OSU-PNU 2006

after school today, we went to dinner with some of the other foreign teachers from pnu who teach English, some who have been here for 12 years. we went to a pizza place near the campus and ordered four different kinds of pizzas, two cheese, one mushroom and a supreme. the pizza was good. what's interesting here is that even with Western food (e.g., pizza, spaghetti), side dishes are served. with the spaghetti i had at the english chatting cafe earlier in the week, sweet pickles were served. with the pizza, sweet pickles and pickled jalepenos were served. at first, i wasn't quite sure about how complementary these would be, but surprisingly, it's a nice mix. after all the drama from this past week, it was nice to get together with them and gain some perspective on our experience. they were also very interested in how things were going for us, as they had quite a bit of say in choosing osu to be the partner school; however, they didn't seem to be a bit surprised when we told them of some of the situations we've encountered along the way, both before and after we arrived. the teachers were a great resource of info and were happy to share about their various experiences in korea. what i found interesting were the stories they told about having to sometimes teach courses on the fly and the emphasis that's placed on appearance rather than substance. all of them had a story about being thrown into a teaching situation with little preparation and few to no materials. i vaguely remember stories similar to this when i was living and teaching at a hagwon in seoul, but i guess after being back in the u.s. educational system for the past 9 years (one year i was teaching in germany), i find the lack of emphasis on substance to be disturbing. what's the point then of investing in your teaching if the substance doesn't matter? the teachers actually found our response to these aspects of teaching in korea to be refreshing. after dinner, we walked through a shopping district to the o2 building. along the way, we discovered a jogging path that runs along some water and a cafe which looks like a good place to work on my dissertation, which i've managed to work on despite all the other work i've had with teaching.
(this past week i didn't get as much done on it as i hoped. lisya and i decided to collaborate on a proposal for aera, which was due on tuesday, so that took some time at the beginning of the week. the focus of our dissertations is academic literacies, just with different populations, so we thought that this would make for an interesting conference presentation. that's more or less why we decided to collaborate on this. it was great fun working with her on this because we're on the same page in regards to the topic and we work well together. she's the first one classmate from our department i've collaborated with outside of course projects.)
we were hoping to catch pirates, mostly to sit and drool over johnny depp, at least for lisya and myself. i really don't think stuart (or charm) were interested in drooling over johnny ------ (hey, clint! "mr. pasty doesn't seem to look too pasty to me in these shots!!!!!! ;) i think lisya agrees with me on this.) We missed the 7:00 showing, so we hopped on the subway and headed toward one of the major shopping districtis in pusan, seomyeon, in the hopes of catching it at the theater there, but the only showing was 12:30am, so we headed back to the pnu district to a place called camel, "a basement bar". we were there a couple hours and then decided to head back home only to find out in an e-mail that dr. kim lost her position today. after receiving the negative feedback from the secret course evaluations, we e-mailed her requesting to meet with her at lunchtime today to discuss this. however, we received no response from her. we learned from the teachers at dinner tonight that in the korean culture, superiors do not respond to requests like this because it goes against the confuscian based hierarchical structures at place in the society. in other words, she can arrange a meeting with us, but we can't arrange a meeting with her. how frustrating! on top of that, the correspondence we did receive from her was a e-mail message telling us she had lost her post and that we would need to report to the dean now. she didn't really give much explanation for this, but it seemed like it came as a shock to her as well as others in the deparment. the teachers did tell us at dinner that the administration at most universities in korea is transitory. administrators hold their positions for what seems to be a short time compared to in the states, and new administrators typically bring their staff with them, which causes others to lose their jobs. the dean, dr. cho, who we're now reporting to, is new as of july 1, so i wonder if this sudden change came about because of his new post or if there was something else in the history between him and dr. kim that caused her to lose her job. needless to write, for another day this week, we were shocked. the question in our minds was what does this mean for the program. thankfully dr. h will arrive on sunday night; we'll meet him on monday to talk about all that has happened this week and try and figure out what's going to happen to the future of our program. we really hope that the program will continue, but right now there are so many questions in our minds that we have no idea what's going to happen. hopefully tomorrow will be a drama free day.