Month: June 2013

I recounted the following in post-73:

To which I appended, in a comment, this:

The “TED Talk” in question, for the record, is from 2006. It is called “Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity“.

I was pleased to find that this Ken Robinson delivered another talk in April 2013. It is even more impressive than the 2006 talk. Its title is “How to Escape Education’s Death Valley“. Here it is:

He’s delivered two other TED Talks. I’ve only seen so far the original (2006) and this 2013 one, video directly above.

This Saturday was the first time I played soccer since sometime in mid-2012.

I recounted, in post-6, how I “used to” play soccer every Saturday, from late-2011 through mid-2012 in the Bupyeong neighborhood of the Seoul Megalopolis. The games stopped happening, as people stopped showing up. I’m happy to say that a game finally happened on June 8th and I was there.

I walked to the field, as is my habit, leaving my home about 11:30 AM. I bought two 2-liter bottled waters on the way. The weather is warm enough and the sun strong enough that I was sweating by the time I showed up at 12:15 to find three others waiting. By 12:30, 13 players had showed up, of whom four were American (me and three others), one Canadian (D., who started playing about the same time I did in 2011), and the rest, British or Irish. Most of the faces were totally new to me. All the initial players were White and English teachers, mostly from Incheon. One Korean I’d never seen before showed up late. The games were always English-teacher-oriented, but in the past there were several regular Korean players, and even a handful of miscellaneous players whose “stories” I never learned, like the 21-year-old Russian who said he worked for some company, and who spoke fluent Korean but mediocre English.

I am not in bad shape, I found, but I definitely got tired a lot more quickly than I did playing in 2012. I scored a goal.

My final note on post-75 gets me thinking about our own two veterans’ holidays in the USA. I said:

There may be some reason for it being June 6th that I am simply ignorant of. Alternatively, it may be a “random” day.

We in the USA have two veterans’ holidays, November 11th being WWI Armistice Day, many will know. We also have what we call Memorial Day. Why is our Memorial Day at the end of May? I cannot figure out a reason for that.

Memorial Day in the USA’s real function, of course, is marking the start of Summer. So it’s not a “veterans” holiday at all, except highly superficially. Look at what really happens on Memorial Day (in the USA), what people actually do. They get their “summer routines” started, with barbeques, good-weather-oriented overnight trips (my aunt and cousins were so engaged this year, as they often are on Memorial Day weekend, travelling to Connecticut), or perhaps doing yard-work, or going bicycling, or picnicking. Swimming pools open on Memorial Day weekend.

None of the things regular people do on the USA’s Memorial Day are connected with veterans’ commemoration, it seems to me. What they actually do is connected with “commemoration”, or celebration, of the seasonal change; the start of consistent good weather; the start of summer.

The USA’s Memorial Day, it occurs to me, is a “seasonal-change holiday”, just like the old pagan festivals. It appeals to the same instincts as the European pagans did with their seasonal festivals. My own name, and the name of this blog, is derived from such a Northern-European pagan seasonal festival.

Old habits die hard. I don’t think this is a bad thing.

Thursday, June 6th, was a holiday in honor of the soldiers who died in the Korean War (perhaps, see below).

We were off. Looking back on my other “June 6ths” in South Korea:

June 6th, 2009: I was still settling in to my job in Ilsan. I did not yet have my Alien Registration Card, so I did not yet have a bank account or a phone (I had rejected the offer of my boss to pay me in cash, although I did subsequently run out of money a few days before I’d gotten the ARC around mid-June; Luckily, my predecessor had left me hundreds of coins, which I used to buy ramen for sustenance — I didn’t mind; it was all part of the ride, I thought. I also refused to tap into my U.S. funds, thinking it best to keep as a back-up). / I have no memory of a June holiday in my early time at the Ilsan job. Looking at the calendar, I see that June 6th fell on Saturday in 2009. Korea has no tradition of transposing weekend-falling holidays onto Mondays, as we do in the USA. [Note: In some alternate universe in which I’d chosen to stay at D’berry, the company I worked for during the better part of 2008, June 6th 2009 would have seen me having been awarded the one-year certificate the company gave out, along with perhaps a little bonus, a few weeks earlier. I liked D’berry. See post-13 for a roundabout way of telling why I decided to not get back in with that company in early 2009.]

June 6th, 2010: On May 1st, 2010, I’d moved out of Ilsan bound for Suwon, leaving my packed suitcase in the care of my closest Korean friend, Cho B.W. I lived in very cheap but fine lodging in Suwon until June 10th (with a 10-day[?] trip to China in the middle of that period). My idea was to just live-in-Korea without working for a while. I flew back to the USA on June 10th. / I have no memory of there being a “holiday” in the final days of my time in Suwon. Again, I see it fell on a Sunday in 2010. / On June 6th, 2010, I was excited by my upcoming travelling in the USA, including to the Grand Canyon — with a childhood friend, A., and some of his relatives — and my visits to my own extended family in Iowa. / Later, I’d try to get back in with D’berry. They wanted me, they said. I waited. By late fall 2010, I realized it would not happen: The GIS department has been gutted; I remember a full office, I came in to ‘interview’ to see a mostly-empty office; most people had been fired, moved away, or nudged into early-retirement between summer 2008 and fall 2010. I’ve thought about this decision a lot since then, and whether it was the right one or not.

June 6th, 2011: I was not in Korea.

June 6th, 2012: A Wednesday. I was about to hit the nine-month mark at the Bucheon job (which I began in Sept. 2011). A British coworker had invited me and about 10 others friends/coworkers to a baseball game between two Korean teams in Seoul. It was a fun day, and a day I will not soon forget. After the game. the group split up. Three of us — me, my coworker-friends C.H. (a tall and humorous American), and B.S.Y. (a not-very-tall but also good-humored Korean), went to the Yongsan War Memorial Park, at my suggestion. I think of that as my favorite place in this country because (a) It’s so non-busy/peaceful, and (b) There’s lots of interesting stuff to look at. Following this, we had a dinner of a soup called buddae-jiggae and then home. This baseball game and visit to the Yongsan Memorial were some of my friend C.H.’s last meaningful activities in this country, as he flew back to the USA early on June 9th.

June 6th, 2013: A Thursday. I am now about to hit the 21-month mark at this Bucheon job. I regret staying on for this second year-contract. The job has grown to really depress me and angers me, at times, for a lot of reasons, which I have tried to keep off this blog for sake of avoiding negativity. / On the 2013 holiday, I visited Song-do Island in south Incheon (an artificial island that feels more like an American downtown, minus the lurking potential for street crime, than any place I’ve been in Korea), and then the Sinchon neighborhood of Seoul.
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Note on South Korea’s Memorial Day (현충일):
In the days before June 6th, 2013, I asked some students about the holiday. Did it commemorate only soldiers who died fighting under ROK command in the Korean War? Or was it also for “all” Korean soldiers who’d ever died while under arms, in previous centuries? / Or, was it actually commemorating all those who’d served in the South Korean armed forces (as our veterans’ holidays in the USA do, I think). That is improbable, because in South Korea, the latter would “commemorate” almost all the Korean men alive today, due to universal conscription. In fact, the 7th, 8th, and 9th graders I asked didn’t seem to know, but the consensus was that it was only for Korean War dead. / I also cannot figure out why the holiday is on June 6th, which, as far as I know, has no significance to Korean War history.

A friend sent me an analysis into the background of Senator Schumer [Harvard ’71] vis-a-vis the early “SAT prep industry”. It’d been reported that Schumer got a perfect 800 on SAT-Verbal and a perfect 800 on SAT-Math, but there’s a big backstory to how. (“Did Senator Schumer really get a perfect 1600 SAT score?“). There is a lot to digest there, so I’ll try to summarize. (I think it’s important because it relates to my idea of test-prep as fundamentally unethical, which is, I think, why the friend recommended this pertinent article.)
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Very few people achieved perfect scores on the SAT before the 1995 “recentering” (e.g., in 1987, only nine students got perfect scores). Therefore, if Schumer got a perfect score, he may be among the smartest men alive in the USA.

The thing is, Schumer (b. 1950) worked for Stanley Kaplan from ages 14-17 in the 1960s. Kaplan was pioneering the “SAT test prep” business around that time. Kaplan hired kids to take the test and memorize questions. They’d rush back to his office afterwards to report the questions. The compiled questions formed the early Kaplan “test prep” material. Future-Senator Schumer was deep in this venture, manning the “Gestetner machine” [a mimoegraph]. Schumer thus saw all material that came into Kaplan’s hands, and (Kaplan himself says, in his autobiography) Schumer pored over it all. Kaplan also reports than Schumer got a “near 1600”, not 1600, so the mystery deepens.

This was all before anything like an “SAT test prep” business existed. The makers of the SAT would not have yet been prepared for a concerted attempt by an aggressive group to “game” the test in this way. Thus, when Schumer took the test (probably multiple times), he may well have been the most “prepared for the test” of any student alive in the 1960s. He’d had years of defacto “SAT-prep” (seeing the actual questions used by the SAT), before the field of SAT-prep even existed. That this boosted the scores of a smart boy into the near-1600-range is plausible.
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The way Kaplan, Schumer, and co. aggressively “gamed” the SAT in the 1960s is distressing, yet even “honest” test prep strikes me as at least a bit ethically dubious. If standardized tests are supposed to be about how smart (or how informed on a given subject) a person is, then highly-aggressively “prepping” muddies the waters, and can be seen as a form of non-punishable cheating. It tests what you studied, not what you know, if that makes sense.

See the Ethics subsection of the “Teaching to the Test” Wiki article:

Kaplan and Schumer, it seems, engaged in #6, and arguably/potentially dabbled in #7 as well. I really agree that only #1 and #2 above are solidly-ethical forms of studying/instruction.
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In extreme cases (Korea) too much time devoted to test-prep seriously dulls the intellectual passions of teenagers.

A lot of what I’ve taught over the years in Korea has been test-prep, I must confess. It’s been principally for TOEFL. Parents of Korean teenagers want this, for some reason. Korean parents really seem unaware/unconcerned when it comes to this “dulling the intellectual energy” effect of endless, mindless test-prep.

The lion’s share of regular-schooling for Korean students is also directed towards test-prep, especially for their version of the SAT called the Su-Neung. Are the Koreans, after literally countless thousands of hours of test-prep for the Su-Neung test, really better-off — “better-educated”, better-informed-about-the-world, able to make more informed choices, possessing of more intellectual passion and curiosity — than they would have been if they’d done no prep at all, and used that time for other purposes? Not from my (limited) observation. / The test-prep obsession is a manifestation of something else, which is harder to pin down, but test-prep is a “tentacle” of it. This “tentacle” seriously stunts the personal development of many Koreans, and (as I understand) many East-Asians, generally.

Fighting the System
A year ago, my coworker-friend C.H. (an American in his 30s from California) quit his job here in Korea, partly due to frustration with the above-described system. He spoke a lot about how bad he felt it was. In his final weeks, C.H. eagerly recommended this TED talk to all students. / You know how, in a certain kind of movie, when the good-guy is surrounded, outnumbered, and begins to run away, he tends to shoot wildly into the distance while making his escape, right? He’s shooting at the bad-guys. The good-guy is hoping to score some hits, sure, but the shooting may be mostly for his own satisfaction, I think:“I fought the good fight and I did the best I could”. C.H. was the good-guy, and each of his recommendations of that particular TED Talk was a bullet fired at the enemy.

I was surprised to learn that it is impossible, in South Korea, to “fail a grade”.

I mean, if a Korean does very poorly in (say) 1st-grade of high school (=10th grade in the USA), failing all tests, and shows not even a basic understanding of the material taught, he will still go up to 2nd grade of high school with the others of the same age. There is also no “summer school”, as we have the in the USA, to make up failed classes.

What is the incentive to learn, if you will just advance to the next grade no matter what?”, I asked.

Two answers were forthcoming: “Making parents happy” and “getting into a good university”.

I found these answers uncompelling, and it reminds me a lot of what I wrote in post-73.

“She is most frugal in matters of business, but in her private life she reveals a streak of ___________.”
             (A) antipathy
             (B) misanthropy
             (C) virtuosity
             (D) equanimity
             (E) prodigality

This question appeared recently in the English-education insert that typically accompanies the Korea Herald newspaper. It is from a semi-daily section called “John’s GRE Prep”.

I’ve done dozens of “John’s” GRE practice questions, and I’ve gotten every one of them right, until this one.

I rejected choices (A) and (B) immediately, but none of the other three seemed like knockouts. I was doing this on the subway, so I may have been unable to properly concentrate. But the real reason I think I got it wrong was that I was led astray by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John (no relation to the John of John’s GRE Prep), whichever one of them recounted the Prodigal Son parable.

My knowledge of the famous Prodigal Son parable has led me to believe, from a young age, that “prodigal” means “rebellious”. “Rebellious” is not really a good candidate to be an opposite of “frugal”, I thought, so I gave that one a low-mental-ranking. I wavered. No choices seemed right. My final choice was (D). That was wrong. The correct answer is (E).

“Prodigality”, it turns out, has the following definitions (according to this): 1. Extravagant wastefulness. 2. Profuse generosity. 3. Extreme abundance; lavishness. / Not “rebelliousness” at all. Since age 9 or so, I’ve inferred that the word was tied-in with the theology of that particular parable, which is more about the rebelliousness of the son, turning away from the father, and not about the son’s “lavish wastefulness”.

In late 2009, my then-boss in Ilsan bought a new Volkswagen SUV. I was surprised that she bought a foreign car. At the time, I interpreted it as luxury purchase. Due to tariffs on foreign cars, a Korean buying a foreign car was engaging in overt conspicuous-consumption, I thought.

It seems that my boss was on the cusp of a trend, back in 2009. According to the Korea Herald, foreign carmakers’ “market share” in South Korea (which I assume to mean the percent of cars on the road) has increased as follows:

Share of Foreign Cars on the Road in South Korea
        4.7% : Mid-2009
        6.7% : Mid-2010 [+2.0% market-share]
        7.4% : Mid-2011 [+0.7%]
        10% : Mid-2012 [+2.6%]
        11.7%: April 2013 [On track to be +2.0% for Mid-2013 over Mid-2012]

Soon, one-in-eight cars on the roads of South Korea will be of foreign origin. My former-boss was one of those responsible, as her purchase helped push the foreign-car-share past the 5%-threshold back in 2009.

South Korea’s long-tightly-protected car market may finally be opening up, perhaps partly due to the Free Trade Agreements. Then again, these foreign cars seem to me to be all “high-end”. (Americans don’t think of VW as a “luxury brand”, but in Korea it rather is. So is Ford; the few I see are “high-end”.) There is a street in Gangnam that is lined with glamorous stores selling glamorous foreign cars, displayed in their windows [as is usual here]. If this is the “image”/”market” for foreign-cars, then growth will slow and stop.

The USA, by comparison, has a 60% foreign-car share. (60% of cars on U.S. roads are not made by U.S. companies).

The price I pay for a haircut has risen: From 6,000 Won ($5.30 at current exchange) to 7,000 Won ($6.20).

For the past year and a half, I’ve gotten my hair cut by a woman who runs a small barbershop in eastern Bupyeong**. After today’s haircut, she handed me back three 1,000-Won notes after I handed her a 10,000-note. She’d smiled and said something I didn’t understand, but indicated that she was aware she was giving me 3,000, which means the new price is 7,000. This is the first time I’ve paid that price. / Alright. It’s still half what I paid in the USA.

In all my visits to this woman, she has never once tried even one word of English. Our limited communication is in Korean. I appreciate that, even though it means very limited communication. / There are some foreigners of my acquaintance here who have located an “English-speaking barber” in central-Bucheon, to whom they shell out 20-25,000 (about $20) for a man’s haircut. I consider that a waste of money, but “to each his own”.

** — “Bupeyong” (부평) is an older neighborhood between Incheon and Seoul. I live to the east of Bupyeong, in a newer development called Jung-Dong, Bucheon. I have always felt a bit more comfortable in humbler Bupyeong than in self-consciously wealthier Bucheon. Bupyeong is also where I used to play soccer. See post-6. Actually, the barbershop is just above the anchor-point of post-6’s map. I found it once on the way to play soccer, and I’ve stuck with it.