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Oh, as I was in the garden
I was planting out my beans
The sky betook an awful shade
The queerest one I’d seen
                                                                                                         From “The Third Millennium”  (a song apparently so obscure that it‘s not on Youtube)

A few weeks ago, the sky “betook an awful shade”. An odd, vaguely-eerie, orangish glow.

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 remember my first yellow-dust storm. It was early Spring 2010, a Saturday. I worked on Saturdays at the time. When I went into work that morning, I hadn’t notice anything unusual. By the time I was walking home, in the early afternoon, the sky had “betaken” such an odd texture that it made me half-think I was in a dream.

Today, April 3rd, was the day the the  “Gyeong-Ui Railroad” (경의선) opened. In 1906. It connected Seoul and Sinhui on the North-Korea/Chinese border. I saw this mentioned in the newspaper in the “On this Day in History” section,

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.

I see that the new president, Park Geun-Hye (박근혜), now has a 41% approval rating, three months after winning the election and one month after taking office.

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?

Yesterday, I mentioned how opposed my students were to the philosophical prospect of “robot teachers“.

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:
______________________________________________________________
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 School Grade
— 6 / 55 Ninth Graders [11%] [3rd-grade-middle-school in Korea, born in 1998]
— 2 / 20 Eighth Graders [10%] [2nd-grade-middle-school in Korea, born in 1999]
— 0 / 17 Seventh Graders [0%] [1st-grade-middle-school in Korea, born in 2000]

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.
______________________________________________________________

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.

Maybe Post-1‘s photo deserves some explanation.

Here goes:

The photo at right was taken on Chuseok Day, 2012. A pleasantly-warm fall day. Chuseok is a Korean holiday similar to Thanksgiving Day in the USA. Everyone who is anyone is off work.

Jared and I made a trip out to Paju, the mostly-rural area between Seoul and the DMZ. The first stop was his old, now-abandoned, U.S. Army base. Then we headed towards a place called Gamak Mountain, deep in rural Paju, which we ultimately didn’t fully ascend. No matter. Also in the area was a Buddhist temple (which seemed abandoned, as all temples do, though we did see one monk peeing off a steep hill). A bit up the road from the temple and trailhead up Gamak Mountain was the place you see at right: A monument to the three-day-stand of the Gloucestershire Regiment in the Korean War. (See Jared’s account of this trip).

The Loss of the Gloucester Battaltion
I found this interesting: In April of 1951, the Chinese Spring Offensive began. The Gloster Battalion — a British unit of 750 men — was at the front in Paju. It was quickly encircled around a particular hill, at the base of which there today stands a park and monument in its honor. It was a terrible 60 hours of constant fighting, and finally surrender. Ninety percent the battalion was killed or captured.

The flags you can see in the picture are in this memorial park: The ROK [South Korea] flag, UN flag, and UK flag.

The park is pleasant, with lots of shade, picnic tables, flowers, and war-related curiosities. There is a certain peaceful solemnity to the place, which I guess is the point.

The day we were there, the major holiday of Chuseok, several families were around, and though the place has a distinct picnicking ambiance, we were the only ones eating anything — the Koreans were probably stuffed full of Chuseok food. (Our ‘Chuseok food’: peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and apples — energy food. We’d been walking a lot already and were tired).

[Read much more here]

The battle account fascinates me, as it did the public in 1951, it seems. One synopsis of the battle has it this way:

The Gloster Regiment’s Defensive Stand in Paju
In April, 1951, the Chinese Spring Offensive began, which threatened Seoul. The Gloster regiment
of about 700 men from the UK held off the Chinese 63rd Division, of 10,000 men, for three
days in a valley outside of Jeoksong village. By the morning of 25 April 1951, only 67 soldiers were
able to escape the Chinese encirclement. The remaining soldiers were either killed or captured
by the Chinese. Their heroic defense of the valley prevented the UN forces, who were withdrawing
south towards Seoul through the Uijongbu corridor, from being flanked by the Chinese division. [Link]

It was this kind of action that prevented a loss outright in the Korean War following the Chinese intervention.

I read the autobiography of General Paik Sun-Yup (백선엽, born in 1920, “the R.O.K.’s first four-star general”). He was normally exuberant and kinetic, always actively on-the-ball. Yet he recounts how he sank into an (uncharacteristic) deep depression when the Chinese crossed the Imjin River again in January 1951. He had to be dragged out of his command post chair by a subordinate to evacuate, as the Chinese fast approached. He was genuinely concerned that the Chinese would completely win the war in early 1951. Their winter offensive did recapture Seoul, but was stopped to the south, and Seoul traded hands yet again. In April, General Paik recounts that it was clear that the USA/UN were wavering on whether they wanted to take so many personnel losses in such a wild see-saw of a war.

In the end, the Chinese Spring Offensive failed. UN resistance had a backbone, unlike in summer 1950, and unlike the early days of the Chinese intervention in late 1950 and early 1951.

(The Battle of Gloster Hill seems to me a actually a smaller version of Chipyongni, a decisive battle I read about occuring on my birthday in 1951. I’ve located the site of Chipyongni (지평리 in Hanguel) in north-central South Korea. I will write more about this at a later time, and hope to visit one day).
_____________________________________________________________________________

Pensive
I seem to be in a pensive mood in that picture. I don’t remember it being taken.

I do remember being in such a mood at this memorial park. Who wouldn’t be?

Anyway, the Gloster Hill Memorial was a few hours well spent, and a great Chuseok Day. The weather was good. There is more to the memorial than I even had the chance to look at. Many more photos are at the military-themed, Korea-focused blog ROK-Drop.

_____________________________________________________________________________
Update, April 2013:
A longer, maybe more coherent post about the Battle of Gloster Hill is at post-40.

It seems that in September of 1816, a shipload of Scots and Englishmen visited Korea. Aboard was the “Ambassador Extraordinary from the British King to the Emperor of China, and a diplomatic entourage including secretaries, naturalists, surgeons, Marines, and an artist” — It was all under command of a Captain Basil Hall; a journey of official goodwill to the Orient, it was.

Captain Hall kept diaries and published a book based on them (“A Voyage of Discovery to the Western Coast of Corea and the Great Loo-Choo Island in the Japan Sea“) upon return home in 1818. He reported the Koreans to be  inhospitable, constantly encouraging the White visitors to leave. Captain Hall speculated that the locals’ paranoia may have been due to a fear of the government. I learned all this from a post at Gusts of Popular Feeling.

Interestingly, at the back of Captain Hall’s book there is included what must be the first Korean-English ‘dictionary’:

I may know about half of these words in Korean. Some of them are noticeably altered from the ways I know them, though. For example: water is “mool”, not “bool”. Eye is “noon”, not “boon”. Maybe they were talking to a Korean with a stuffy nose?

The one that confuses me the most is the supposed translation of “No”, though. Captain Hall has it as “Poodong”, which is not right at all. Where could that come from?

It’s after class. The other students had since run out. Jon Chung — still there.

“What is your IQ?“, he asks.

This is a student in “GA class”, the 3rd-highest-level class in the elementary-school group at the language institute at which I work, out of the 11 total hypothetical levels. (Hypothetical because not all exist at any given time for lack of students). (GA means ‘Glide-Advanced’, for some reason). Jon is in 6th grade.

I answer that I don’t know, and that I’d never taken such a test. I quickly turn it around to ask him, a teaching instinct I developed long ago, though this was not exactly a teaching situation.

Me: “What’s yours?”
The boy: “One-fifty-one.”

He belted it out matter-of-factly, as if informing me of his age or shoe size.

Jon had spent much of the class trying to talk to me about the 19th-century novel Frankenstein, giving me his opinions on it and trying to inform me about the intricacies of the plot as I roamed the room checking work. He came onto that subject because I’d been trying to explain the word “jolt”, and I’d used Frankenstein as an example, as in the monster was ‘jolted’ to life. Jon Chung had raised his hand promptly, and had helpfully pointed out, “actually, Frankenstein is the professor’s name, not the monster’s name.”

Finally, I don’t know what to make of Jon’s question. Was he asking because he thought my IQ was low, or high?  Or just showing off his own supposed IQ? If the South-Korean IQ is 105 on average, as I’ve read, and the standard deviation is 15, then a Korean with IQ 151 is in the top 0.1% in IQ in his country. Maybe Jon did one of those goofy Internet tests, of dubious reliability. Who knows?

I do know that he is pretty smart, all the same.

And he’s still just a kid. Last week after class, he approached me to ask, very earnestly, this question: “Do you like dinosaurs?“ He subsequently went into a small explanation of his dinosaur collection.

I like this student named Jon.

There we were, standing in the front, greeting the incoming students at 4:10 PM. Classes start at 4:15 PM.

People who still cling to obsolete, or at least long-thought-abandoned, technology, was our subject of conversation. The third foreign coworker present said, “Oh, my aunt still uses AOL”. Wow, we said. We’d half-believed that AOL folded up long ago.

My new, young American coworker, C.R., chimes in: “You can tell a lot about people in these kinds of ways. It’s like someone who still uses a Yahoo email“. He chortles. Hmm: “I use Yahoo email”, I says.

He disapproves. “That says a lot about you, dude.” It does? “Everyone should have Gmail”, he says.

It was good humored, and I don’t have anything againsy C.R., but I don’t understand his attitude. Who cares what one’s email provider is? What’s so great about Gmail that means every person should have it? I have used Yahoo mail forever — I know it and I’m comfortable with it, and (significantly) everyone else knows that is my email, too. “You might be right, but as our coworker, ‘M.W.R.’, has said to me many times, ‘I just don’t care enough’…”

That’s about what I said in response. About then, the bell was ringing. We departed.

Oh well.