Of horses and bayonets...

For those of you who missed the debate, you might be hearing Republicans shouting 'Obama compared naval ships to horses!' and other such nonsense. He didn't. He may have been patronizing to Romney in this clip (OK, so he was totally patronizing), but he did not equate horses to naval vessels. He did, however, make use of a nice rhetorical argument I've made use of myself. Romney was deriding Obama for the fact that the US Navy has fewer ships now than it had in the past. Obama's point was that we're working smarter, not harder. We don't need as many ships as we had 50, 70, 100 years ago, because now we have more high tech warships. Just take a look at the specs for the USS George HW Bush, the US's newest supercarrier. And believe me, until you've been on an aircraft carrier (and I have been on several), you have no idea of the size and scope of these floating cities of war-making. Believe me when I say that one modern supercarrier is worth a whole fleet of ships from fifty years ago. So do we need to keep the same number of ships we had back in 1916, or do we need to work smarter, not harder?
I spent two and a half years as a US federal government employee under George W. Bush. During this time the agency that hired me was transitioned out of the US Department of Defense and into a different arm of the US government, the US Office of Personnel Management. (This was done in order to route more money to the war effort.) In order to cut operating costs, the folks at OPM initially argued that we should have our workplace internet access revoked. (I should point out that our job was conducting background investigations for people getting US government security clearances. After 9/11. Under George W. Bush.) Thank the gods they came to their senses and decided that well, maybe it was OK for investigators to have internet access after all. The thing is, there was an OPM representative who was sent to our field office prior to the beginning of the transition in order to ease the process. She and I had several rather heated arguments, in which she vehemently argued that there was no need for investigators to use the internet because "the internet is just a tool, and we have plenty of other tools at our disposal - we got along fine for decades without the internet, we don't need to be wasting money on it now!" My response was always that we got along fine for centuries with horses, but she wasn't arguing that we should trade in our government vehicles for horses and buggies was she? 
Now did I just equate the internet to horses? Don't be daft. I did, however, just use the same exact type of argument the President used.

no physical harm!

A long, long time ago, back when I was 16, my friends and I had a rather bizarre and overly superstitious year. I'm not going to get into all of that here (although maybe when I finish writing The Inhumane Society I'll get back to writing The WD-40 story, which would address that year of my life in great detail), but for now I want to talk about one phrase: no physical harm. This phrase, more so than any of the other weirdness that came from that year, has stuck with me. Just ask anyone who has known me since then; I say it all the time. But what does it mean?

When I was a tenth grader, my friends and I could be rather catty. (What tenth grade girl isn't?) There was a girl that our group didn't like (I'm pretty sure there was a boy involved). One of my friends (whose house I happen to be renting currently!) was very upset with this particular girl and said something along the lines of, "I hope something really, really, really bad happens to her! Well, no physical harm." - and that afternoon the girl in question totaled her car. But she was fine.

From that point on, anytime we said anything pertaining to death or harm or danger, or did anything potentially dangerous, we would say 'no physical harm.' "Aaack! This test is going to kill me. No physical harm." "What an asshole. I could seriously kill him. No physical harm." In an airplane getting ready to take off? No physical harm! In a van passing uphill on a blind curve in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan? No physical harm! In a marshrutka on the way to Chernobyl? No physical harm! You get the picture. On facebook, this often appears as 'NPH!' tacked on to the end of posts and comments. (This of course leads to the occasional Neil Patrick Harris joke, because what else could NPH mean?)

I've wanted to get a tattoo of something since 1997. Luckily, I'm not one of those people who rushes into things, because had I gotten any of the designs I was mulling over tattooed on myself way back then, I would've ended up taking a hot iron to my body for the purpose of burning that shit off within the year. I've had lots of ideas for tattoos over the years, although none has ever really stuck. Some I simply grew out of. Other designs ended up reminding me of things I'd rather forget. Then, this past January, I had a bit of an epiphany: I would get no physical harm tattooed on myself somewhere!

Unfortunately, I was in Korea at the time. You can definitely get tattoos in Korea, although finding a reputable, quality tattoo parlor is a bit of a challenge. In Korea, tattoos are still, for the most part, seen as something sported by gangsters and criminals. There are certainly young punks and hipsters who have started to sport the odd tat here and there, but it's really not all that common. I looked online and found a couple of websites for tattoo parlors in both English and Korean, but when I say "a couple" I mean two. In a city of 18 million people. Not exactly confidence boosting - and I didn't want to end up with a Konglish rendition of my catch phrase permanently embedded on my body. So I decided to wait.

In the small southern town where I lived from March through July of this year, there are a couple of tattoo parlors... but nothing to particularly inspire confidence. If you're going to have something permanently etched into your skin, it should be done by someone who exudes confidence - and has evidence to back up his or her skill, you know? I asked friends with tattoos, and got recommendations for tattoo artists in Tallahassee and Sarasota and Savannah, but I never felt like making the drive. Then I moved to Orlando. I swear there's a tattoo parlor on every single block down here. But again - I needed to know where I could go to get a quality tattoo. Then a friend of mine from the small southern town recommended the place where he had just gotten a tattoo - and yes, he had driven all the way down to Orlando to get it: Ascension Tattoo.

I spent a lot of time over the past few months perusing their website. After totally rocking my midterms - and having a few days to rest and relax before throwing myself into the swing of studying once more - I decided it was time:

I love it! I found the folks at Ascension Tattoo to be very professional and friendly, and they did exactly what I asked. The font is 1942 Report, which is my favorite decorative font (it's the font I used on the Desolation Travel website). Also, while I was a little concerned that it would hurt (although I do have a fairly high tolerance for pain), it didn't. It felt like someone was writing on my arm with a really sharp pen - which I guess is, essentially, what they were doing - but hurt? Nah. NPH!

A short break from my studies.

I've knocked two of the three midterms down (the third is next Tuesday), and I'm just about ready to submit my conference proposal... now it's time to work on my web-post (due Monday), exam #3 (Tuesday), and my presentation (Wednesday). I figured I had enough time to run Mochi down to the dog park for a little squirrel chasing :-)

Quests for Bows and Yellow Flowers

In the area of southeast GA where my mom lives, there's a yearly event called the Fifteen Mile Yard Sale. Pretty much everyone who lives along its route has a yard sale during this event. People who don't live there drive in and set up shop along the side of the road. Food trucks sell sausage dogs and funnel cakes and hot tamales. The fifteen mile stretch of the normally sleepy two-lane is packed with cars. Yes, I drove three and a half hours to GA to attend the Fifteen Mile Yard Sale. 

Mom and I spent SIX hours yard sale-ing. It was a little insane. I even ate a sausage dog. I came away with a bunch of paperback mysteries, a lot of clothing, a picture frame shaped like a cat, a super-awesome orange purse (originally priced at $80; purchased by me for $5), and a $500 value compound hunting bow (purchased for $250). Before we started out in the morning, I had actually said that the one thing I really wanted to find was a compound bow. I'd been looking at them online and knew how much they went for, and I certainly didn't expect to find one, but whaddyaknow. I'm one step closer to being ready for the apocalypse.

That would be me, trying to look tough.
Some other pictures from my 24hr stint in GA:
This is Donnie, one of the "kittens" dumped at our land back in April. Boy has he grown - and his tail is ALWAYS up like that. I can't believe no one has adopted him :(
Mom has started getting the interior of the house sheetrocked. It is slowly coming along.
Jack O' Lanterns on mom's front porch
Oh, Georgia. Every time I go there, this sign has gotten even more ridiculous. (Also, there's been all sorts of crazy racist shit over this sign:
see here, here, here, and here.) I've already voted... and I voted for OBAMA. Take that, sign.
Meanwhile, down in the Orlando area, there's a lake called Lake Jesup. It's located just to the south of Sanford. One of my classes meets every other week at the Sanford/Lake Mary campus, and to get there I drive along the 417 (large toll-road), which crosses Lake Jesup. This past week when driving across the bridge over the lake, I noticed that the area to my right (east of the bridge) along the shore was just blanketed in gorgeous yellow flowers, which looked incredibly picturesque, especially as the fields of flowers flowed into the lake, and were dotted by palms. Apparently, this area is known for its beautiful swamp sunflowers that bloom during the last week of September and first week of October. I really wanted to make it down there to check them out while I still had the chance. I actually planned to stop off at the Lake Jesup Conservation Area on my way home from Georgia - but as I didn't roll into Orlando until after 8pm (I hadn't expected to spend six hours at a yard sale!), that didn't happen. I really needed to spend today studying (midterms start this coming week), but I figured it was now or never.
Apparently it's going to be never. I found my way to the Marl Flats entrance to the Lake Jesup Conservation Area, and began hiking in. Unfortunately, it was very, very wet. My hiking shoes were no match for being up to mid-calf in water and muck. I plowed on until I reached a spot where the actual location of the trail became impossible to discern. I didn't mind the wetness and the muck too much when I knew I was on the right track, but I wasn't going to just wade out blindly into the wetland all by my lonesome. I did find some of the swamp sunflowers, but I never made it to anywhere particularly picturesque.
The trail was flowing.

This was definitely wetland. Emphasis on wet.
You can see a few yellow flowers, but nothing like the view from the highway.
I then decided to drive to the western side of the 417, where there's a park called the Lake Jesup Park. I thought I might be able to get a decent view of the yellow flowers from over there. Instead I got a couple of decent shots of a duck and of the lake, and then found myself up to my knees in muck amongst some not-too-photogenic swamp sunflowers.
Lake Jesup


This path started out all dry and promising, but just led to a muckhole with no view. Alas.
Apparently the best way to photograph the flowers is to pull off to the side of the 417 and shoot from there - and apparently people do. I'm kind of amazed, as I opted not to do that, thinking it was to dangerous even for me. Anyway, if you'd like to see what I was unable to shoot, here are some links to the blog of a fellow who photographs these flowers every year: here, here, here, here, and here.
I'm not anticipating much posting - either here or over at The Inhumane Society - during the next two weeks or so, as I have three midterm exams to prepare for and take, a conference proposal to write, a presentation to plan and give, and a web posting to write. I'll see you on the flip side!

Analyzing research on native-speaking English teachers in Korea

Sorry for the lack of posts of late. The grad school work load finally kicked in, and I've been up to my ears in papers, projects, presentations, volunteering (required for one of my classes), and articles. One of my assignments is to read and review several published, peer-reviewed articles on a topic of my choosing. As there were no such articles on my first choice (native speaking English teachers in rural Kyrgyzstan), I went with a topic for which there is indeed published literature: native speaking English teachers in South Korea. Unfortunately, the three articles that I've analyzed thus far are nothing short of abysmal. Normally I wouldn't waste your time with information on things I've read and then rated as crap, but given that a lot of my readers  either are or have been native speaking English teachers in South Korea, I figured some of you might be interested.

The first article (and the best of the bunch so far), Globalization and native English speakers in English Program in Korea (EPIK) by Mihyon Jeon proposed to examine the perceived legitimacy of the native-speaking English teachers hired by EPIK. Jeon sought to examine the views that both the native-speaking teachers held of their legitimacy as teachers in South Korea, as well as the views that their Korean counterparts held of them, by attending an EPIK conference (at which several native-speaking teachers presented), as well as by conducting one-on-one interviews with several teachers (Korean and native speakers) and EPIK coordinators. The following four conclusions were reached:

1. While the Korean government places emphasis on the importance of the native English speaking teachers hired by EPIK, Korean English teachers and students often do not view EPIK’s native speaking English teachers as important. 

2. Korean teachers often did not have either time or desire to work closely with the native speaking teachers.

3. Native speaking teachers did not feel that they had been fully integrated into the school curriculum, resulting in feelings of isolation and marginalization.

4. Native speaking teachers felt as though they were valued for their "entertainment value" (with several teachers describing themselves as "performing monkeys"), as opposed to their work as educators.

5. Classroom management problems presented a great difficulty to EPIK teachers, as students did not consider them to be real teachers, and therefore did not respond to them as such.

The sample size for this study met the minimum threshold for being considered generalizable in terms of the number of native English speaking EPIK employees; however, the number of Koreans sampled did not meet the criteria for generalizability.

The second, and certainly the most absurd of the three articles, was Global fatigue: Transnational markets, linguistic capital, and Korean-American male English teachers in South Korea by Songpae Cho. The purpose of this article was to examine the reasons why Korean-American males move to South Korea for the purpose of teaching English, to examine their perceptions of their value in South Korea, and to examine the views that South Koreans hold of them.

The "study" (if you can call it that) featured a series of interviews conducted by the author with his coworkers, an individual that he "met in the elevator" and another whom he described as "an Apgujeong matron" - hardly a representative sample by any stretch of the imagination. The results of this study were as follows:

1. Korean-American males come to South Korea "on a whim" often with no teaching experience. (I'd say the same can be said of most native-speaking English teachers in South Korea, although like this article, I have no actual research to back up my statement.)

2. Korean-American males remain in South Korea longer than their female counterparts due to their perceived desirability in the Korean patriarchal society. Cho basically says that Korean-American males are more valued sexually in Korea than in the US due to their elite status as American English speakers, and the fact that Korean males are at the top of the food chain in Korea (while they’re emasculated in American culture). 

3. Koreans are suspicious of Korean-American male English teachers, wondering if perhaps they did something wrong in the United States, leading them to seek work overseas. (As far as I can tell, the only person who expressed this view was the aforementioned "Apgujeong matron.")

4. Koreans think that Korean-Americans do not speak English as well as white Americans.

5. Korean-American males become anxious both about staying in Korea (due to the above two reasons) and about returning to the United States, due to “the fear of getting older and becoming less marketable in the U.S.” 

I think my favorite part of this article was its repeated use of the term "English prostitute." One of Cho's interviewees described himself as feeling rather like an "English prostitute" - and then Cho went on to use this analogy several more times in the paper, even though doing so was totally unnecessary. 

The third article, The novice, the native, and the nature of language teacher expertise by Ji-eun Shin and David Kellogg, was the only article to involve a statistical study. Unfortunately, out of the thousands of native and non-native English teachers on the Korean peninsula, the study focused on one native and three non-native English speaking teachers. If you need a minimum of one percent of the population (in this case the native English teacher and non-native English teacher populations) to achieve generalizability, what is even the point of conducting research that is so far below the generalizability threshold that it's not even funny? When you consider that a lot of work actually went into this pointless study, the mind boggles. 

The purpose of this article was to quantitatively analyze and compare the teaching talk of native English speaking teachers and non-native English speaking teachers, as well as to compare the amount of English spoken by students in classes taught by native and non-native English teachers. The one native speaking English teacher chosen for this study had neither studied education nor worked as a teacher prior to coming to Korea at the beginning of the study. In contrast, the three Korean English teachers chosen all had education degrees and two to five years teaching experience. One of the three Korean teachers was also Ji-eun Shin, one of the authors of this study.

Fourteen classes over a six month period were recorded, transcribed, and statistically analyzed to look for various things such as number of times each teacher spoke, complexity of their utterances, grammatical structure/correctness, and amount of English/Korean spoken by students in class. Well, in this one native speaking English teacher's class, Korean was spoken more, she spoke English less, and she had more grammatical errors than her Korean counterparts. The authors then attempt to generalize their results, because obviously this shows that Koreans are better English teachers than native speakers! Dude, really? Have you seen your sample size?

Looking for a Mochi of your own?

No, really. There's a female dog at Miami-Dade Animal Services (a high-kill shelter) in South Florida that looks so much like Mochi that it's heart breaking. (She must be about half his size though, since she only weighs 7lbs and he weighs 18lbs!) You don't need to be in Florida to adopt, and transport is available!

Peppy, approx 2 yrs old, 7lbs, female Interested? Contact Miami-Dade Animal Services
7401 NW 74th St, Miami, FL Phone: 305-884-1101 Email: pets@miamidade.gov

Downey Dog Park update #2

The dog park has re-opened. I'm not sure that this is public knowledge though, as we were there at 4pm on a Friday (typically a popular dog-park time), and Mochi and I were the only ones there (other than some rather brazen squirrels). There are, however, a few kinks in the system that still need to be worked out. For one thing, when you enter through the main Lake Downey Park entrance on Flowers Avenue, there are still two very large signs - one which says 'No Pets' and another which says that the entrance to the dog park is over on East Colonial. However, as I mentioned the other day, the entrance to the dog park has moved to inside the main Lake Downey Park... somebody just forgot to change out the signs. Note: you can also park in the original dog park parking lot, and walk to the corner of Colonial and Dean where there is a pedestrian entrance into the park if you don't want to drive all the way around to Flowers Ave.

The new entrance is to the north-west of the volleyball court.

Even parking as close as one can get to the dog park (over by the skate park area), one still has to walk one's dog quite a ways through the picnicking area of Lake Downey Park. I wonder if the relocation of the dog-park gate signals that soon the ban on pets in the other parts of the park will be lifted? As it is, there will definitely be doggies walking around the northern part of the picnicking area.

That's my car as seen from the new gate to the dog park. That's a long stretch of 'no pets allowed' park we're all going to be walking through!
Additionally, there is now a new 'small dog' section over on the west side of the park next to the skate park. Like the original small dog section, it can be entered directly through the new entrance - and unfortunately, like the original, it doesn't have a doggy water fountain. Oddly enough the original small dog section still exists; however, it can only be reached by walking your small dog through the entire length of the large dog section - so I'm guessing  it's not going to get much use.
The squirrels in the park today were behaving quite absurdly.
This one kept teasing Mochi.