Clothes

The temperatures here are finally in the 'sweaty' range, which meant that I could pack up the winter clothes for storage and break out the summer clothes.

One product that I have finally found to do the job it is advertised to do is the vacuum storage bag. I bought these last autumn and packed away my summer clothes in them, and have just used them for the winter clothes and bedding. What a pleasure! A whole closet full of stuff reduced to a single shelf!

So this morning was a check and discard sort of morning - what did I not wear during winter? Toss it out! I suppose all of us make these impulse buys. We walk past a clothing store and see a blouse, jacket or shirt in our colour scheme, and we buy it. Sometimes these work our really well - a jersey in brown with big purple and green leaves on it has turned out to be my favourite this past winter; but sometimes they are disasters. A green blouse with rhinestones and a belt just under the bust is definitely going out!

Yesterday in Iteawon I did shop for shoes, so out with some things and in with the new. I bought some sandals for all-terrain, wet or dry conditions (you know the ones with the velcro straps and plastic soles), and some lightweight sneakers in green and blue checks - very funky. I also got a speedo one-piece swimsuit to frolic around Caribbean Bay in once Sean gets here.

Basically I am now all set and the summer clothes are hanging on the dryer, ready to start wearing.

Perceptions

Having spoken about religion, wars and other such stuff with my daughter at six this morning, I thought about this word perception.

How much of what we perceive is real is open to a lot of debate - for instance, we all have a literal 'blind spot' of stuff that our eye really does not see because of its construction, and our brains 'fill in' the blank using cues and memory of what should go there. But maybe this blind spot extends to more than just the physical world.

At the heart of the human experience lie these things: food, shelter, company, love and sex, birth, health, death. What makes these into culture is how we eat and what we eat, how we build and what we build etc. In other words, culture is in the details.

Which made me think - the proverb says that the devil is in the details. And what do we fight wars about? Not whether we worship God or not, but how we worship seems to be a major issue these days.

I can understand the struggle over resources to some extent - we want to live and will fight to do so, but less understandable are the ideological battles - at least for me.

What do you perceive as evil?

Craftsmanship and painstaking

Once a week I get to teach a whole 45 minutes of 'my' lessons - in the schedule these are shown as 'supplementary' classes, and for quite a while I taught these in the following way:

Each grade at this present school is split into two groups, so we have 1-1 and 1-2, etc.

Only the first and third grade get supplementary classes, and the whole third grade and the whole first grade have to be accommodated in the space of one period.

So I would spend 22 minutes with group 1, then dash to the classroom of group 2 and spend 22 minutes there. The two Korean co-teachers would each be with a group, and use the time to drill the grammar.

Lately, we have changed this - one week I see group 1 for 45 minutes, then next week I see group 2. This has allowed me to prepare more kineasthetic classes for them. However, the latest such class, where I asked the students to use ribbon, paper, crayons, stickers and glue to create a birthday invitation (the curriculum is focusing on the 'will you come...? I will...' grammar construction, so this was a nice way of getting them to write it out as well as reinforcing the use of 'at' and 'on' - at my house, on the 14th etc. It also gives me a chance to spend time talking to them about what they are doing while they are nice and relaxed.

I observed the following phenomenon - those who are good students are also those who took the most pains to make interesting and carefully crafted invitations. Those who are poor students generally just did a scribble or made a mess in terms of glue all over, jagged cuts, bad writing etc.

The idea of the craftsman who patiently and painstakingly makes something out of nothing, even something of the mind, is alien to the poor student. The idea of instant is in their minds, and if a thing cannot be attained in an instant, they give up on it.

Teacher's Day

May seems to be the month, at least in Korea, when groups of people are honored - we had Worker's day on the 1st of May, then Children's day on the 5th, followed by Parent's day on 8th and today, the 15th, Teacher's day.

I wonder if we could start a movement to have this particular day acknowledged worldwide as a public holiday? A day when teacher's are thought of with pride, with acknowledgement of their contribution?

Of course, now I must play Devil's advocate a bit - there are truly terrible teachers out there, and taking pride in them hardly seems possible. Acknowledging a teacher who bullies children, or calls them stupid, or ignores them is difficult to do.

However, isn't this just as true of all those other days mentioned? There are lazy workers, bad parents and terrible children. In any group of people you will find the bad apples. But, as the saying goes, don't let them spoil the whole barrel.

To those teachers out there who teach in schools where there are hardly any books, where kids sit on the ground, who teach with passion and commitment - happy Teacher's Day!

Learning

You know how we say some people never learn? Usually when they do something so stupid we want to smack them on the head and go 'duh'!

But then, don't we all, at some stage or another, do just that? Something that you wonder to yourself, what was I thinking?

And, of course, in these days of video cameras and access to YouTube, Flickr etc. you no longer have to wait for America's funniest videos to show people in pain, in agony and horribly embarrassed. 

Watching some of these made me once again think of an argument I had, quite a while back, with one of my co-workers. I made the assertion that all comedy is, inherently, cruel. We laugh at the discomfort of others. He scoured jokes and websites to convince me otherwise, but I kept proving my thesis with each example he brought.

Now, the thought strikes me, maybe laughter is a way for us to learn from the experiences of others? Apparently we remember funny things a lot longer and a lot better than others. So, to benefit from watching our neighbour saw the branch he is sitting on out from under himself, so that we don't do it, we laugh?

Education

Since I am, now, mainly a teacher, education is something I tend to think about a lot. What do we want to achieve with education? Why educate? And what should we be teaching?
My daughter and I were discussing this last night, and a couple of things came up that I think we should be thinking about more seriously.

It is generally agreed that educated people are better citizens - they pay their taxes, they obey the laws, they are generally more tolerant and more civic minded than the uneducated. They are healthier and their kids are generally better looked after. However, what is an education that will achieve this?

Initially, education for everyone sprang from the reform movements, who felt that illiterate people will be exploited by bosses and rulers, and so pushed for education for all. This was allied to the industrial revolution, and the need for workers that were trained according to some mass production method. 

There was a lot of opposition, and to a large extent education remained the province of the rich, until state school funding started, and gradually we have what is now, if not universal in all countries, certainly in most of those that value education, the accepted system: Children attend school from the age of six to about sixteen or eighteen, then go to university or college, and then become part of the workforce. Schools have set curricula for the subjects they teach, usually drawn up by some board or ministry of education.

During the initial reform a number of critics were very scathing about teaching the masses, especially as this would make them dissatisfied with their position in society. Obviously the use of education to stratify society did not end there, and in fact, is still with us today, where children with wealthy parents generally get a better education than poor children.

So, my thoughts about changing education are these:

Remove all impediments to children attending schools - whether rich or poor, white or black give them an equal opportunity to learn.

Weed out the scholars, the knowledge seekers, and place them in one track. Allow the rest to be trained in basic literacy and numeracy, and to discover their aptitude and be trained to the best of their ability in that aptitude.

Why am I asking for this rather radical strategy? Simple. Every day I've been a teacher I see the scholars or potential scholars, the ones who would love to explore a subject, either becoming bored because they have to proceed at the pace of the slowest child in class, or educating themselves. And, conversely, I see the agonies and boredom of those children who have to struggle with subjects they have no interest in and no aptitude for. Radical? Maybe. But think about it a bit...

The soundtrack of your life

What would you consider the soundtrack of your life to have been?

By that I mean, if your life was a movie, what songs, by which artists would feature prominently? Who features in your personal top ten?

I must say the two artists who say most about me and my life are Billy Joel and Carole King. Listening this morning to Billy Joel sing 'A Minor Variation' just brought it home to me again. Then I must add a more contemporary element in Maroon 5, who are poets of the failed relationship and the complexity of the human experience. Add to the mix a touch of Haydn and a generous dollop of Mozart, backed all the way by the rock stars of the sixties and seventies such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Def Leppard, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Queen, the Beatles, etc. and you start getting some idea of what I'd sound like.

But - deep down, at the heart, the music that brings a smile, gets my feet tapping and sits at the core - country! As my current favourite country singer, Trace Adkins, says: Ladies love country boys! Amen.

The Orange Couch

I had a visit from another English teacher yesterday, and when she saw my couch she exclaimed: 'I have the exact same couch in my apartment! And so does my neighbour!'  In my experience, the furniture for the NET's come from some pool - obviously the cheapest! - but also the least likely to be chosen for any decor magazine.

The orange couch is not only orange, but a faux leather vinyl orange, and, more damning, not a really comfortable couch to sit or lounge on. The seat is too narrow, giving only 48cm of space, just enough to catch you behind the knees, so there is no leaning back and relaxing on this couch.

Then, the TV cabinet, cupboard and bed - made from a plywood covered with melamine in a dark brown with white trim - contribute to a rather gloomy picture.

Most of us manage to brighten things by adding individual touches in terms of the bedding, picture on the walls etc., but if you are a NET in Korea, and you are living with this same furniture, what are your thoughts? Can you live with it? Or do you just suffer it?

Or do you, like me and my friend, find it an absolute hoot and enjoy living in an art-deco meets trailer trash taste set-up?