Next to this “Seoul Science Park” there also seems to be a farm plucked right out of rural Jeolla and plopped down in Seoul. I conclude that it is an experimental farm (whatever that means). Why else would it be there?

The most interesting feature of this place was its mini-planetariums (or, “planetaria”, if you insist). At the top of the hill overlooking Seoul Science Park, there is an observatory — that silver structure in the above. It is surrounded by little blue spheres (one is below), into which a person can put his head. On the inside of these spheres are compelling re-creations of the night sky. They are soundproof and “lightproof”, so the sensation I got was of being alone on a cloudless, pitch-black night in a very-non-light-polluted area.

I’d assumed it was made a U.S. possession and remains one.

That’s incorrect. It turns out that Iwo Jima was a U.S. possession for a long time, but was ceremoniously returned to Japan in mid-1968. But, then, “High on the hill Suribachi flies Old Glory, and she will for…twenty-three years” — That just wouldn’t have had as good a ring to it.

The remains of over a million of them are unknown, even in 2013. Part of the reason why:

(Note: I see that up to a million more Japanese, civilians, died from the firebombings of their big cities, and in the two nuclear attacks of August ’45.  I’ve also heard that one-in-seven of the Hiroshima deaths were Korean laborers).

Japan lost 22,000 dead at Iwo Jima. (See left). Most of the dead defenders lay in unmarked graves until 2010, according to the article:

Eight square miles is about equal to the area in Arlington County between Arlington Blvd. and Lee Highway, excluding Ft. Myer. See the map at left. (I calculated that area using this tool).

It’s hard to imagine 100,000 men fighting for weeks on an island so small, with 30,000 of them dying.

(Incredibly, it seems that 4-5% of all U.S. military deaths in the Pacific Theater were at Iwo Jima, a single island).

At the extreme east of the green-shaded area stands, incidentally, the Iwo Jima Memorial — My familiarity with that memorial is what caught my eye in the article. My dad always likes going to “Iwo Jima” (the memorial, not the island).

One thing I can say about the Iwo Jima Memorial is that it’s more than a bit hard to find, to actually get to, on foot. If you approach by foot, the ‘hazards’ you face are many: busy roads, blockages, fences, unclear lines of vision as you approach, hills — It calls to mind the physical obstacles, confined spaces, and danger that the men would’ve had in February and March of 1945. I’ve wondered for years whether this was an intentional feature of the memorial’s design or not. If so, it was a success.

Today is my cell phone’s fifth birthday.

Buying a new phone is more common than I’d thought for Koreans. It turns out that 68%  of Koreans got a new phone in 2012, the highest turnover rate in the world. Of the 32% that didn’t get a new one, some must have gotten new ones in 2011, 2010, and 2009. The number of people still using a phone manufactured in 2008, before smart phones, must be very low. / Hey, this phone still works fine. I’m used to it. The battery still holds a charge fairly well, to my surprise. Why do I need a smart phone? That’s my feeling on the matter.

Now that Tim is gone, I think I am the only employee at the language-institute here without a smart phone. Oh well.

Knock, knock. He opens the door without waiting for a response. M.R. resembles Steve Jobs (who is a secular saint in Korea), and thus he is half-affectionately called “Steve Jobs Teacher” from time to time.

“Can I ask you something?”

Now, a teacher barging-in and asking such a thing to another teacher is an unusual occurrence. I don’t think it’d ever happened to me before that moment. Maybe another teacher would come in looking for a lost board marker, eraser, or the like (classes “own” rooms at this language institute, and teachers shuffle between them), or maybe one would ask to consult briefly with me outside for some urgent reason. Not this time: What followed seemed, even at the time, a bit surreal: M.R. asked me, loudly, in such that all my students could also hear: “If I call your name and you say ‘Why?’, is it rude?” The door to his room was still open, too, so his own students could hear what was going on.

Most students were working on honing the fine art of shirking, trying to do anything but EtE1’s tedious textbook work.

A moment after the exchange above-described, one particularly impetuous student, Trever, loudly agrees with M.R. and me. “Yes, it is rude!”, he says. M.R. gets so excited by this, that he asks Trever to go next door and explain to them. Trever went. Well, he did after he was assured that the other class’ students were all younger than he was.

It seems that M.R. had called on a drowsy, inattentive student, and heard “Why?” in response, and was offended by it.

The thing is, in Korean, “Why?” (“왜요?”) functions as English’s “What is it?” or , more politely, English’s “Yes?“

    In Korean
        A. “Kim?”
        B. “Why?”
        A. “Can you lend me a pencil?”

    In the USA, in English
        A. “Smith?”
        B. “Yes, what is it?”
        A. “Can you lend me a pencil?”

These two exchanges are functionally identical. A Korean  student responding with “Why?” is just saying in English exactly what she’d say in Korean, and means no offense, I think. I remember my early days when I didn’t realize this yet, and also thought students were being openly rude. I’d never contemplated doing something like what M.R. did, though, and couldn’t’ve anyway, as I was the only foreign teacher at my first language institute, in Ilsan in 2009.

One of the hardest things in the world to get a true sense of is how many South Koreans sympathize with the North. The outright pro-North-Korean candidate in last year’s election polled at only 1%. But then, consider that only 3% of Americans voted for Nader in 2000 (including my cousin B., he told me), but far more support environmentalism.

I once heard a Korean, with whom I was close at the time, express a respect for the North in the following terms: “Everything they have, they’ve built themselves“. By implication, he was saying, South Korea had gotten a lot of outside help, mostly from the USA, and that was less admirable than autarkic North Korea.

There is something appealing to the Korean psyche (I think) about this “No Wal-Mart” attitude. Looking back to late 2011 and early 2012, this attitude may also be the well from which the fiery opposition here to the U.S./South-Korea Free Trade Agreement drew its water.

1999:

He was a fan of basketball:

She asked because the cherry-blossoms on the National Mall (a few miles from my home) are blooming.

I was born in February. In April, my grandfather was visiting from Iowa, as he worked part-time as a kind of deliveryman for Winnebagos at the time. Somebody in Maryland, say would order one. He’d drive it out to the buyer, and Winnebago would fly him home. As he was passing through, he and my dad took my down. I was two months old, and in the photo, I frowned in that curious way babies have of doing flawless impersonations of Winston Churchill.

This brings up an interesting question: Are cherry blossoms actually Japanese? The city of Washington got its cherry-blossom trees as a gift from Japan in 1912. That is shortly after the annexation of Korea by Japan. I wonder if cherry blossoms were also aggressively planted in Korea at a similar time. Is that possible? Wiki says that “watching of cherry blossom was introduced to Korea during Japanese rule”, whatever that means.

What may be most interesting about the trip is my method of transportation: I got there on the Seoul subway network. Amazingly, I can scan my card into the “subway” system here in Bucheon, and arrive in Chuncheon 2 or 2.5 hours later. Total charge: $2.65, deducted from my card. Less than Koreans tend to pay for a single cup of coffee.

(My friend Jared dreams of a day in which the subway system is nationwide. Scan-in with your card at your home station in Ilsan [say], and get off in Daejeon [say], several hours later. Not very speedy, but essentially free, and gloriously easy. Why not?).
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Chuncheon is famous for the tasty Korean chicken dish called “dakgalbi“. We ate a delicious meal on “dakgalbi street”. The soda was free, all-you-can-drink, which delighted me.

I find it funny that in Seoul, everybody claims to make “authentic Chuncheon-style dakgalbi“.  Naturally, in Chuncheon, though, I noticed several businesses bearing the name “Seoul”. Seoul Dry-Cleaners, for example. The grass is always greener on the other side. I also noticed a bunch of quaint establishments called da-bang (다방), tea houses. I’d read about these in old tourist guidebooks. I had no idea they still existed. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any in the Seoul area outside Insadong, the tourist street. In Seoul, it’s all coffee. Maybe I just don’t look hard enough.

The 16th Iowa Regiment was there. In it, a no-doubt-scared 21-year-old, George, happens to have been the first person in the USA bearing my surname. His regiment was thrown into the fray to slow the Confederate tide. They made a stand. He was hit. He fell. Maybe he died instantly. Maybe he lay dying on the field as his regiment began to crumble around him. His regiment listed him as “killed in action at Shiloh“, one way or another.

If anyone is interested, watch this rather well-made animated-and-video re-creation and synopsis of the battle. (In case the link goes down, it is called “Battle of Shiloh”, produced by Wide Awake Films).

The real-time pollution-board, which stands at a busy local intersection, confirmed it. It showed PM-10 air pollution levels to be through the roof, at 200-some micrograms per cubic meter of air, as I recall. (Normal for Seoul is 60-70. Normal for the Washington, DC area — my birthplace — is about 20. The EU declares anything over 50 a health hazard, South-Korea’s own arbitrary safety-threshold is 100).

This must have been the vaunted “Yellow Dust“, blowing in from Central Asia. The then-new guy at work, C., spoke of “fog”. Well, Korea doesn’t have fog, I explained. (A foreign editor thinks it’s “fog” here. Note on that photo: I’m of the belief that the yellow-dust cannot be adequately captured on camera).

Air Korea is a convenient real-time air quality site. From it, I took the screenshot at left. Each square is one hour of one day.

Green means (by Korean standards) normal air quality. Blue squares are hours when the air was “particularly” (heh) free of particulate-matter. Blues are, I think, associated with rainstorms. Yellow and Orange mean the air is getting unhealthy. 

A 72-hour yellow-dust storm is visible on March 7th, 8th, 9th, trailing off before sunrise on the 10th.

I was curious about choices for #1.

“There are no unhealthy Korean foods.”

Those were the words of a genuinely-befuddled 7th-grade student. This is not a student who uses sarcastic excuses to avoid work or something, as some do. No, he was quite serious.

In the short discussion that followed, it seemed that no one in class was willing to concede that any “Korean food” could be unhealthy. Finally, we agreed that fried-chicken was unhealthy. That is Western food, they said. True. But, I said, given its popularity, we could — by this point — dub fried-chicken a defacto Korean food (especially this variety).

Result: I think almost all the students chose fried-chicken for #1. All or almost all chose kimchi for #2. Groan.

The previous president, Lee Myung-bak, was so wildly unpopular that I don’t think I ever heard a single person say they liked him. I recall in my first week or two in Korea, April or May 2009, hearing elementary-school students tell me they “hate” Lee M.B. — his presidency was a year old at the time. The left-wing administrations previous to Lee were scandal-prone, too.

According to the newspaper, though, Mrs. Park’s approval-rating is, by far the lowest of any new president’s since military-rule ended in 1993.

As I was reading, I sketched out a table to help myself understand the data presented:

Presidential Approval After One Month in Office  [acc. to Korea Herald]
% Approval……………..President……………Year
……….71%……………..Kim Young-Sam…….1993
……….71%……………..Kim Dae-Jung………….1998
……….60%…………….Roh Moo-Hyun……..2003
……….52%…………….Lee Myung-Bak………2008
……….41%……………..Park Geun-Hye……….2013

From this, one cannot help think that Koreans are getting more and more cynical about their leaders, as time goes on.

Then again, old Syngman Rhee was also wildly unpopular, it is said. He was deposed in 1960 after protests, and died in exile in Hawaii! So maybe Koreans have always been cynical about their leaders except for a period in the 1990s when optimism prevailed following the end of military rule?

This rail line still exists intact, today, It was incorporated into the ever-growing Greater Seoul urban rail network (still often loosely called a ‘subway’) in 2009. I remember when that happened, as I was living in Ilsan at the time, through which it passes. One station was only 10 minutes’ walk from my workplace.

I have ridden on this rail-line more than a few times. It is pleasant to ride, and takes not more than a half hour  between Ilsan and central Seoul. You can ride it today way up north, to within a stone’s throw of the DMZ.

I have even walked through Dorasan, the northern-terminus station of the line.

Well, being as I was curious for a bigger sample size, and being as three other foreign-teachers at this institute also had classes complete this essay, I glanced at the others, via the online system. (We can see anyone’s essay, anytime).  Purely personal curiosity, no pretense of direct educational value. (But tangential value, perhaps).

I calculated the totals for all the institute’s students, and present the data below, based on school-grade, gender, and skill-level of the students. (These students are generally-upper-middle-class Korean 7th-9th graders, living in a Seoul satellite city).
______________________________________________________________
Results:
92 essays were written in total
8 supported robot teachers [8.7%]

As I suspected, though, there is a wide variation in opinion depending on the type of student:
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Demographic Characteristics of the “Robot Supporters”:

By Gender
— 6 / 44 Boys supported robot teachers [12% of the boys who wrote this essay]
— 2 / 48 Girls supported robot teachers [4% of the girls who wrote this essay]
[See much more here]

By Gender and School Grade
— 5 ninth-grade boys said ‘Yes’ to robot-teachers / 28 ninth-grade boys completed the essay [18%]
— Of the 64 other students (ninth-grade girls and all non-ninth-graders) who completed the assignment, only three said ‘Yes’ to robot-teachers [5%]

By Skill Level
(Four different skill-groupings completed the assignment. Together, these form the top–20%-or-so, by English ability level, of the institute’s middle-schoolers)
— 1 / 24 [4%] — Highest-Level Cohort [PO] — The students with the highest ability level in the institute
— 2 / 18 [11%] — 2nd-Highest-Level Cohort [E3]
— 2 / 26 [8%] — 3rd-Highest-Level Cohort [T3/E2]
— 3 / 24 [13%] — 4th-Highest-Level Cohort [T2]
— x / 402 — Other 7th-9th-grade students enrolled at the institute, who are in lower-skill cohorts / Did not write this essay.

Note: The two girls who supported robot-teachers are in PO and E3, the highest and second-highest classes. All the rest in the above are boys.
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Conclusion:
Opposition to robot-teachers is overwhelming (around 20-to-1) among all subgroups of the institute’s students, except lower-skill-level older boys, among whom opposition to robots-as-teachers is only three-to-one or so.

Question:
I can understand why girls would prefer human teachers (most students seemed to say something like: “as robots cannot understand human emotion, they would be ineffective teachers”), but why were higher-skill-level students so opposed? Of the 24 PO students, all eight boys were anti-robot, and 15 of the 16 girls were anti-robot.