Last week, I went to Icheon to teach at an English Camp for a week. It was the first time I ever taught at a camp, but I truly enjoyed teaching at Unesco's Icheon Global Peace Village. It is a very impressively modern camp with new facilities. Everything coincided with Unesco's message of environmentalism and world peace. Here you can see a student posing over shoes that the students had decorated. All of these shoes will go to Cambodia and they will be given to kids that need them. The kids also got to take a day trip to the Natural History Museum in Daehangno. Here you can see a student with a wax hand mold. I taught Panel Art as part of the extra curricular activity. The kids decided to draw panels of Korean food to help the promotion of the food around the world. Here is a student's idea of what Dukkbokki looks like. Here is my homeroom class: Team Horse. Our Team's Motto was: Horses are Fast! Horses are Strong! Horses are Smart! Yippee Ka-yo! Dan

Listeners, I’m not sure if you know this, but I haven’t always been an MC in Korea. Like many foreigners that come to Korea, my first job in Korea was working at a hagwon. I came to Korea totally naïve and I just thought to myself, “This is going to be easy; I’ll just think of it as playing with kids.” And like many I thought, “I can speak English, therefore I can teach English.” Boy was I wrong. Jennifer gave us many insights into teaching and I want to expound a bit more on teaching in Korea. Let’s start off with some tips. Tip number 1: You are the teacher in the classroom. You are the boss. You are not a friend. Roles should be distinctly established in the classroom- especially when you are working with younger kids. If you go into a classroom and try to be too friendly or too fun, kids will not take the class seriously. If you are working at a hagwon, your boss has convinced the parents that you will teach their children. Tip number 2: You need to be aware of the parent...

In my writing class the students were supposed to brainstorm about disturbing trends in Korea and I said that Black Bean Tea was a disturbing trend. Then I went on to expound on the ghastliness of corn tea (it tastes like soggy popcorn!) and that this will lead Korea to make teas from everything: from flower teas, bundaeggi tea, water tea, book-tea, and even pen-tea. The last one was a mistake. My class exploded with laughter and I was left red faced. Dan

I'm going to get my students to rewrite their 2nd drafts because they don't really improve their first beyond superficial grammatical fixes. I'm going to also have them rewrite another student's paper in order to make it even more collaborative.

Here's an article that I wrote for a magazine. MacGyvering a Lesson It's Sunday night. You are staring up at the ceiling realizing that tomorrow you are going to be the shepherd of howling hooligans yelling "Teacher GAME!" and it fills you with dread. These days Simon says, "Jaemi-oppso," the students have already stolen all the monopoly money, and you've lynched the entire populous of stick figures. You think back to your first day of hagwon hell, after you just flew into the country, and felt the shock of being in the sweltering, cramp armpit of Korea. It was an exciting time, remember? Then, jet-lagged and not even unpacked, your kind director took you into a classroom and said, "Teach" as if he was animating clay to life. You got through the first couple months on charm, wit, and the games you used to play as a kid, but now...; you are out of ideas and numb from the screams and cries of kids suffering from EAS (English ...

Analyze your dreams! I am teaching symbolic analysis this term at my hagwon. Here's a list of different symbols that could be related to dreams. I feel that if I can teach kids the concept of symbols then they'll be able to make their own connections. I'm also going to be showing Cool Hand Luke and analyze the symbols in that movie. Dan 1. Animals represent habits. Animals function from instinct, reacting to pleasure or pain. Having differing degrees of memory and the ability for attention, animals lack the evolutionary development including sufficient brain capacity needed for imagination. Most animals in a dream will represent the dreamer's habits. 1. Baby is a new idea. A child is the result of uniting of a male and female. In the language of mind this represents the cooperative use of the aggressive and receptive principles to create something new. 3. Clothes signify how the dreamer is expressing Self. Clothes indicate the part of the Self others view. Many cultur...

Jack Palance was one of the great movie heavies of the 1950s, when he was often cast as a sinister villain in film noirs, westerns and melodramas. His impressive debut in 1950's Panic in the Streets was followed by Oscar-nominated performances as menacing baddies in Sudden Fear (1952, starring Joan Crawford) and Shane (1953, starring Alan Ladd). He played a has-been boxer in television's Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956) and won an Emmy, but in the 1960s and '70s he made mostly forgettable movies in the U.S. and around the world. His faded career was resurrected in 1989 when he played a mean crime king in Tim Burton's Batman, and his turn as the comically creepy trail boss in City Slickers (1991, co-starring Billy Crystal) earned him an Oscar as best supporting actor. While accepting the prize he showed the crowd his youthful vigor by dropping to the stage to perform one-handed pushups, and the wacky moment became his public signature. He also appeared in the 1994 sequel...

boll weevil n. 1. A small, grayish, long-snouted beetle (Anthonomus grandis) of Mexico and the southern United States, having adults that puncture cotton buds and larvae that hatch in and damage cotton bolls. 2. Informal. A conservative white Southern Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

"The people called her Our Lady of Chains. They called that not bcause she wore chains..." "Not because she wore chains," the Daughters chanted. "They called her Our Lady of Chains because she broke them."

Why is May singing Oh-Susanna. It's an awful racist song. hmmm... It must have some symbolic significance.

Here are some interesting resources i found Here's a dictionary on Bokonism http://cns2.uni.edu/~wallingf/personal/bokonon.html

I wonder if I could work Arm wrestling into a punishment for not doing homework...hmmm...

I'm researching and developing material for Cat's Cradle and A Secret Life of Bees for my middle school students at my job. It's going to be a lot of fun. I wonder how the students will react to Vonnegut. Alrighty, back to work. Dan

The disdainment of the master is a prerequisite for Sithhood. We have to stymie President Bush from fooling the world by saying the pretexts of the Iraq war. We should stop him from making monkeyish claims! Becoming a herpetologist was not easy at all. He had to endure lots of red bumps on his body. (a herpetologist studies reptiles^^)

I thought my Korean students and others who might have read the book and seen the Korean movie would enjoy this. "I thought it might be funny to point out the similarities of the two characters: they both like to eat a lot, they are composed out of fish, they were both created out from the reckless actions of white men, and they both imply their return." Dan

"Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers-not the defined."

I thought you might get a kick out of this. Part of my job is to research and make questions. Here's one that I had to share with you ;) It's from Nelson Mandela's A Long Walk to Freedom. 3. Why did Mandela feel ashamed after the "ingcibi" cut off his foreskin? A. Because he thought he didn't yell out "Ndiyindoda" quickly enough; he felt he wasn't as brave or as strong as the other boys.

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif Here are some resources I've found for Beloved by Toni Morrison: Did you want to know what a "pateroller" was? Look here: http://pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmBeloved65.asp This sight has a whole list of definitions that Morrison uses. And here I really like these questions. This one has several different links: This website is good too. I like the last one because it seems to be more indepth than Sparknotes.

"If a Negro got legs he ought to us them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up."

This has been a question I've been pondering for the last couple days and I've come to a conclusion: if it is approached with maturity; it is. I think the Korean students can relate, especially since Korea has suffered so many hardships in their history i.e. Japan, China, US etc. The people have suffered and the country as suffered and I think this is what gives Korea its strength: its perserverance and strength. Morrison's book is also filled with an unspent rage and I feel there is a bit of that in Korea and I feel they have a strong case for it. This rage is the fruition of competition, class disparity, and the obvious corruption in society. In class last night, one of my students told me that he questioned his teacher about one of his test questions that was marked wrong. The student felt the question was misworded and his peers in the class felt similary, but were too scared to bring it to the teacher's attention. For this student's efforts, he was beraid...