What the...?

I've been following the Korean Professional Volleyball league all season with great interest (and, no, Poop, not just because the women are hot). Last weekend, the best-of-5 championship round started. Saturday, the two underdog teams won (Hyundae Capital Skywalkers - men; Hyundae Construction Foxes - women), which was kind of cool. Sunday, the Skywalkers won again and the Foxes stunk up the gym (if it's possible for a bunch of women to stink up a place). All throughout the Sunday matches, they had the times for Wednesday's matches at the top of the screen. The women's match was to be at 6:30PM and the men's match at 9PM. So, I rushed home to catch the games, arrived at 6:45, turned on the TV, and.....caught the last 5 points of the men's FINAL championship game. . The men's game must have started around 5:30.

The match went 5 games and the final game ended up 15-12 for the Skywalkers. It was probably a great match. I'm sure that it will be on the TV tomorrow morning but it's not the same watching a game when you know the score already.

I thought that it was cool that trash-talking Alejandro's team on the men's side lost. What was that you said at the beginning of the season, Alejandro? "Rooney's nothing special." Ha, he must have really studied the game tapes because he had you blocked almost every time. Just as a side note, while Alejandro was the league's dominant spiker all season, he can't serve to save his life. He's kind of the Shaquille O'Neal of volleyball.

Who plays a professional championship match at 5:30 on a Wednesday? People are working. Who changed the time? Some bigwig who wanted to make sure that he had time to go out drinking after the game? I'd like to say that I was surprised but I'm not really. Last Sunday's matches didn't start at the times they were supposed to either.

How can a professional sports league expect good fan support if they can't get the schedules straight?

I have really enjoy watching the games, and I hope that next season will be even better. I hope that the interest that was shown this season will allow the league to expand from 6 men's teams and 5 women's teams. I really want to support the league. I hope that they get the kinks worked out, but, at this time, it's not really very professional.

I hope my favorite women's team, Hyundae, win, although that's not very likely. I realize that I'm being petty, but I still haven't been able to get over the fact that the coach of the strongest team on the women's side, Heung Kuk, was suspended for two games and he sat in the stands during both matches signalling his assistants. He might be a nice guy, but I just wish he would lose. Besides Hyundae have the nicest uniforms in the league - maroon.

The Korean...Japanese...Wave

When the world is riding the Korean wave, Korea seems happy.

Fuji TV Producing Special on Korean Wave Star
Japan’s First Lady-to-Be an Avid Korean Wave Fan
Asian English paper editors gather in Seoul
K-pop makes another leap forward
South Korea adds culture to its export power
A rising Korean wave: If Seoul sells it, China craves it

But wait...

Fresh Japanese Wave Threatens Korean Pop Culture

Some experts fear that enthusiasm for Japanese pop culture is headed for a renewed domination of Korea.

It must be a slow day at the newsdesk.

A new job?

I've been thinking of a new job recently - perhaps even a different field. I have to say that I was inspired by this headline: Harlequin books seeks "real men" for covers". I'm a real man. Ask my friends (and, as soon as they stop laughing, they'll tell you it's true).

The picture accompanying the ad was a little disheartening.








But, when I read the article, I thought that perhaps I could do this.

"We're looking for some guys that are not your usual models, but have that iconic look that women go for -- sexy, sensitive, beautiful and fit," said Harlequin spokeswoman Marleah Stout, who attended the open casting.

"We want real men ... exactly what you think in your mind when you're fantasizing or imagining that ideal man." [Every morning on the subway, I can tell that the women are fantasizing - I'm sure.]

...

"A lot of the models were too young, men in their twenties ... and our audience likes men a little bit older, a bit bigger, than the runway models." [Hey, that's me.]

CDN$250/hour is a lot more than I can make tutoring. I just need to cut out the cheese burgers and beer for a couple of weeks. I'm sure I can wittle my keg down to a six-pack.

"From what I understand, (Harlequin) readers are women who want to escape from the relationship that they're in," said auditioner Carlos Troccoli, 30, who was tall, sturdy and muscular. "I can bring that to them." [Ooh yaah! Where do I sign up?]

Ponderous pondering

I sometimes think too much (not always well, just too much). Recently, I've been thinking about my teaching philosophy. I had to sit down and think about this a month or two ago when I was prepping for a video conference job interview (didn't get the job, and, no, they didn't ask me for my teaching philosophy); however, events in the last couple of weeks at my university have had me discussing (arguing) about our programs and the university's direction.

I'd like to preface this by saying that I love the possibilities that computers and the internet have for education. I've had my own student-centered homepage for years (www.geocities.com/mbrown_ae). I've created a lot of interactive materials that I have on a department homepage. I show my students where all of this material is and I strongly encourage them to use it. HOWEVER, I don't check up on them. If they don't want to use it, that's their choice as adults.

Our new president is a business man and undoubtedly thinks like a business man, not as an educator. To be fair, some of his beliefs are not that far from some of my Korean colleagues. The thing that has struck me most is that the president seems to think that the main thing that stands in the way of us becoming a world class university is that our students don't do enough homework, so he has told our department (and presumably all departments) to assign more homework and to do it online so that the students can be tracked and given a grade based on this homework.

This will assuredly make our university a world-class one (koff, koff).

I may be remembering poorly as I sometimes do, but I don't remember my university professors gathering and marking university students' homework on a regular basis. Certainly homework was assigned and it was expected that you would read Ch.1 and come to class prepared to discuss it. We were assessed by one or two exams and by several assignments. If we didn't do the homework, we expected that we might do poorly on the exams and assignments.

Another thought is that old people who have little or no understanding of computers shouldn't be allowed to make decisions about computer use. To be sure, there is tracking software that can show if "someone" has logged in. It's possible to see what links were clicked on by "someone", but there is not necessarily a correlation between looking at something and actually studying it and learning it. (How many times have you read a couple of pages in a book to then realize that you have no idea what you read?) There is no way to be sure of what students are doing when they are out of your sight. It's hard enough to control them sometimes when they are in the same room. Even if "someone" has logged in, you can't be sure who it is. I could certainly see some enterprising young man getting a list of everyone's user names and passwords so that he could log them in for a fee. You also can't be sure that they haven't logged in and then turned on a computer game. I can just imagine some teacher looking at little Moohyun's tracking log and seeing that he spends an amazing 5 or 6 hours every night on the university website. WOW!!! Amazingly Moohyun's English isn't getting better, but he's well on his way to becoming a professional gamer.

Although I still assign homework, I've stopped grading it. I still walk around the classroom and mark who has something written on the pages I've assigned. They get one mark for doing it and nothing if it isn't done, but I'm getting increasingly uneasy about even this. I like to think that my tests and assignments reflect the students abilities. I try not to trick them. My students know what they will be assessed on and how. Homework helps, as does extra online material that I provide for them.

I don't assign much out of class writing anymore either. This bothers me a lot because I like teaching writing, and, as a student, I always wrote better outside of class than in. Now, I alternate take-home and in-class assignments. The take-home assignments are for feedback. The stuff done in class is for "big" marks.

I have disagreed on more than one occasion with colleagues about online quizzes. And, again, I feel really bad about this, but cheating is common and it is a problem. If the teachers allow it, they are disadvantaging the honest students and teaching them that only cheaters prosper.

At my university, we grade on a strict grading curve. 30% get A; 40% get B, and 30% get C or lower. Allowing a "B student" to cheat and take an A from a deserving "A student" (who gets bumped down to a B+) really bothers me.

My colleagues say that cheating isn't such a big problem and that there is no solution anyway. Sometimes I wonder if we deserve to be called a profession.

Plagiarism.org has this to say (the emphasis is mine):

A study by The Center for Academic Integrity found that almost 80% of college students admit to cheating at least once.

According to a survey by the Psychological Record 36% of undergraduates have admitted to plagiarizing written material.

A poll conducted by US News and World Reports found that 90% of students believe that cheaters are either never caught or have never been appropriately disciplined.

The State of Americans: This Generation and the Next (Free Press, July 1996) states that 58.3% of high school students let someone else copy their work in 1969, and 97.5% did so in 1989.

A national survey published in Education Week found that 54% of students admitted to plagiarizing from the internet; 74% of students admitted that at least once during the past school year they had engaged in "serious" cheating; and 47% of students believe their teachers sometimes choose to ignore students who are cheating.

Now, this article at Plagiarism.org dealt with plagiarism, but I think that people who plagiarize would not have second thoughts about cheating in other ways if they knew that they wouldn't get caught.

I found this article in The Harvard Crimson:

Problem Set Problem: Cheating

Let’s be upfront: cheating—most commonly in the insidious form of copying or other illicit collaboration—happens quite a bit at Harvard on take-home assignments...

The status quo would be acceptable, though still unattractive, if cheating were a victimless crime. But most large science classes—incidentally the places where copying on problem sets is most apt to occur—are graded on a curve. This creates a zero-sum situation, where any points people gain by cheating do not simply help them, but hurt others.

A look back

Redemption comes too late for many accused during S. Korea's red scare

This article in the International Herald Tribune was interesting because it reminded me of what it was like here in the 70's and 80's. I first came to Korea as a tourist in 1976 and then later returned in 1983 and stayed until 1986. During my first visit, Korea was controlled by a military dictator, Park Chung-hee. On my second trip, Korea was being run by another military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan. As might be expected, the government ruled with an iron hand.

At my campus in Seoul, the students demonstrated almost every day (except during exams). They went to the back gate, threw stones at the riot police, were hit with pepper bombs, and then they moved to the front gate and did the same thing. For most of the students, it didn't seem really serious. It was just something to do. By 5PM, everything stopped and returned to "normal". The demonstrations generally stayed on campus.

The riot police, armed with shotgun pepper-bomb launchers, usually fired these canisters in the air where they exploded over the students. The canisters were about 6 inches long and about 3 inches thick. They were full of powdered pepper which was irritating when it got in your eyes and nose. In some of the pictures, you can see yellowish clouds. That's the pepper bomb. It was irritating but not debilitating. It was no where nearly as strong as tear gas, which was rarely used because it was expensive and also caused fires.

I've posted some pictures that I took during one of the demonstrations. I was taking these pictures from a window in the top floor of the gymnasium. There were students playing basketball, and, when the police saw me taking pictures, they launched a pepper canister through the window beside me. It landed in the circle at center court and exploded - effectively ending play for that day. I later stopped taking pictures when the students started throwing rocks at me.

You can see the riot police in green padded uniforms with helmets and shields. They couldn't move very fast, so there were sometimes plainclothes policemen who would come onto the campus and try to catch students.

It was a very strange time. People were being arrested. Many of the student activists were living on campus because they would be arrested if they left. I can't remember the exact dates, but around '85, a student leader was killed "by accident" when the police had him bent over a tub of water and they were ducking his head under water. They "accidentally" strangled him on the edge of the tub. In early '86, partly because of this incident, things started to get a bit ugly. A student threw a molotov cocktail into one of the police buses that have wire over the windows. One police officer couldn't get out and died. The police then started firing the pepper bombs directly at the students. At least one student, took one to head and suffered serious brain damage.

I left in the middle of 1986 so I didn't see how things developed. However, the international news coverage showed demos moving off campus and becoming much more violent. I still remember watching a news program that showed riot policeman being pushed off of a highway overpass. This eventually led to Chun stepping down in 1988.

For many people, the demonstrations were ignored, and life just went on as normal. However, there was a really dark and depressing side to the military dictatorships. I think that most of us cannot imagine what it was really like.

"They tied me naked in a steel chair and attached an electric cord to my genitals," Bogwang said in his last interview. "When they threw the switch, electricity bolted through my spine and jolted my brain. It was as if my body jumped a meter off the floor."

By the time the military interrogators were done with him, Bogwang had signed a confession that he was a Communist spy...
...
On Jan. 23, a court acquitted, posthumously, eight men who were hanged in 1975 on charges of organizing a "People's Revolutionary Party," ostensibly to overthrow the government at North Korea's behest. The court found that the men were executed on the basis of confessions extracted under torture.
...

Interrogators deprived him of sleep for days and then made him sit in front of high-intensity lights, he said. They tied him to a rod like "a pig being roasted," put a wet towel over his nose and eyes, and poured water laced with mustard or pepper into his mouth.

"Such methods of torture were commonplace," said Kim Byung Jin, 51, who worked as an interpreter for interrogators at the Army Security Command. "They could make the victim say whatever they wanted him to say. Truth was irrelevant." (my emphasis)

...
"I still hear them saying to me, 'You ready? Here we go!' as they cranked up the generator to send electricity to the wire tied around my fingers," Kim said in an interview last month. "I had to admit to their nonsensical charges against me after they threatened to send my wife to a brothel and my 100-day-old son to an orphanage."

For some reason, the online article is not the fully version that was in the newspaper. The newspaper version had more information that was particularly saddening. Bogwang's family disowned him because they were afraid of what his connection to them would do to their futures. Even recently, just before his death of natural causes, his family wouldn't speak to him. I don't understand this. Most Koreans know what was done. They must realize that many of the confessions were coerced. Under torture, most people will say and do anything.

A little egg on their faces

After leak, 900 students’ SAT scores canceled

About 900 students who took the Scholastic Aptitude Test on Jan. 27 in Korea will have their scores canceled because questions were leaked ahead of time, the Educational Testing Service announced yesterday.
...
“Our investigation confirmed that the security breach only occurred in South Korea,” said Ray Nicosia, executive director of the firm’s Office of Testing Integrity, in the press release.

Exam scandals are a common occurance here. Of course, it is the students who cheat, but it is teachers and administrators who are responsible for selling the test questions. The unscrupulous people who are making money from this need a real swift kick in the ass.

For the technologically challenged

If you, like me, sometimes just don't get computer stuff, this should hit a nerve. (Thanks to a colleague for showing me this.)