First Hike of the Year

 Since early December the majority of my thoughts, efforts, writing, talking, texting, chatting, and stress have been about the whole work situation. Because it is not, as yet, resolved I STILL can't get into it in any detail here. 

Instead, I'll tell you about something I did today that was good. A few things. We'll start this year off on a bright note. I'll do what everybody says I should do: I'll say "Yay," though I walk through the valley of death. But I will fear no evil though I have no rod, staff, or shillelagh to comfort me. I shall hike and it may restoreth my soul. And lo (and high) I didst hike and it was good.  

I have been getting my steps every day since moving into my capsule abode, not just because I need to go out for food, but to keep my sugar down and my spirits up. I haven't hiked anywhere that would get me fresh air or allow me to commune with nature though. And, to be honest, no stairs, no grade, 6000 steps is a cinch. It hasn't really been challenging. Aside from getting me out of the hotel and giving me seen time instead of screen time, the walking has not done a world of good. I have seen a little bit of Incheon but a lot less than I'd like to because I've been so caught up in research, rules, and legalities. During one or two of my outings I noticed a little green on the GPS not far from where I am staying. Today after watching the US get knocked out of the World Jr. Hockey Tournament and watching the Canadian boys dispatch the Slovaks with aplomb, I decided to take a shower and then go for a better walk than usual. 

I almost walked right past it but found what was called Moonlight Park on Naver Maps. I know it 

doesn't look like much but that's what I wanted. I haven't hiked for a long time and it wasn't long before my body was screaming that at me. 

It was just a puny hill with some exercise equipment and I saw a few adults and a few kids playing on swings and exercising on equipment. It was pretty easy to tell that there was a path up one side of the hill that looped over to the other side and came back down again. The side I was on had stairs and as I am always saying, I said today with the whiniest tone I could get away with in public, "Stairs..." But luck was mine and there was a path right beside the stairs. I took that right up to the top. 

At the top I was confronted with my first choice of the day. If you had heard how I was wheezing, coughing, spitting, and sputtering all the way up the puny, little hill you might have suggested I turn around and go back down to the road where there is a hospital. St. Mary's Hospital I think it is. 

Truth be told I had expected to make it a lot farther before hitting the wall than a hill that had about 50 stairs. So although everything in my pudgy, soft, sedentary body was telling me to just pack it in before I cough up a lung or stroke out and die on a hill in Korea like so many of our fallen comrades, I pressed on. But this was no Heartbreak Ridge, this was no Pork Chop Hill, this was no Khe Sanh, Langdok, or Hill 364 where so many of Walter Sobchak's generation gave their lives to die face down in the muck, if this was skiing this wasn't even the bunny hill! I pressed on out of embarrassment not heroism. I chose not to loop back down and be done with it. I saw an opening in the fence and I went through it.

This was what awaited me. "Awwww stairs.... ;-(" I had to get to the top of these stairs without stopping because there was another hiker coming down and I didn't want his to see me stopping like a girl's blouse. I even held my breathing as much as I could as I passed acting like the hike wasn't destroying me like Anthony Joshua did to Jake Paul. My whole body was feeling like Jake Paul's jaw looked the next day. 

I almost felt like I was in prison or the military and I HAD to keep going or get KP or a longer sentence. Maybe it was the cheery barbed wire narrow enclosure. I dunno...

But eventually it DID open up and it started to look more like a hiking trail and less like a tour of Vietnam. 

Although Vietnam never gets this cold. Or has this type of foliage. Or Korean signage. Yeah, bad analogy. 

At any rate, if you notice, the hike leveled out too and I was able to catch my breath for the first time. This invigorated my aerobic ambitions and renewed my resolve. I kept plugging on.

It may sound like I'm well into this hike but I'm sure this was at like the thousand step point. I had a second decision to make. 

Although it has been a while I am an experienced hiker of the Korean hills and I pride myself on being able to follow the trail maps even if they don't have English and my Google Translate camera is not working.

Well, this map had no English and my Google Translate was not working. A lesser man might have turned around at this point being so close to where the hike had begun and almost (but not 100%) sure to find my way back the way I had come. 

But I read the word Byeongweon. That means hospital. It looked very much like I could keep going, get off the green where I was and onto the brown trail, go by the gazebo, then back onto the green trail and down to the hospital. That's pretty much where I started.

I soldiered on. The decision was not made lightly for you see there has seldom been a hiking trail, road, highway, track, subway tunnel, path, or any form of thoroughfare in Korea (in all of my experience) that ends up or comes out where you might expect it to. This could have meant for all the world that I was just making the half-way point farther away since I might have to just turn round and retrace my steps all the way back. Was I ready for that? Well, I actually felt like the worst was behind me. I had hit the wall, scaled it, and Humpty Dumptied down the other side without needing any of the King's men or horses to put me back together again. Nobody? Ever wonder what help the horses could have been putting a big egg back together? Just me? 

If you blow this pic WAAAY up you'll see a lady in full Korean hiking regalia like I described in a previous post. Even the guy in front of me had his fancy boots, pack, and titanium hiking stick. 

Another decision. Should I walk all the way up that graveyard hill or should I turn right where I think the hospital path is? Do I satisfy my curiosity or keep it simple? I bet I know what you think I did. But I was feeling the burn now. The rush of exercise that I hadn't felt since working out at the gym at the university I no longer work at. I also thought it might be a good view.

This was about half way up. It WAS, as it turned out, a good view. I can't tell you what those buildings are. I think the circular one is a coliseum where they take all the foreign workers who have disobeyed the Korean employers who ordered them to break Korean laws and make them fight lions, tigers, and ligers for the amusement of the ruling class. 

But I could be mistaken.

It was a 20% grade and I did it without stopping. Well except to take that picture above. But I wasn't breathing as hard as when I summited the bunny hill. So I was feeling proud. 

When I got to the top, this is what I saw. More graves. I don't know what I was expecting. 

Beyond the path continued and there were even more graves, but I looked back down the hill and saw something that made me turn around and go back down.

By golly it was the Gazebo!

20% downhill? It's a lot easier than 20% uphill.

So in no time I had reached the gazebo. 

Here's where I had to make another choice. Should I use some of the exercise equipment here and make this a full body workout?

There was bench press, curls, twists, sit-ups, pull-ups, flies, and of all things...

Yeah! This machine gives you all the exercise of hiking up a mountain without actually hiking up a mountain although you need to hike up an actual mountain to get that even better than the real thing feeling of the machine that makes you feel just like you are hiking up a mountain. 

It reminded me of those people who go to concerts and film the whole things on their phones looking at the phone screen version of the real thing they are capturing electronically. 

Maybe I should have just watched a few episodes of Hiking With Kevin Nealon. 

I left the gazebo area and immediately found another decision pole with three arrows on it, one of which had the word byengweon on it. I followed that trail.

It got thin and woody. Nobody else was on this trail. I started thinking that maybe this was a different hospital. Maybe it wasn't St. Mary's just down the road from my capsule hotel. Maybe I'd have to just turn around and go back.

Oh well, at least I was going downhill. 

This empty lot is where the trail came out. It was completely surrounded with fence. There were some signs in red that I couldn't understand and STILL Google Translate camera refused to translate for me. 

Luckily I found a hole in the fence and went out to the street.

This was the street. I just walked a little bit along this street and suddenly I saw the byeongweon. It was an angle I hadn't seen St. Mary from before but I was pretty sure it was her.

Before long I got to the main crossroad and saw an E-mart 24. It was the E-mart 24 at the end of my road! The one that's not open 24 hours but never mind. I had come off the mountain ON MY ROAD!

This NEVER happens! And I looked at my step count. Just below 7000. Pefectamundo!

So you can bet I'll be doing that hike again! 

The cherry on top was that I realized I had skipped lunch and I had been craving a sub with some soup for a while. There was a Subway right on the corner. I'd never noticed it before. 

But before I get too excited I noticed while buying my Italian cold cut combo that my alien card was missing from my wallet. I didn't panic because all my cards were there and so was the cash. Nobody would steal a person's alien card. I mean, unless they're lucky enough to look exactly like me.

I then remembered I had been to the pension office in Incheon the day before and the guy had kept my passport, bank book, and alien card. I had to ask him for them back just before leaving. I must have only got my passport and bank book back. So now I have to go back to that office on Monday. That's the kind of hiking I've been doing lately. It's not as healthy.

Hopefully they still have my card there. If not I could be in trouble. 

Tuesday I have a meeting in Gangneung during which I just might need that card. I have no doubt it will lead to some really great content for this blog too. 

Whether or not I'll be able to publish it remains to be seen...

As always, wish me luck.

Conspiracy and Contrivance

"Where tyranny becomes law rebellion becomes duty." Thomas Jefferson

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Adam Smith

"The rich man's primary dilemma is how to extract money from those who have none." Dave MacCannell

You can quote me on that. 

You've seen the sentiment of Jefferson in the pages and posts of this blog before and you've seen that quote by Adam Smith. I think it's one of my favourites because of the delicious irony of the "Father of Capitalism" laying down the all time best burn on capitalism! This post will be about one tiny part of capitalism.

Capitalism is an unsustainable cycle and the end of the cycle will be marked by rebellion because those in charge of trying to sustain the unsustainable must revert to tyranny. The sign that we are approaching the end, and that very tyranny is when the rich have impoverished the poor to such a state that they now have to devise tyrannical ways to extract money from those who have none. This sounds like an impossibility but, credit where credit's due, wealth is a great motivator and from greed have ingenious enterprises arisen. In short, the rich have figured out how to get money from people who have none: give them the (false) hope of getting some. If that's not tyranny, what the hell is?

I have used this example before on this blog but it was an eye-opener to be sure! In China there are great hoards of people, sometimes euphemistically labelled "migrant workers," who go from job to job hoping that they will eventually find one that pays. They work a month for a company, (and in China this is rarely a month worth of 9-5) hope that at the end of the month there will be pay, but if not they move on and try again. They don't have legal recourse, nor the time to pursue it. They go from one exploitative employer to another, many dying during the process. This is China's major contribution to the "global economy" and don't kid yourself, we all take advantage of it. In fact most countries have imported the idea. I worked for a company called Hwasheng in China and every month they hired a different girl to help me with visa issues, translation, and general settling into China. Not one of these girls were paid. At the end of the month the old girl would leave and a new girl would arrive. The most curious part about it was that none of them ever seemed that upset or rebellious. Maybe, like Korea, the younger generation in China has been trained well not to stand up for themselves to delay the end of the Chinese iteration of capitalism, but it'll happen. 

Lotteries, scams, cons, politics, dreams, myths, rags-to-riches stories, Disney movies, they are all designed to give the destitute hope of rising out of poverty and maybe even becoming rich someday. But there are pithy aphorisms that keep the poor in their place. The rich invest most of their money and spend the rest. The poor spend all of their money and invest the rest. Or, the rich buy assets while the poor buy liabilities they think are assets. In truly capitalist countries the worlds of the rich and poor are so far removed from each other as to prohibit even a rudimentary understanding of the other. I've just used the word "invest" but wouldn't have the slightest idea how to go about doing it and the vast majority of the really really good investment opportunities wouldn't even be open to my broke ass. 

I'm no expert on most of these scams and schemes but I'll tell you one in which I am experienced and becoming more and more privy to the diabolical inner mechanics of: education. What is education if not the dream of improving ones station in life through learning? Nobody goes to university just to get smart. They go expecting to obtain knowledge and skills that can make them money. Who clings to education as hope for the future more than the poor? And who but the downright despicable exploit this hope?

Imagine if you will a school... Well, not exactly a school. In fact not in any tangible way is it a school by educational standards. In fact, let's start again...

Imagine there's a wedding or some such social occasion. By pure chance this wedding is attended by some highly unscrupulous people who have somehow lucked into positions of wealth and power. They might be inheritance wealth, flim flam or mafia wealth, it doesn't much matter. They engage in what Adam Smith calls that seldom encountered diversionary conversation with each other. As dependable as the natural phenomena that make the world go round, the conversation between businessmen swings around to contrivance and conspiracy. They want to do the unthinkable: they want to hijack the good names of others to untarnish their own. They want to do something so unprincipled that the public will believe they are principled. They want to build a lucrative business by cheating people, but they want that business to appear as something honourable. They want to get rich and become reputable at the same time. One of the wedding guests suggests they become "educators." It was so successful after the Korean war when Korea was a poor country and the citizens of Korea wanted to rise out of poverty that they shouldn't have too much trouble selling the idea to some other poor countries like, for instance, Bangladesh or Nepal. The sweetest part of the deal is (thank you China) there are lots of businesses in Korea who don't want to pay the wages that privilege has caused Koreans to expect. Why not get these students jobs too? Restrictions on international students working while studying have eased significantly due to some tenacious lobbying by fellow businessmen. These kids are so broke and 5 thousand won and hour looks like so much money to them, they'll jump at midnight shifts gutting fish or waiting tables for abusive bosses who pay way less than minimum wage. And by being such a valuable source of cheap labour in the community, business irregularities might be overlooked by regulators if, say a law or two might be fractured. 

"What kind of laws one might ask? Well first of all we will need to attract good, reputable teachers in order to look legit, so we'll offer them a contract of 20 hours a week. A lot of universities allow teachers to get away with working this little or even fewer hours but not our 'school.' We'll add more hours to the teachers' duties once they are trapped in the country and have signed contracts for a full year. We'll give them abstractions like on-call hours and nebulous rules like give every student as much counselling as they require and we won't clarify anything - certainly not in the contracts - but we'll create an atmosphere of militaristic unquestioned authority and cultivate fear and intimidation by giving public official warnings for violations of these ambiguous rules. OUR teachers will work Korean hours, not the lazy hours foreign professors enjoy, and we'll even include a clause in the contract that says we won't pay them for these hours whether they exceed 40 a week or not."

"But isn't that illegal?" 

"They signed the contracts agreeing to it. And besides, with all the low cost labour we bring, who's going to split legal hairs here?" 

"BRILLIANT! But what if one of the teachers challenges the rules or even the laws?"

"We'll fire them. For a foreigner the legal recourse is so convoluted and even the government agencies to contact are so bogged down with purposely complex rules and regulations, most of which are difficult or impossible to find in English, that only a friggin' idiot would challenge us. Besides, we pay so little that they'd run out of money before they could complete that challenge. Why, we won't even have to pay the legal one month of pay in lieu of notice. It'll take more than a month for the teacher to get the government to do anything and that's only if the teacher can figure out how to do that."

"I don't usually say this but I'm kinda glad I came to this social event! Screw the teachers, screw the students, and screw the law, we're gonna make a pile of money outta this!" And a round of cigar smoking, pretentions drink drinking, and self-congratulatory back slapping ensues. 

Bent on Walking Straight Lines

 Not too long ago while coming home from Quiz night in Songtan I heard a girl who was descending one of the requisite calisthenically yo-yoing staircases in most transfers between Seoul subway stations trying to conceal her sobs and it caught my attention. Before we get to the girl, I recently read that Koreans walk 10,000 steps a day

and found in the description the partially satisfying explanation of why. The explanation included walking aps and hiking popularity in Korea but the real reason I vibed with was BMW. Bus, metro, walk. I had to put my own comment on the Facebook post, which has since gotten a few likes, that said something like go anywhere in Seoul by subway and if you have two or more transfers - there's yer 10 grand. And although there are escalators and even the moving sidewalks in many of these pilgrimages between subway lines, they are often under repair or just turned off. In a country so image-conscious I don't think it's a stretch to say that the subway lines are purposely made to involve superfluous stepping and when the average weight of Koreans rises above a certain level, ambulant assistance devices are "repaired" or turned off and worse still in summer the air conditioning on trains is turned down. Paranoid Uncle Dave again? Maybe... but if it's not already the plan, if someone shows this post to Lee Jae Myung, it might soon be. Transfers between subway lines will be lengthened and maybe scattered along them will be fitness stops like on the hiking trails with pull-up bars, sit-up benches, and other exercise equipment. Koreans will start a fad (and buckle up Adidas/Nike/Reebok/Puma/Under Armour and Lulu friggin' Lemon, you're about to get Korean fadded!) and transit takers of all sorts will get decked out to the nines in their fitness attire. Speaking of the Korean hiking popularity... they are something to see! 

There is no gadget, or accessory that the avid Korean hiker won't buy, for double its worth, just in case they might need it on their next hike. I've been on 2K fun walks in the park and seen ajummas and ajoshis like the ones pictured with their backpack radios playing bongjak music and their tin cups tinkling while carabinered to their Everest-worthy packs along with other supplies or the latest Labubu. They don't go halfway. So get ready Korea for subway sweatin' to the oldies. Leotards, pony tails, spandex, headbands, and leg warmers that'll make Seoul Station look like a 1980's Bally Total Fitness. 

And I'll get no credit. The person who read this will claim it as his/her own patriotic idea, be paid millions to become minister of fitness in the country, and Korea will show the world how they cleverly keep their citizens slim and trim. It wouldn't be the first time I've made other people rich...

But back to the girl. I tried not to let her notice I noticed. It's something I see more frequently than I'd like and being pretty close to the very real suffering adolescents go through in Korea, I have a soft spot for them. Most countries start piling on the pressure for PISA tests when the kids are around 14. Here they are trophies to be compared to others by competitive parents their whole lives. Trophies to be shown off, or failures. Overworked and underplayed was the very first impression I got of the kids in this country and it's the same in Japan and China. Everything is better when you run it like a business, right? So how 'bout raising kids that way? Spend, even OVERspend, but only if the shareholders get good ROI and always stay ahead of the competition. 

Of course there was no way I could have known that this was what the girl was crying about even though the dreaded Suneungs had just taken place and this year's were exceptionally evil! The suneungs are the college entrance exams, an 8-hour test that basically decides if you were worth giving birth to and if you should bother to try to succeed any more. EJU's in Japan, Gaokao in China. Suicide statistics are hidden all over Asia so as not to have these educational abscesses excised like they should be. And if you think you've seen cheating... like the hyper-capitalist system that inspired them, these "standardized" tests are LOUSY with cheating. And why not when the exams are the epitome of difficulty for difficulty's sake? And, of course, it's always the kids of the wealthy who can afford instruction not in getting smarter, but in how to BEAT these diabolic exams that have an unfair advantage. The English part of this year's suneung is a good example:

If you watch the above video, read the comments. I read one from a Korean guy that said this test just made the multi-billion dollar after-school industry sometimes called the "shadow" education of Asia, a lot more money. 

As Fate would have it, I stopped on the subway platform right in front of a bench and waited by the doors. The crying girl sat on the bench and I heard her sobbing, sniffing, and tapping away on her cellphone. Then I got on the train and she sat directly across from me. Now I could SEE her face. Her face was not pretty by Korean or any standards but she reminded me of many students I had had in Korea who were not the beauties this society provides with so many advantages. This made me empathize even more thinking of the bullying some of my favourite female students had to put up with from the popular kids and wondering if this wasn't part of her sorrow. She convulsed with a fresh sob and I saw impossibly large and lava-like tears slide down her cheeks before she covered her shame with her hoodie hood and fought back the next round of convulsions. I sincerely wanted to sit beside her and squeeze her with an avuncular arm softly consoling her with wise placation spoken in Korean but language deficiency and social mores about "creepiness" prevented me. 

She got off the train before I did. I will never know what caused her heart to break that day and she will never know I even cared. Neither sat right with me. For the rest of the night and even in my dreams that night I questioned whether I was right to do nothing. I questioned whether society should put so much pressure on such young kids. I questioned whether we should really call ourselves "civilized" when we have created such a fear of UNcommon sexual deviance that it precludes common courtesy and compassion. I thought of parallel stories I could write in which I just gave her a silent hug and she went on to a happy life or I did nothing and she lost all hope and spiraled into depression. I also thought of how I would never know if she would live a happy life or not. Worst of all I wondered if she might become one of the hidden suicide statistics of Asia. 

Just yesterday I found myself walking down a narrow Korean sidewalk in the anodyne, give little offense, stranger in a strange land being a good ambassador style that I have found necessary in streets, grocery aisles, subway stations, hiking trails, bike paths, roads, pretty much anywhere Koreans move themselves from place to place. It's a constant source of annoyance and it has graced the pages and posts of my railings before that Korean people, and to be fair, most people in Asia, seem bent on walking in straight lines. (self chuckle) Bent on walking straight lines. That is just subtly contradictory enough to be a book title or a sweeping statement that could be used to sum up a large group of people like the kind George Carlin described when he said, 

An old couple, one that might don untold fortunes worth of hiking paraphernalia to go for a hike and see the colours on one of the mountains of Korea on a fall weekend were walking a trifle straight-linedly toward me. As is my still unabashed proclivity, I got out of their way. Now, the sidewalk was not even wide enough for two but they did not abandon fully abreast formation as they advanced on my position. I could see no sign of that changing. So I did not just move over on the sidewalk, I had to move over to where the telephone and lamp posts were and actually put one foot off the curb and onto the street that was bumper-to-bumper with automobiles. As I did so out of fantastically unacknowledged courtesy my shoulder bumped against a lamppost. On the lamppost was a sign that had been hung with a metal clamp and the clamp was tightened with one screw. The screw held the two razor sharp sides of the clamp together. It was a cold day and I had on my newly purchased winter jacket the left shoulder of which now has a gash that will either have to be sewn or will get larger and larger until the jacket needs to be thrown out.  

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.