not dead yet
I'm still alive here but without any real stories to post. Mostly, I have been editing. The linguistic dissertation I have been editing (don't get excited, it is not mine) is more or less done. I am currently doing a "style edit" to prepare it for final submission. For those of you interested in this sort of thing, it is a study of the strategic exploitation of honorifics in intuitional interactions in the Korean language (with a focus on address/reference forms, requests, and openings and closings.) There is a lot of discussion of politeness, face and discernment. And now you understand why I have not written anything very interesting.
Classes started about a month ago. Instead of level testing, Andong organizes by major, so in most of my classes everyone is studing the same thing. This means that all the teachers talk about their "biology class", or their "administration class." At first I thought this was a poor way of doing it but it actually works quite well. Most of the time the levels of the students are remarkable similar, and yet in the low level classes there is usually one student who understands well enough to explain to the students who cannot understand anything what is happening. Unfortunately, this semester I have three engineering classes (metallurgy, mechanical, and computer.) These classes are notorious for being the lowest level and for having no motivation. For me, the fact that the classes are also amost entirely all boys (each class has a single, solitary, girl) is also disappointing. I don’t mind all-girl classes, but there is something about an all-boys class that I just don’t like; part of it might be that it just seems harder for me to connect to them. Most of my time in university was spent shaving my legs (I raced bikes) and hanging out with lesbians (yes, you genhawk) and gay men, so I really have trouble relating to university boys. The sad thing is that if I were gay myself, it would probably be worse.
In semesters past, I have always had a class that was a pretty high level, and though I am teaching an advanced class that is comprised of older students that have chosen to take the class (compared to the rest of my students for whom it is mandated) it is still sometimes frustrating to have classes all day with students who have trouble combining a noun and a verb. The upside is that I don’t really have to dumb-down or smart-up my lessons to match the level of the lesson to the level of the class.
And now I have run out of things to say and I have not really said anything substantial, just wrote about the minutia of my life. *sigh*