Quote of the week

"I hate four and six because four means death and six is the devil's number."

I think my tutor student is going to provide a wealth of quotes. To unpack this one a bit: in the Chinese-Korean hybrid numbers the number four sounds like the Korean word for 'death' (the six part we know about, but I can't capture the facial expression and hand gestures that went with it to convey 'devil'). Today he had another toy dinosaur with him (so far there's been a velociraptor and a pterodactyl), and we talked about international incidents, which is amusing enough of a topic with a nine year old, and even funnier when he doesn't know all the words he needs. He got the story through to me anyway, though: a South Korean hiker went to climb a mountain that she thought was South of the border but which was actually North of the 38th parallel, and a North Korean border guard killed her thinking that she was trying to infiltrate the country.

I'm realizing that these quotes need some context in terms of the consistent oddities of my students' English. The older kids write weekly journals (theoretically), and this would be a prototypical essay "Yesterday I go to roller coaster. It was excited and very funny. Yesterday was happy."

My favorite story of a student at my school misunderstanding English is the case of Tiger. All the students here are assigned English names when they first arrive, and one of the kids was dubbed 'Ryan'. Ryan's best friend thought that the name was 'Lion', and he wanted to be an animal too so he insisted that his name be Tiger. Most of the students are pretty good at distinguishing L and R, but the newest students have some trouble. Even so, I've only been called 'Randon' once or twice. 'Roren' and 'Rindsey' weren't as fortunate for some reason. I wonder if my inability to audibly differentiate between some Korean letters leads to anything as humorous as the Lion/Ryan mistake, or even as funny as the Rindsey Rohan t-shirt I saw (Yes, in print. I kid you not. The t-shirt only got better from there.)

Call me Minjun (with Prank Signage II and other miscellanies)

My schedule is getting busier. I now tutor a student during the one break I had on Mondays and Fridays. This means that I have to start getting to work earlier to plan for my classes instead of doing some of that during the day (hence the reference to mindless walking dead).

I think my tutor student and I will get along well. His favorite movie is Jurassic Park and he is learning English in order to travel (he will soon be attending an English academy in Malaysia, for example). However, his English is rather limited at the moment. Due to their early immersion, the regulars at my school must think partially in English in order to speaking it so well. My tutor student, on the other hand, came to English a bit later than a lot of the kids at my school, so he sounds a bit like I do when learning Korean: he stops to think and translate his thoughts and he asks a lot for me to repeat things.

Speaking of my learning Korean, I've started meeting with one of the Korean kindy teachers after classes on Thursdays so that we can both improve our language skills. The Kindy teachers collectively gave me the Korean name Minjun (pronounced like 'mean June'), which is apparently a very common Korean name. Now that I am being taught by native speakers twice a week perhaps I will actually finally learn a (living) foreign language.

We want Change!

Apologies for the format changes. The previous template was incredibly narrow, and I lack the skill and the patience to edit the html to make it all wider. I'm not totally happy with this one either, so I may end up changing it, but I promise to keep such nonsense to a minimum.

Update: I found a template I can tolerate, so I guess I'll stick with it. I hope none of you checked the site when I was trying out some of the worse options.

Lunar New Year hikes

I have a four day weekend for the lunar new year, and I took this time to go hiking in the mountains that surround Daejeon. It turns out that there is a trail that circles the city and that hits every peak along the way. On Saturday Bo, John and I went about a sixteenth of that trail, climbing four peaks ranging from 436m to 570m (1,430ft to 1,868ft). By my standards as a Coloradan, these elevations don't even count as hills (my parents' house is more than three times the elevation and sits at the bottom of a mountain). However, snobbery aside, these were some nice rugged peaks and some serious hiking trails, especially since Korean trailbuilders don't believe in switchbacks. In the grand tradition of my highschool we enjoyed gummy bears on some of the peaks. Good hiking, good company, good conversations. Doesn't get much better. The mountain tops provided great views of both the surrounding hills and of the city. We agreed that this picture summarizes Daejeon better than words ever could:
On Monday Bo and I went to another mountain at the South end of the city. This one had a pagoda on top:

On a nearby smaller peak, there was a old (~600 BCE) fortress wall and another pagoda:

Strangely, there were eight well-fed cats up in the fortress seeking shelter from the snow:

On the walk back down we enjoyed views of snow-covered trees and the baseball stadium (with the city in the background and the edge of a Buddhist monastery in the foreground):

Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die

(Hat tip Darksyde on Daily Kos)

"I will crush them"

While I wasn't impressed by the inauguration, the Obama presidency (wow is that fun to say) sure has kicked ass so far. It seems that Obama really is going to stand by his campaign promises, since he has already acted decisively on some (closing Guantanamo, repealing the Mexico City rule) and has unambiguously reiterated some of the others that are controversial (repealing DADT, etc). I am also pretty confident in his ability to keep even the ones that require the acquiescence of the other branches of government (an effective and infrastructure-friendly stimulus plan, universal health care, a fix for social security, etc) because he is brilliant at politicking, because he has an army of volunteers and donors behind him, and because of what he says in this video:



(hat tip Daily Kos)

Food

I pretty much split my dinners here between eating out and cooking for myself (which is somewhat limited by the fact that I only have two burners and no oven). I love galbi (Korean barbecue), and I used to enjoy kim-bop, which translates to seaweed-rice and consists of some veggies and meat wrapped in the namesakes, but then when I got the flu I wasn't such a fan of what I had had for lunch that day anymore. I'd probably be fine with it at this point, but I've been being cautious. I've also eaten at good Japanese and Indian restaurants. On Thursdays we go to Lindsey's for Family Dinner, so I have home-cooked but not cooked-by-me meals then.

For breakfast I usually just have cereal on my way out the door, but sometimes I buy pastry from Paris Baguette, a common chain shop with a store in my school's building. I like that French bakeries are the foreign food of choice here.

For lunch I usually have the kindy lunch. The kindergarteners are served lunch at school and the teachers are welcome to it. It always has purple rice (I don't know what makes it purple) and then there are side dishes and soup. The side dishes are always interesting and often good. I especially like the egg-based concoctions. Kindy lunch is always an adventure because we foreigner are unable to identify a lot of the food so sometimes we end up not taking enough delicious potato cakes but take a bunch of the weird tiny fried fish that taste like a fishmarket smells. Also, sometimes something strong, like a particularly strong batch of kimchi, will make me a bit queasy a few hours later. However, I think I will stick with kindy lunch because it is a convenient way to experience Korean food, and because I am cheap.

Update: I forgot to mention that Paris Baguette, and possibly Korea in general, is brilliant when it comes to birthdays. Paris Baguette has a kit that it includes with cakes: it has short and tall candles, matches, and a cake knife. Koreans have a convention that I think the West should adopt where tall candles represent decades and short candles represent years, which is way classier than the stupid block number candles I see in the US and more practical than putting a candle for every year (though this can sometimes be amusing, such as on my grandmother's 75th birthday when we were mean enough to actually light 75 candles on an enormous cake and she surprised us all by blowing them out with a can of compressed air).

Quote of the week

"I don't think that vampires are a problem in Korea because we eat so much garlic."
~Olivia, approximately 13 years old (Western reckoning).

Other fun things about my students: kindergarteners love me for my imitations and drawings. In one class I can get them to do anything simply by pretending to be a robot (or by giving them a ball to play with, etc. Kindergarteners are basically perpetually tripping and find the smallest things either fascinating and wonderful or unbearable). In my other kindy class I draw whatever they request on their workbooks when they finish a page. Often they simply want hearts, ribbons, and flowers, but they've branched out to include witches, dragons, and Batman (I draw the logo). I'm not much of an artist, but they think I'm amazing.

Pretending to be a robot and drawing half-way decently does not win over the affection of the older kids, but I think they like me alright. They often give me little snacks. The first time they did this the snack in question was a rice cake, and I was amused to think of this as the Korean equivalent of giving the teacher an apple. Rice cakes aren't standard, though; I've received things both quite foreign (orange-flavored crackers) and from my childhood (fruit by the foot).

My class of oldest students probably doesn't particularly like me, but that is likely due to their not wanting to be there. I don't blame them: I wouldn't want to be at language school in the early evenings on my winter vacation from normal school. The saddest example of this is the Winter Intensive class, which consists of five eleven-year-olds (or 'thirteen' year olds in Korean age) that meet in the mornings during public school break. There was wonderful irony in making them write essays about how they needed more leisure time (and I completely agree: they spend all day in school (or in cello lessons, etc) all year with only a few days of vacation. They spend all night doing homework. It's not as intense as college, but they aren't even in highschool.) My intensive class is pretty fantastic. We were studying recent civil rights leaders in various countries so they learned the word 'petition' so they petitioned me for stickers. All students can trade in 100 stickers for markers or something. I'm not entirely clear on it. It is sometimes surprising to see which classes care about stickers and which don't.

Anyway, my students are often amusing and I will try to remember to provide their funniest quotes each week for your amusement.

Hell

An eternity of this really would be my hell. The comic also has a pretty good idea of my reaction to heaven:


Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal generally has great takes on religion:


There are lots more good ones, but this post is long enough already.

Inauguration speeches

I finally got a chance to watch Obama's inauguration speech (I don't think I would be able to stomach the rest of the ceremony) and I give it a resounding 'meh'. It sounded like a stump speech, and not even one of his better ones. Granted, Obama's stump speeches are better than the majority of speeches ever given, but this inauguration speech isn't even in the same league as Kennedy's in 1961. Hearing it still gives me goosebumps. Everyone knows the 'ask not what your country can do for you,' line, but when you hear the build up it gets exponentially better.



(Seriously, give it a listen; it's only fourteen minutes.)

Update: This article makes me feel better about Obama's speech. It made me realize that the speech was brilliant, if not particularly inspiring to me, because it wasn't talking to liberals. Obama used the language of conservatism to try to get conservatives behind liberal ideas, which will be essential if they are to be enacted. The best example of this was the "These things are old; these things are true" line, which resonates for conservatives in a big big way, but among the 'traditional' values he listed were tolerance and curiosity, the latter of which in particular seems pretty damn radical after the quarter century of Republican leadership and completely antithetical to Bush II in particular.

On Gremlins

I have recently been researching mythological creatures both for incredibly dorky reasons and because they are awesome. One of the things that struck me was how recent some of the creations are, particularly gremlins. Like other mischievous little people (fairies, goblins, kobolds, pixies, brownies, oni, etc), gremlins are blamed when things mysteriously go wrong or get misplaced, but gremlins limit their mischief to airplanes. Gremlins were invented by the British Royal Air Force in WWI. They were originally suspected of being creatures in league with the Germans, but then RAF members heard of similar occurrences on German planes and realized that gremlins just like to sabotage planes for their own twisted pleasure, without regard for the nationality of the pilot. The gremlin myth became more widespread during WWII. Here is my favorite telling of the gremlin tale:

Birthday

I had quite good birthday today, for the most part. This morning I slept in and chatted with some of you people, which was nice. At school I received many gifts including rice cakes (sweetened gooey rice concoctions which taste considerably better than the preceding description would have you believe), Belgian chocolates, cookies, school supplies for my Korean class (I really should practice writing Korean, and the notebooks I got today should help), a tasty bread-cheesecake something or other, and a paper airplane from one of my kindergarteners. My kindy class sang happy birthday to me and ended the song by making hearts with their hands and saying "I love you Landon Teacher!" I am totally going soft in my old age because I found this adorable.

The nadir of the day was when I was giving a test to a class of older kids. This involves taking them out of the room one at a time for an oral quiz while the other students do the written part. I made the mistake of going out of earshot, and the kids left in the room tore up each other's paper tests and literally got in a full-out fight. Ukk. This class has consistently been the worst behaved, so I should have known better than to leave them even for a few minutes, but this was way worse than what I expected. We can't really do a whole lot to punish them, but ripping up someone else's test is definitely grounds for in-school suspension in my book (I am such an academic and nerd for this to be the part that appalls me rather than the physical fight).

After school I met up with other teachers for Korean class and we had the best Korean Barbecue that I have had thus far. Mmmm, barbecue. At class I felt like Korean was starting to click for me, which is a great feeling. The only other time I've had it was with German in Germany. I now have a rough idea on how to decline verbs and know the infinitive of basic verbs, which gives me a much better picture of the structure of the language. At class they also had a birthday cake for someone with a birthday in about ten days, so I got to share that too. The only bad part about Korean class is that the Pakistani and German and Chinese people make me feel stupid because they are learning their third language (or more) by being taught in their second language (or more), English, yet they are better at it even given that huge handicapp.

On the way home I got another birthday gift in the form of the subway system correcting their English grammar (!). They now say "the door is closing" instead of "the door is close", the latter of which had been driving me a little crazy every time I heard it. After dropping off perishable gifts at my apartment I met up with most of the other foreign teachers at The West Wing bar and hof ('hof' is Korean for 'bar', so it basically says 'bar and bar'. Also, the logo says 'sense 2002' instead of 'since 2002.' The logo is generally fantastic: it is the presidential seal except that the eagle is holding hops and forks instead of olive leaves and arrow.) Hanging out was great. We toasted America on this historic inauguration day (well, sort of, given the time zone difference), semi-planned a movie night, talked about relationship stuff, and other fun things. I'm really enjoying my fellow teachers. I was worried at first because I am so used to Reedies that it is like I'm not socialized properly and have weird expectations of people, like that they have some side interest of totally useless but bizarre and interesting information that they will spout out for hours to anyone who will listen. However, they seem genuinely happy to hear me spout off about obscure things like how the movie Hero as an example of brilliant subtle Chinese propaganda and other useless information, and they have interesting commentary to add even though they themselves mostly lack the weird trivia because they mostly studied things that can, you know, get you jobs. I'm deeply looking forward to hiking and chatting with Bo this weekend, and to our 'family dinners' and other social events with the family in general.

To sum up: I am really happy in Korea so far and had an excellent birthday.

Zen and the art of destroying household items

This is gorgeous:


(hat tip Andrew Sullivan, as usual)

I especially like the parts with water balloons. I love anything that reminds us how amazing and beautiful the ordinary things around us are. Though my ascetic tastes still tend towards the epic, I am learning to appreciate the little pieces of awesomeness around me, and it has made me a much happier person (I'm on my way to Zen mastery, I swear). In the mornings when I shower, light comes into the bathroom from the window and there is so much steam that breathing in there is like the inverse of breathing in cold weather: I can see my breath in the absence of steam. Watching the water molecules swirl and dance in the sunlight makes my morning.

Late Update: This video adds an interesting twist to the general awesomeness of slow motion destruction:

Korea update

I'm getting pretty used to things here. Classes are becoming easier since I am learning the routine. I also now know almost everyone's name, though I still need to consult the attendance sheet occasionally for some of the older kids. I have two kindergarten classes that I teach twice a day (all classes are 45 min), eight classes of older kids that I teach on either M-W-F or T-Th, and one class of older kids that I teach for a two-period block on Wednesday mornings. The classes range from five to twelve students, with most classes having nine or ten kids. The supervisor of the kindergarten and the supervisor of the older kid classes each observed some of my classes and gave advice. Apparently I am adapting fairly well all things considered, both in terms of teaching--judging by their feedback (especially about keeping the class on track and orderly)--and in terms of moving to another hemisphere--in comparison to how my fellow foreign teachers describe their first weeks.

The foreign teachers are very nice and friendly. We have 'family dinner' once a week at Lindsey's apartment. John and Bo live in the same apartment complex as I do, and are both good to talk to. Bo shares my love of hiking and John and I can be huge nerds together. Lindsey and Lauren are generally interesting and easy to talk to, though we don't share any single issues to bond over. Lauren and I go to Korean class every Tuesday, along with a bunch of teachers and ex-pats, including a few teachers from the other school. The two YBM ECC (my company) schools' foreign teachers also meet up once a week to hang out. One of them briefly went to school in the tiny town of Milton-Freewater Oregon with my good friend Ben from Reed. I really like some of the teachers from the other ECC and want to hang out with them more.

Tomorrow is my birthday. Tuesday is my light day in terms of teaching, so I get to sleep in, but it is also the day I am a student of Korean, which is much more difficult. Today was the birthday of Bo (he also turned 24) and Tom, a teacher at my school who is Korean. Tomorrow is also John's birthday, so all five foreign teachers went out to dinner to celebrate our triple birthdays. We had tasty tasty Indian food. Tomorrow we will probably get cake at work, judging by the precedent of today and last Friday, which was the birthday of our manager, Maria. I am of course getting an amazing present tomorrow of an Obama presidency (after work we will probably go to an American-style bar in our building called The West Wing to celebrate birthdays and the innauguration). However, I am greedy and want more, so for my birthday I would love to hear from you, either in email, in the comments, or (ideally) on Skype this weekend (my user name is landon.goldberg), and by 'weekend' I mean your Friday or Saturday evening, which are my Saturday and Sunday early afternoons. Actually, this weekend is the lunar new year, so we have next Monday and Tuesday off as well, although that also means that Bo and I (and maybe others) will be out hiking a lot in the 'mountains' around Daejeon.

Busy, busy, busy

The Washington Post just ran an article on Obama's faith:

For the president-elect, religion has always been less about theology than the power God inspires in communities...

Sounds like someone we know. I like to believe that Obama has this almost Bokononist view of religion. There is a part of me that prefers Bill Maher's opinion that McCain and Obama claim to be religious, "but I hope they're lying." However, I have recently attempted to embrace the foma of Bokanonism: the lies that bring one comfort and happiness. One of the foma I have been living by for over two years now is that Barack Obama will make the US a wonderful country and fix all our problems after eight years of duffle. One of the ways he might do that is by using and promoting the foma of religion. While it is not remotely possible for a religion to provide meaning for my life, I recognize that religions do indeed do so for many people, and I will do my best not to undermine meaningfulness for them as I have for myself. Similarly, as a Wittgenstinean I recognize the extreme importance of community, and while I am not part of any religious community, most of America is, and one must be part of a community in order to shape the realities of its members. In the meanwhile, I will attempt to re-embrace the foma of my past: truth, logic, science, Rawlsian Justice, etc and to discover new ones.

Trimet

I saw this picture in a Matt Yglesias post and it made my heart aflutter with missing Portland. Portland was my introduction to good (i.e. usable) public transportation, so Trimet has a special place in my heart.

The public transportation in Korea is fantastic, by the way. Daejeon has roughly the population of Portland (though it is much much denser) and its transportation infrastructure is better (again, easier because the city takes up less area) and cheaper. It costs less than a dollar to go anywhere, and the subway runs about every seven minutes. I'm not sure how often the buses run since everywhere I have wanted to go is on the one subway line (more lines are opening soon, but maybe not before I leave). The only problem I have is the grammar of their English (all announcements are in both Korean and English), such as 'the door is close' at every subway stop when they mean 'the door is closing'. The grammar nazi in me flares up at that one, but other than that the infrastructure is wonderful. Sometime I will do a post about the bikelanes here, which would be the envy of Portlanders (keep in mind that Pdx is by far the most bike-friendly city in the US).

The Illustrated Night Parade of A Hundred Demons

During the same year that the Declaration of Independence was signed in the US, Japanese artist Toriyama Sekien published Gazu Hyakki Yakō, which is much like the tales of the Brother's Grimm in that it is a collection of folklore, except that this one is an illustrated bestiary instead of a collection of stories. The most amusing is the Akaname, or Filth Licker. The Tenome should be familiar to anyone who has seen Pan's Labyrinth:
This is probably my favorite:
...though I am also a fan of these two:

Domestic Transformer

This apartment in Hong Kong is amazing and precisely the kind of space-efficient home I want to have some day.

Existentialism and parenting

(blatantly stolen from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics, which is somehow both updated daily and consistently hilarious)

I expect that we existentialists make many lousy things, including parents. This is actually one of the reasons I never want to be have children: there would be far too many instances of me saying thinks like "Well, I don't think that I would like having my eye poked out, but of course there isn't anything inherently good or bad about it. There is no reason to prefer--say--the taste of ice cream over the experience of extreme pain. I do have that preference, but there is no reason for it. If you think you might prefer to poke out your eye over having two functional eyes then feel free to keep playing with that sharp object near your face." Or if asked if Santa Clause is real: "It is true for your friends that Santa exists but it is not true for me. I don't know whether or not it is true for you. It depends on whether the opinions of your friends outweigh my opinion on that issue."

The other philosophy-based problem I have with parenting is that as far as I am concerned parenting consists of conditioning your children, whether you are doing so purposefully or not. Thus I would want to have a plan in place as to what I wanted to condition them to believe and desire, but I have no idea. I wouldn't want them to share my values because my values are self-undermining, but people with radically different values from mine drive me crazy.

Update:

Air vent art

As a Reedie, I'm no stranger to air vent art. The bubble ferris wheel may be the coolest Renn Fayre piece I've seen. It is nice to see that we are not alone:



I also like that these NY pieces are from subway exhaust, and so come and go, so the sculptures come to life and then after a moment fall back into a lifeless pile.

(hat tip Andrew Sullivan)

In the desert we will dirty our hands 'til they're clean

I cannot recommend highly enough Songs About Teeth by Cake Bake Betty. The lyrics, as the title might suggest are about strange things like anatomy (especially teeth and spines), the stars disappearing, cannibalism, and other less odd things that are sometimes quite powerful. Here's my favorite of the songs [other great tracks are Jesus and Austria, 64 Litle White Things, The Charge (knockturnal), and The Spine Song]:

Flying cars

It's about damn time. We were all supposed to have flying cars years before 2009, and this still isn't exactly what I was expecting. Still pretty cool though.

Radio Free Korea

Pandora doesn't work abroad, but mediayou.net does. I prefer Pandora, but this will be sufficient for keeping me sane.

Reed and the real world

I forget sometimes how much Reed differs from the real world. The main case that gets me into trouble is that at Reed people love to argue/debate and don't take the matter personally while doing so. In the real world, people will go to great lengths to avoid talking politics or to interrupt a conversation about politics if the conversants disagree. This has happened to me now with two different sets of English speakers in Korea. I don't ever bring up politics, but if someone else does I am (overly) happy to talk about it, and even though I have been way way less extreme or confrontational and way more concessionary about politics than I ever was at Reed, people seemed terrified that an actual fight will break out or something. Talking about politics is a taboo I never learned. The taboo is too bad, because politics is interesting and one can have good conversations even (especially) with people one disagrees with. I have been wise enough to not even touch the subjects of philosophy (which would bore people and make me seem pretentious) and religion (where my views are very offensive to most people). I miss the idle, tensionless, yet intellectually engaging debates of the Reed community.

Another difference is that in the real world people listen to popular music and not recognizing it (or other elements of popular culture) is weird, rather than a point of honor like it is at Reed and other hipstery communities.

The matter is accentuated by the fact that I differ from the Reed communities on some of their commonalities with the real world, such as drinking and going to clubs/dancing in general. These things have never appealed to me, yet it is what many people my age do for fun and look forward to doing. I had a fine time at a club last night (I would probably find clubs in the states almost as weird as clubs in Korea), but it wouldn't be my first choice for a social activity. I guess I am just weird, but I'm fine with that.

It's like I rolled a State of Nature 20!

There's a new Dungeons & Discourse cartoon! And a promise of more on the way too. I love anything where you have to be nerdy about philosophy and D&D to get the jokes. It's like it was written for me and my friends...

Update: Speaking of webcomics, XKCD was kind enough to make a metric conversion chart that was precisely the kind I have wanted in the fortnight I've been abroad.

Oh, the Interwebs

I have internet in my apartment! Yea! I was jonesing pretty badly...

(On a tangential note, blogger's spell check thinks that 'jonesing' should be 'Micronesia'. What?)

Bias

This is an excellenct article about bias in Western media in the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza. Once again Al Jazeera proves to have more substantive news and less propaganda than Fox...

The tables are turned

On Tuesdays I only teach three classes, but I also take one (voluntarily). There is a church here where the members are kind enough to teach Korean to English speakers for free. Learning Korean is hard. If I had to learn through immersion (Korean only) the way my students learn English I would be completely lost and hopeless. Learning through English is doable, though. I am doing alright at it; teaching myself the alphabet (see Eliot's posts about Hangul) was a good idea and allows me to sit with the people who have been going to class for a few weeks now. I still feel like an idiot though. I am so damn ignorant in this country.

Landon's first day of school

Yesterday I had my first day of classes. It was a long day: I taught 10 classes that were each 40 minutes long. Wednesdays are even longer: I teach from 9:30am until 7:45pm with short breaks for lunch and dinner. I have far fewer classes on Thursdays and my Tuesday schedule is almost empty, so it works out. Yesterday was tough, but not nearly as bad as I expected. I did my best to learn all of the kids' names, in addition to preparing for each class and getting used to the curriculum, not to mention this whole teaching thing. I actually rather like it and am pretty good at it (so far). The kids like me and know what they should be doing (even if they don't always want to do it). In the morning I teach kindergarteners, and in the afternoon I teach elementary and junior high aged kids. They are actually fairly well behaved in class, which surprised me since they were completely wild on the first day that I was observing classes. They were probably just wound up from having been on break for Christmas and New Years. My one class of teenagers is the hardest because they don't ever want to answer the questions and are generally unhappy to be there, but I know how to be strict so I kept them on task.

All of the students know more English than you would expect. The kindergarteners can write and spell in English better than most first graders in the US can. It probably helps that they start school at age 3 and that the expectations of them are high.

The teacher student relationship is far more physical in Korea than in the US. The kids are always touching me and hugging me, and a lot of the other teachers will ruffle the hair of the students, pick them up, etc. I'm still pretty uncomfortable with that, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. One kindergartener is fascinated by the fact that I have hair on my wrist and always grabs my hand to look at it, and a lot of the kids come up to me on my breaks and hug me.

I am sure I will be sick of the curriculum soon. The rough format is the same from kindergarted on up, and rereading this post I can tell that it is already influencing my thought processes, making my sentences more stilted: 'Landon Teacher writes a blog entry. He is wearing a blue shirt...'

Hopefully I will have internet in my apartment soon (I am writing this from work). I am in the process of getting an imigration card, which I need in order to get a bank account, and it makes sense to have a bank account before I set up my internet and phone accounts. I will update you more frequently when I can do so from home.

The Sound of Silence

We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue towork diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.