Interviews...

Any situation in which a group of people or one person has to choose between another group for a winner, a leader, an employee, is fraught with problems.

The first of these is personal prejudice. Even though the criteria might be a set of skills, and that it may be very clear that a certain person among the selectees meets those criteria better than any of the others, prejudice may kick in and, if the person among the selectors is powerful enough, their prejudice may decide the selection.

Another is the criteria used to select - are people really aware of the skills needed? Do they know how to measure those skills?

The final problem I see is that random factors may influence the process - a person may be well qulified, personable and ideally suited, but arrives late due to a subway drivers strike, or reports to the wrong office, or has received outdated information about what to bring to the interview.

These musings follow on the treatment my daughter received at a university she applied to. She was approached by a professor from the university, and invited to attend an interview. She then received instructions about what to prepare, that were superseded a mere 24 hours before the interview, and which she ignored since she had been given the instructions at the university offices and thought these new instructions to be unrealistic (they involved getting hold of a textbook!). She was also told she would have 15 minutes to teach a demo lesson, which was cut to 5 minutes, during which she was interrupted a number of times.

Needless to say, she did not get the job. This, even though, based on the skill set required according to the advert, she was the best for the job!

Etiquette

...but there's some special time to forget etiquette! Never smile at a crocodile...

These lines from a famous Rolf Harris song (apparently it was due to be in the movie Peter Pan but got cut), seemed to apply recently.

The situation I found myself in was this - having taken pains to make sure that my two co-teachers and their husbands would be able to attend the end-of-year Sakornet party, I duly proceeded to book the tickets at 75000 won per person. Only to be told a day before the party that they would no longer be able to come! And could I cancel the tickets.

No, I couldn't! The whole idea is that the pre-booking is to ensure that there is food prepared and tables laid etc. and hotels generally don't allow cancellations on stuff like that!

OK, so given the salary I earn, 150000 won is not that much. However, to have wasted it in this way really drove me nuts. If I had that money to waste, I would be sending it to my family in SA, where it is worth over R1000 - think what they could have done with it! Or it could have gone towards paying for the room.

Coming from a culture where, if you accept an invitation like this, especially well ahead of time, you basically have made a firm commitment and other invitations have to be set aside, this kind of rudeness is, I suppose, what is meant by culture shock.

On my other blog...

Does anyone else also try to keep three or four blogs going at the same time, and end up, as I do, falling further and further behind with each of them?

I guess this falls under the good intentions that pave that famed road to hell (which is, by the way, still my favourite Chris Rea song). You know, the idea was that each blog would allow me to indulge in a separate part of my life? This one was to be the general one for venting, sharing  and otherwise discussing frustrations, one is for sharing thoughts about teaching methods and lessons, one serves as a general photo blog of my time here in South Korea and the last is the place where I'm publishing the Tarot card deck I've painted.

That last one is the furthest behind at this stage, and I really do need to bring it up to date, but before that I have to do some serious scanning to get all 74 cards scanned in and on file!

And what with applications for University posts going out and me sending copies of a stack of papers on a regular basis, the copier/scanner is far too busy with other things to bother with cards!

Maybe if I land a post I'll be able to spend more time on these things.

Congratulation?

One of the most pervasive errors in English here is the use of the word congratulations - it keeps being used as congratulation on cakes, cards and in conversation.

This started me thinking, why do we, in the English world, offer each other either congratulations or condolences, plural? Why not a single congratulation or condolence? We can offer words of congratulation and words of condolence, but then the plural rests in the use of words. Does it perhaps rest in the fact, that, to be grammatically correct, we need to append a or the, since these words are, after all, nouns?

So, if I'm not that happy about your achievement, can I offer you a congratulation?

Liberty and responsibility

I am reading a very interesting book at the moment, dealing with the rise of liberty as a concept in western society.

I am purely at the initial stages of the book, and so have not yet formed an opinion as to how accurate the thesis is, but it started me thinking about the concept of liberty, and how, to some extent, the idea of responsibility had been abrogated with respect to this concept.

Let's talk about liberty. The idea of freedom is intoxicating - being free to live life the way you want to, not having to answer to anyone, free to think and say and do what you want. Most of us consider ourselves free - we live life freely and without being a slave to anyone. Yet, if you really think about it, what does our freedom consist of?

If we broke a law, we'd be imprisoned. If we gave in to our baser impulses (and we all have them!), we'd be rapists, murderers, thieves etc. We do not live exactly the way we want to - we conform to the norms of the society we live in. In that sense we are slaves, slaves to the idea of civil behaviour.

However, so ingrained has become the idea of freedom of speech that people can stand in the streets calling for Obama to be assassinated! Or publish blogs calling for abortionists to be strung from lampposts, blacks to be castrated etc.

Which brings me to responsibility. Unless we temper freedom with responsibility, where we consider the consequences of our deeds and are prepared to bear those consequences, we cannot really have a free society. And, moreover, that responsibility should not be 'I killed him but I can live with it' kind of responsibility, it should be the kind that asks what effect your actions will have on those around you, on the community and on the world.

Tests and short-term memory

It is said that we humans can hold only three items in short term memory at any one time. So, there is a continual shuffling of material between short and long term memory, all happening at incredible speeds, which is why our thoughts can seem so chaotic at times.

Yet, if we think of this in the light of helping students to study more effectively, we certainly would not overwhelm them with mock test papers to do, but instead would give them three concepts to study, test those extensively, then do three more, test those etc. and repeat the formula the next day with the exact same set of concepts, but different tests.

In this way, we would utilise short-term memory most effectively, promote the retention of information as the short term memory repeatedly shuttles the information to long term and back again, and prepare our students for tests far better than we do if we simply have them write mock tests, give them the answers and then proceed to test them for real.

Building, weather and kids

The school is adding a gym, and so we've had about four months of ground-levelling, digging, cement pouring, scaffolding etc. until we are now at the stage where the skeleton of the building is receiving the flesh, so to speak.

Bricklayers are building up the walls in between the concrete pillars, roofers are laying panels on the steel girders and the sound of hammers echoes through the building.

It's getting to the nice part of autumn in terms of weather - lovely cool breezes during the day, and just cold enough at night to need a cover but not uncomfortable if you kick it off. If only I could find a job that allowed me to travel around the globe, staying in this zone all the way! I like autumn more than spring, because the green is still around, the fruits are there ripe and ready and it seems more leisurely than spring.

The kids are being typically Korean about it - Koreans like living in hothouses. They are horrified that I'm walking around in short sleeves still, and that I don't seem to mind the coolness!