Sick of Academia

 Well, here we go again. Of all the ways I could start a post I think THAT statement might require as much of a "NNnnnnngo on..." as any. This is the first week of my final class in my MEd studies. Yes, I am STILL banging my head against the wall trying to get this master's degree. Other than grade school nothing has come easy for me educationally and it has had almost nothing to do with intellect. Socio-economic status, lack of government or any other kind of support, and just bad breaks have made me think if I had my druthers I'd go back to that naive boy of 18 who thought his brain was all he needed to leave a great big mark on this free, egalitarian world full of honesty and justice and I'd tell him to learn to drive heavy equipment or install air conditioning systems. 

But I suppose intellect HAS had something to do with this straight gate and narrow path down Academia road I've chosen in that I'm too stupid to give up. However, today I think I may have come face-to-face for the first time with the very real prospect that I might have to do just that. Eleven arduous courses into this venture in which I've had to suffer the group project bullies who feel safe enough to be their genuine asshole selves behind their keyboards; pedants posing as educators trying to quantify and mathematize things that every true teacher knows defy those processes; courses singing the praises of progressive education that are taught in highly instructor-centered, passive, incessantly rubricked, summatively assessed, hypocritic methods; and maybe worst of all wading every week through "academic" studies like so many Vietnamese swamps trying to push aside the weeds of pretentiously specific terminology designed partly to exclude those outside the realms of the educationally elite, and erudite scientific diction that accomplishes the exact opposite of educating usually in highly structured, highly repetitive, highly anal, preset template form that aside from a few precious nuggets of educational edification are largely ceremonious rights of passage into the academic Mecca of publishing. 

Now, to my Kurtzian horror, I am tasked with producing one of these soul-sucking Faustian documents so as to gain the privilege of entrance into the higher echelons of academia that may be available to me if I tuck twig and berries and just get this humiliating paper written and submitted. Honestly, how much better could life be for me if I get my master's now at the ripe old age of 58? I may have missed the boat on this one. But I might just be in that frame of mind because I looked at the "Capstone Project Guide." This is the format of the final project I am expected to formulate and submit in the next 8 weeks. Just the notes on the format of this monster of unprincipled capitulation to all that is wrong with education are enough to make me yearn for the freedom of not being a student any more for the rest of my life. I got to the 7 page point and just lost all hope. These are just NOTES on the final project. It's going to be a study comprised of a curriculum and a rationale. That doesn't sound so bad, does it? But read on... 

Originally this thing was designed as a primary study done by teachers on (presumably) their students. I know this because I remember back when I first heard about it saying, "Well it's summer, where the hell am I going to find students to collect data on?" Then I guess the school ran into accountability and liability problems getting permission from students, parents, schools, and whatever other legal or governmental agencies were required to avoid being sued. Our world eh? 

So NOW we have to do a fake primary study using secondary resources and data. A ha! Now it's getting more complicated. But still plausible, no? 

It WOULD be if the school and teachers could come to a consensus on how to do this damn thing and what should be real and what should be fake. So here's a brief summary of the format. See if you'd touch this thing with a ten-foot pole. (or without the aid of Chat GPT)

1. Highly formatted title page.

2. Abstract. Single paragraph double spaced with no indentation describing in one paragraph (250 words or so) an educational problem you've encountered and the solutions to it you are proposing.

3. Title again. Headings must be centered and bolded using upper and lower case letters. Text below must be double spaced with indented first line. Provide a brief overview of your project including a) (fake) school, b) problem, c) intervention, d) target audience, e) purpose or goal, f) your role in the project. Close by describing how this deliverable is divided into 3 sections: Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation.

4. New page. Planning. State the problem... AGAIN. Include the following: 1. Problem (YET AGAIN) in one sentence. 2. How it manifests itself 3. Evidence to support claims of the problem (how is this different from number 2?) 4. Scope and significance of the problem. 5. With whom and how you collaborated in identifying the problem. 6. Potential consequences if the problem is not addressed.

Now here we get into the problem of what should be REAL and what should be MADE UP. I think the best way to do this would be to use your current teaching situation and write about ACTUAL problems and interventions but use no specific names or information so as to give the appearance of secondary rather than primary research. See how Mickey Mouse this is? I don't know why they don't just let us write a thesis. Do some research and write a paper   ---   like the format EVERY SINGLE ONE of the previous 11 courses has taken!!! My theory is that they needed to publish lots of papers written by students in order to better qualify for regional accreditation. But they HAVE ACHIEVED that and it's nothing to sneeze at. Same accreditation body as Berkeley and Stanford. So why not just abandon this bullshit and let us write theses? Your guess is as good as mine.

Oh we're far from finished. Organizational Context with a list of details including collaboration genuine or fabricated I don't know, history of this problem in other places YES this means I have to do research so despite having to describe the uniqueness of my project, I have to include past research showing how NON-unique it is. Causes of the problem AGAIN, and possible barriers or challenges.

Intervention. Describe for the fifth time what you are doing only this time they suggest a table, graph or other visual. 

Believe it or not... Purpose Statement. State the purpose in one sentence. State your expected outcomes.

Review of Literature. Okay, good. I get to use some of the learning from the other courses to support my study. "Any lit older than 5 years should be labeled "siminal."" So must include RECENT projects and lit and theories related to my topic. Again don't do what they tell me to do and make it something unique or there won't be any. 

Project methods.

Stakeholders and audience. How they would be impacted by your project. Just an excuse to use the very academic sounding word "impact." 

Intervention implementation plan. Is this like maybe METHODS? Well you need to give details like a timeline (again should I fudge some imaginary timeline of when I did what I did when I didn't? OR should I really do it and pretend like I didn't?) HOW FUCKED UP IS THAT? Wait it gets more fucked up.

There will be three separate sections. One is PRIOR to implementation, one is DURING, and section 3 will be, you guessed it, afterwards. So do I just make up learning outcomes? "EVERYTHING went as planned and all my students are now fluently speaking English!" Woohoo!

Expected Outcomes. Discuss expected outcomes and ACTUAL outcomes. Actual or made up? Make up your fucking minds! "I thought my plan wouldn't be so successful but it turns out I'm a genius."

Provide a lead-in like "The following questions guided this project..." So for the SIXTH time, what are you doing only like we're now playing Jeopardy and phrasing our answers in question form.

Data sources and collection procedures. Describe each data source separately. Must be SECONDARY. Don't forget that. 

Data analysis. List the sources AGAIN. Describe how they were analyzed. Ummm I fucking READ them and THOUGHT ABOUT them. 

Limitations. Describe the weaknesses in your project. Like the overarching weakness of it being complete bullshittery? Identify areas that could not be improved. The whole thing NEEDS to be improved but I can't do that. 

Ethical Issues. How were ethical issues addressed and mitigated? I don't think they will be. I can't possibly do this without Chat GPT. 

There are pages more of separate sections like sections 2 and 3 of Implementation, Process Analysis, Data Analysis and many other superfluous sections to add more rigor for rigor's sake. But I want to stay on this ethics section. I am getting a very familiar feeling here that you may recognize from any of my most recent posts. NOWHERE in the course description did it tell me I'd be subjected to this Herculean task of a capstone course. I assumed, like most of the hundred or so students with whom I collaborated during the course, that we'd be writing standard theses. I feel pretty safe in saying that not a single one of my cohorts in this program would rather subject him or herself to such an academic abortion. But I don't think any of us knew what was in store for us. Has the past three years taking this course been yet another in a long list of SCAMS?

I'm sure getting that feeling. How bout you?

At any rate, if nobody notices this and they don't kick me out of the school, there IS a possibility of getting this damn thing done. I am pretty much decided (and this is what I meant by the first line of this post) to drop this fucking course yet again. But in the 8-10 weeks I have to wait till it is available again I can do all the research and data collection FOR REAL here where I'm working, I'll have to make it look like I haven't done it and keep it anonymous by (and I'm not making this up) creating a fake name for the school and the principal for the permission forms I need to fill out. At least the data will seem more authentic that way because it will be. 

I have written an email to my prof asking if my current situation and a curriculum adjustment plan on how to make things easier for international students studying in university in Korea and in English will be a viable project topic or not. If not, I officially give up. If she says it'll be okay then I'll need to conduct all this research while teaching the next semester here and implement my strategic accommodations and interventions, record them all, make charts and graphs, and write up this horrifically and unnecessarily complex academic study.

I'm kinda hoping they'll say that since my major is in secondary education and I'm in a university it won't qualify. Then I'll be done. I think, believe it or not, I'd feel better about that than actually having to go through this tribulation. It will certainly not have been a waste and I could write a good educational essay or two, or even a book, including what I've learned that is not sanctioned in any academic way. That would be FAR more satisfying to me!

You know what the crazy thing about this is? I didn't even come close to finishing. There are several more pages of hoops to jump through described in the Capstone Project Guide. 

Fuck it Dude. Let's go bowling.

The Normalization of Greed

 I did a post called Pedo Pumpkinhead that I thought might be a bit inflammatory so I just took it down. It was the post I worked on longer than any other in my blogging career and I decided to trash it anyway. This is a theme...

I've registered for classes again. After 4 semesters in a row of registering and dropping my FINAL class of the master's. Odds are looking better and better that this might happen again. Sept. 3 I'm due to start. If they are expecting the same things as last time I started this final course, I may have to drop it again. I originally thought that I would have ample time to study and work at the same time. I was told I'd be teaching 21 hours a week with a 14-student max. I planned on a lot of hours after class since this is IELTS teaching and that usually requires a lot of testing, marking, and grading. But things are not exactly the way I was told they'd be. I finished the first semester on the 18th of August after a long weekend of calculations that made me feel more like an accountant than a teacher. But I got 'er done! 31 students. It's too boring to even get into detail about how I had to convert band scores and test scores to percentages, weight them, calculate, then turn them into letter grades, but it was arduous! THEN I made report cards giving detailed advice on individual strengths and weaknesses for each student. AND we (Dima, Lawton, and I) were told to submit all of this BEFORE the last day! And this is not to mention meeting with the other two teachers, brainstorming ideas for next semester's curriculums, writing and submitting syllabi, meeting the new teachers online, or at least one of them, giving advice on what to expect because there really isn't an orientation package or anything like that, attending a formal grad party and meeting the other professors, and all of this just the week before.

What I'm saying is I'm busier than a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest. Busier than I had expected, and I expected to be pretty busy. Add to this a couple of other new additions to my duties - 9 hours of office availability per week and working and/or being available to work during semester breaks, I am beginning to question whether or not I WILL be able to work and study concurrently. I may need to drop the final course again. It has required a LOT more work and time than any course to this point in the program and I may have to drop it making the fifth time in a row, which could result in negating the 3 years of study I've put in. So I have THAT oscillating blade over my head getting closer every day.

On the brighter side, one of the reasons I had to get out of Canada, or more accurately TWO of the reasons were to get my dental and physical health taken care of. My 50,000 kilometer tune up that was about 250,000 kilometers overdue. My two-year+ stay in Canada trying to find work that would allow me to eat AND take care of that sort of thing also got trashed like my last blog post. 

I've been nursing a tooth with a hole in it for about a decade now making sure to brush with toothpaste right in the hole every day a couple of times. I'm talking a hole I can put a toothpick into .

 A dentist told me long ago that I should have it pulled but if I wanted I could keep it for maybe another year or even two. NObody expected it to stay in my skull for as long as it has! But it's getting pretty painful so I have an appointment in Seoul to get it yanked on Thursday. That's August 28th. In Seoul. That's 2.5-3 hours from Sokcho. So it's not a day trip for me. I'll need to get a room for the night and while that used to be cheap and simple, our world has decayed like my tooth during that decade so that it is a pain in the fucking ass now to get a room and it's triple the cost.

30 to 60 bucks I used to pay. This is usually a "love hotel" but the rooms were clean and I had private toilet, shower, and TV. Sometimes even a fridge or coffee or maybe a computer or a closet or a heart-shaped jacuzzi, or mirrors on the ceiling. Depended where I stayed, but there was plenty of selection. On the weekends the selection diminished so I'd end up staying at the Itaewon Motel, a dirty, mosquito ridden dive, but I could always find a room without the hassle of booking in advance. 

Nowadays, like just about everything else, middlemen have gotten involved and fucked things up. Now we need to book rooms in advance. Bookink.com, Tripp.com, Hotells.com, none of which I can type correctly or they will be auto-linked and I will get ads everywhere from them. Probably so will YOU if you read this. I looked through all kinds of postings on those sites before my trip to Seoul on the 20th. I can't count the number of times I found a decent deal (which is now 60 - 100 bucks), filled in all the information including card number, pressed purchase and was given a message like "Your card was rejected," or "This listing is no longer available." I double dog dare you to try to phone when this happens too. They have diabolically eliminated THAT option for most places. Sound familiar? I just went through this a coupla months ago when I was booking my flight to Korea. The worst thing is we don't have much of a choice if we have one at all. HOW THE FUCK DID THIS HAPPEN SO FAST?

I wouldn't even mind so much if these sites were honest. But what are the odds of that? "Slim, where ya'all headed?" "To catch up with None. I reckon I just saw him ridin' outta town." 

I'll give you a forinstance. Happened to me on the 19th. AFTER looking through all these scam sites and spending hours filling in personal information (that I KNOW they are sharing for money) I found a place on a website a lot of people over here in Korea say is pretty good. It's Pagoda dot com but without the P. They did to me what I just did to them - they took the pee outta me. 

After a few hours of frustration, even going to the websites of the places I wanted to stay, trying to cut out these greazy middlemen, and finding prices in the 100-dollar range, I found a place for 25 bucks. I looked for the warnings that all the other sites had saying "This is a bed in a 4-bed unisex room" or something like that. No warnings, no pictures of bunkbeds that all the hostel sites I'd looked at seemed to have. There WAS, however, a pic of a pretty decent looking single room. So I started the lengthy registration process once again. THIS time when I got to the "purchase" part it worked! EUREKA! I had just reserved a room for 25 bucks and it was close to all the places I was planning to visit in Seoul! All the hard work had paid off. I felt a sense of satisfaction that renewed my faith that maybe we're not ALL trying to screw each other. Then I got the email confirmation.

The email confirmation HAS the information that was missing in the FuckingAgoda.com listing. This is a bed in a 6-bed unisex room. First thing I did was go back to the ad on my phone. This scam site doesn't work on my computer. Probably some scumbaggery THERE too. So I check the ad super carefully and there it is: a pic of the bunkbeds. Oh the single room is still there, but one of the later pics in the ad - one you don't get to unless you click on the extra pics - was of bunkbeds that had curtains? I DID see it when I browsed the pics but thought it was laundry facilities and someone was washing sheets or curtains and this was a hanging rack. Curtains on bunkbeds? Never heard of that. I determined that if I ever got to this hostel, I was going to see if the bunkbeds ACTUALLY had curtains. 

I can't sleep in a 4-bed hostel room never mind a 6-bed hostel room. You might check a previous post from when I actually started my flight to Korea. I stayed in a 4-bed hostel in Vancouver. I forget what it cost me but over 100 bucks I think. I got practically no sleep. The few minutes I DID sleep I probably snored and kept the other guys from sleeping too. I wasn't about to do that again. So when I got to Seoul I went to the hospital and set up my every 3 months diabetes visits with a hospital I had done so with before, then went to the hostel to see if I could do anything about this scam. You see, Ag go da .com has customer service but when I complained they said I needed to include my email in the complaint. You know what's coming don't you? I did just what they asked me to and got a message saying "You're email is not valid." It was an AI so I called it names for a while to put it into compassion mode "I'm sorry you feel this way; I deeply apologize for any inconvenience; I can relate; I sympathize with your feelings; BUT if you want actual help I humbly request that you fuck off." I'm paraphrasing. I also got several banner ads, follow-up emails that helped even less, and plenty of interruptions in youtube vids with ads for A fucking goda .com to boot. 

Just for fun I applied for membership in one of the Ago fucking duh programs. They asked for my email THERE too. I put it in and they said, "Okay, great. That email checks out. Let's continue." Of course I told THAT AI too where it could continue to... Or it might have been a worker in Manila or Mumbai but I don't think so. It was much too efficient.

Anyway, I reached the hostel and told the owner Tony that he'd better check his ad on A god da .com because it's awfully misleading. He asked me what I meant and I told him. He said that shouldn't be. I said it was only this site. The others had the right information (AND, by the way, pictures of actual bunkbeds, not double-decker flying carpets or laundry racks). He seemed innocent. Probably not, but I put my hackles back down and asked, "Do you have single rooms like the pics in the ad?" He showed me the exact pic I had seen. The price? Yeah around 100 bucks like the ad on the actual website sans middleman. So I checked in.

I KNOW! I contributed to the demise of Western (or Eastern) civilization. Tony won't change the ad. It made him 100 bucks. The website's not gonna change it. They got THEIR cut too. I had just REWARDED the cheesy business practices I am currently railing on about! Why? Because I had a heavy backpack, it was about a million degrees in Seoul and my back and crack were as swampy as the Everglades. I needed a shower and a change of clothes before I went to Trivia with Amber and Krystle. And there you have it. We get browbeaten with inconveniences so that we surrender to the browbeaters to avoid further inconveniences. They've worn us all down to nubs. Nubs who settle for deception, sketch, and cheap chicanery. And I'm as guilty as the next guy. This makes me feel even WORSE! 

We often ask ourselves, "How did this happen?" "When did this happen?" Here's a sobering thought:

I followed Gretzky's career closely. Back while he was getting lambasted by many who were looking for a flaw in his greatness for making way too much money, I thought it was excessive too. I would have been happy for a million bucks back then to retire on for the rest of my life. Even less. This would be my high school and university years when I had plenty of life left. NOW I'd still be happy with a million bucks to retire on. Even less. I have fewer years left now though.

That illustration with Ago da .com is just one way all of this inflation has happened and has happened so quickly. 

Robert Reich

@RBReich

The clearest picture of corporate greed in this country is CEO-to-worker pay ratios. At the 100 lowest-paying major US companies, CEO pay averaged $17.2M in 2024. Median worker pay at these companies was just $35,570. That’s a ratio of 632 to 1. How can anyone defend this?

Just crunch those numbers. Do some thinking on this. Work it out in your brain. I figure things like if the worker has enough money to buy 2 or 3 new pairs of shoes a year, the CEO's think they should be able to buy 1,264 to 1,896 pairs. That's up to 3,792 new shoes in 1 year. 4-6 new shoes in a year sound reasonable to me. For many it's probably not enough. Anybody, even Imelda Marcos, care to defend 3,792 new shoes a year? Even Marcos only had 1000-3000 pairs of shoes and that was a lifetime of footwear obsession! NObody thinks Imelda Marcos was normal or even sane. But the average CEO is not only given credit for sanity, they are REVERED in our fucked up cultures! What has fucked our cultures up? The systematic normalization of greed.

You have to ask yourself how it has become normalized. What methodology has been employed? Just refer to the previous paragraph. Do you ever find yourself contemplating things like that? Probably not often, or at least not often enough to get pissed off and do anything about them. Hell, you're lucky to have enough time to read this blog post in which I have done the work FOR you. Why? Because you're married and/or have kids and you are too busy going apple-picking, to brunch, or to the Yarn Barn with your wives OR driving your kids to figure skating, going to parent/teacher conferences, or brushing, vacuuming, filling, and maintain healthy algae/chlorine levels in the pool. You ain't got time for researching the shit our owners don't want us to know!

Ever wonder why that conspiracy theorist uncle everybody has is like that? Cuz he's single. And those aren't silly conspiracies, (most of them) they're normalized greed that has conspiratorially been labeled "conspiracy" by co-conspirators who don't want you to know about their conspiracies! 

But you don't need to do research. Just look ANYwhere. Do you play any phone games or video games? Remember when a million was a MASSIVE score on them? Now even a billion is just okay. We all want MORE than a billion on our games, don't we? I have one. I spin on the Game of Thrones slot machine every day. It is a BRILLIANT illustration of what I'm talking about! I got up to almost 6 billion coins today! That's incredible, right? Then I spun a few more times.... aaaand they're gone. Didn't even last an hour. 6 BILLION coins didn't last an hour.

And the quotes in the slot machine are from the show. Especially Little Finger. Remember him talking to Sansa saying how funny it is that when we have goals or dreams and we work and fight for them then finally achieve them, we always want more? That's bullshit! I think the average person is happy (not to mention very lucky) to do that. It is absolutely NOT normal (or funny) to immediately want more. But our society teaches us that it IS.

"Chaos is a ladder." What a fucking scumbag! Chaos caused by greed that is. Cersei shouldn't have called off the guards she sicked on him to illustrate that knowledge isn't power, POWER is power. She should have let them slit his throat. If she weren't afflicted with the same mental sickness she would have. But she saw him as a way for HER to get more power which is the same as money. 

Only the ladder is real. The climb out of chaos is all there is. Everything else is just deception created by our owners. This speech is like a dog frothing at the mouth and attacking its owner. Rabies. It needs to be put down. Anyone who lives like this is sick. It's fitting that it follows a comment by Varys, "Who doesn't love to see their friends fail?" These could be the two most distasteful characters in a show absolutely lousy with vomitous villainy. Yet some LOVE these two! Our society does. And they're systematically teaching us to love this antisocial, (psychopathic?) chaotic philosophy too.

How have I stayed so immune other than remaining single and childless? It helps that I am not in an English speaking country and can't understand Korean I think so the propaganda all around me is mitigated by ignorance. Yet still I surrender to companies like Ago Da .com! I could easily see the owner of the site being a character like Little Finger or Varys. We can't surrender to this scum or everything we've worked hard at will just be trashed.

In closing, I will provide another quote that I think Vary said about Little Finger and it too is in my GOT slot game: "He would burn the world to the ground if he could be king of the ashes." These are the people causing chaos. These are the people normalizing greed. These are the people we promote to positions of power, wealth, prestige, honour, and leadership. We've got to give our heads a shake, wake up from our culturally enforced stupors and knock that shit off or we'll be living in a pile of ashes from whence no Phoenix shall rise.

Back in RO, Back in the RO, Back in the ROSK

 I'm back! In the Republic of South Korea. Or the R.O.S.K as nobody calls it. I'm watching my beloved Kia Tigers play while typing this. I have all my lessons planned and copying done for the week. Did all my laundry and shopping today too. Most importantly, all the paperwork and pencil-pushing powertrippin' hoop-jumping is done. So I'm here for the year. The first pic of the day is the best:

It's only temporary until the card comes, but it sure is beautiful isn't it? That's my alien registration card/paper. So I'm officially an alien once again. This will allow me to do some things like get an apartment, phone, cable, a bank account, you know... exist. I thought it was cause for celebration. My first Cass since coming back. I had such a bad cold I didn't have another one. Yes on day 2 of my latest tour of Korea I caught the requisite aircon cold. My second day kicked my ass and the third day was the field trip to the Korean Folk Village. It was about a million degrees and 101% humidity but I walked about 10,000 steps around the place trying to replicate some old photos from 1997. Here are two of them:

I don't know if you can tell how badly I wanted to drop to the ground and have about a 12-hour nappy-poo, but I was doggin' it big time! You know how the first days of a cold are when you just don't want to do anything? This was one of them. 

I got one of the girls to take this one. I wish I had taken HER pic. She looked really good in her hanbok. A few of the students wore Korean traditional clothes during the visit. I thought that was cool of them. 

This was one of my students even though the original was just a random Korean dude who jumped on the paddle like a Banshee. Whatever that means. 

It was okay to be in a bit of a lying position actually. If it weren't frowned upon I might have taken a nap on the whoopin' bench but, alas, whoopin' benches are for whoopins. 

This was with my friend Park Ki Pok. I wonder what he's up to these days...

And the overzealous volunteer paddler. I wonder what he's up to these days...

I also replicated a pic of me eating some of the hanging corn. One of my students took that pic and hasn't emailed it to me yet. There was one of me and Ki Pok in the jail too but I couldn't find the chairs inside the jail. That may have changed. Other than that the Folk Village was almost exactly the same. 

It hasn't been a really rough transition although the cold didn't help. It's almost gone as I type this. Only 3 really bad days. I think the moment it sunk in that I'm back in Korea was standing in the immigration line-up after the Hong Kong to Seoul leg of my flight. This is what I saw on the bag of the person in front of me:

BTS luggage tag. This was not a Korean either, we were in the foreigners line-up.

After getting through that line-up I met my good friends Amber and DB and Guns and Claire with Hyun Woo. It was great to see them all! 

We sorta had lunch together. I had 2 CORONA??? beers. That's all they had at the airport restaurant where we ate. We didn't have much time though. Everybody was working the next day including me and I didn't even know if I had a place to sleep that night. 

I tried to get a U+ phone at the airport but they said I needed to go to an official supplier if I wanted one that could make purchase verifications or some crap like that. Not sure I really DO want one like that but waited for another day. 

Amber and DB went home (they live in Incheon) and Guns drove me from Incheon to the Seoul Express Bus Terminal where I caught a bus to Sokcho. Sunday afternoon Seoul traffic. I coulda biked quicker I think. I was wired. No sleep for a day and a half. Poor Guns. I was just talking non stop and Claire and the boy were sawing logs in the back seat. Anyway, I made it to Sokcho where Lawton picked me up at the bus station and drove me to the campus. Lawton is one of the other teachers. 

I think I got to the dorms at around 7 PM and there was a bed with a plastic covered mattress and no pillow or blanket. The teacher I was going to replace, Don, gave me a pillow and blanket and I took the plastic off the mattress. The aircon wasn't working and it was hot and muggy. I would have slipped off the mattress otherwise. Next day Don sold/gave me some stuff and I'm better sorted sleep-wise. But even in the sweaty Korean Monsoon night I was able to sleep. I didn't come close to catching up on my sleep but I slept like a dead man. Next day I learned about the limited usage of the air conditioning.

First of all the 2-4 AM is bullshit. I tried. Noon while eating lunch is right. Also there's air available to cool off after showering around 6 or 7 in the morning. So the hours are off but still... come ON man! Luckily, one of the things Don sold me was a fan. It's getting a lot of use lemme tell you!

Other than that though the room in the dorm is excellent! Great big desk with LOADS of room. A full sized fridge. Wardrobe and dresser. A decent bed. I had to scoff a chair from the building I teach in but other than that I'm set up. I have a shower room. and toilet that are separate. Never seen that. I like it. Also have a sink in the bedroom. I'll make that into a cooking area soon enough. I'll get used to the limited air. Hey, this is for free.

What I may not get used to is the incarceration portion of the dorms. Every night the doors are locked. Can't get in or out if we tried. I don't think anyone can. If it's not some sort of illegal confinement or a violation of freedoms, it's definitely a fire hazard. This is the sort of shit that people cry, "We should have done something!" about AFTER they are shoveling up charred remains of the unfortunates who could have easily escaped the blaze but couldn't get out the mag locked doors or through the barred windows. 

This is temporary but might be long-term temporary lodging. 

Just warshed the bedding in the coin laundromat today. What a find that was! Dryers! 

Not a bad place to plan lessons from.

So that's where I am crashing now. It's clean, big, and pretty much free. The internet comes and goes but not bad. 

THIS, however, this is where the magic happens. The magic of taking mock tests and learning how to take those tests better. That's IELTS. It's not the most challenging of gigs. Loads of marking and photocopying so the workload is up there, but I don't get to be very creative very often. The first week was probably as close to my old teaching days as I'm likely to get for this year. But while I'm thinking about teaching literature to students who really want to learn I can look out my classroom window and see this:

Yup that's Sorak Mountain in the distance. 

Here it is from an intersection in town. Tantalizingly close! Oh sure I can walk to the beach in 15 minutes but I'm a mountain man. Beach SMEACH! The mountains are beautiful. And speaking of beautiful, the campus is nice like most here in Korea. It's great to live in the place with the highest concentration of greenery in town! The other day some of the students were shaking a tree right above the soccer field, which is right outside the dorm doors. I noticed some fruit falling. It was an apricot tree. I picked one up and ate it. Nice and sour!

This is the kind of stuff you see springing up around Sokcho these days. It's becoming a big resort beach town. It's hard to tell how big that building is from the pic. It's right off campus. Just down the road from the main gate. 

This is the main gate. Jong moon. You can see what looks like a church but is actually a library. 

This is what I am going to call Windmill Lake. It's just to the right of the blue security shack above as you exit the uni. It's a pretty popular place for students to contemplate their futures.

Here it is at night. I'm told there are fish in Windmill Lake. I bet there are some carp in there. Who know though, maybe a bass or two. It'll be a while before I try my luck I think. 

This is walking up the hill (of course) from the blue shack. The building on the right is where I teach. Behind the trees on the left out of sight is the kee sook sa (dorms) building. That's where I'm typing this now. You can see lots of flags and signs about global this and that as you walk up the hill. This is the global campus. It would be nice to have a wider variety like I did at Gongju Dae. All my students are from Bangladesh and Nepal but hope springs eternal. The goal is to get students from other parts of the world and make it a truly global enterprise.

Well, I think I'm going to catch the 11 PM air conditioning and then call it a night. The Tigers lost. Boohoo :-(

So it's nose to the grindstone for a year. Thanks to everyone who made this possible! This could be a pivotal year in my life. I'm feeling odd right now. What is this strange belly/brain combo? Might be positivity. I'll need more time to look into this...