Beyond School

Just a note to say my wife and I are going to an Extensive Reading conference for a working weekend in a resort area a couple hours south of Seoul. I hear there are hot springs, which sound good this cold week.

So Happy Thanksgiving and see you on the other side. Enjoy the live puppycam while I’m gone

Free TV : Ustream

A reader last week mentioned this “Wordling Political Speeches” as a NYTimes lesson plan, so I Wordled McCain’s stump speech in Colorado this week.

I thought I’d have fun with it by turning it into an open thread for readers to play with.

Here are the rules:

Write your own caption in the comment thread, based only on words in the image (click image for larger view). I’ll select the winner and add the caption, with credit, in a couple days.

Example:

“Applause: McCain people going Obama.”

There are zingers galore in here, but I hope you’ll have fun with them, so I’ll leave the pickings to you. Please lighten your day and ours with a laugh.

[Update: And the winner is: one very creative Vincent Robleto, whose Kerblotto blog screams "Subscribe" for its verbal and graphic wit and creativity. Really, check it out. (And Vince, I can only imagine how honored you must feel, considering the vast field of competition you edged out for this award. ) Thanks for playing to both you, Diane, and the thousands of others!]

My Australian friend John Larkin privately advised me to share some slices of Korean life in this space, and when John talks, I listen.¹

So here are a couple of videos from a very creative trio of English teachers here in the greater Seoul area. I’m too old and too married to have their sort of life, so I’m happy for the chance to live it vicariously through their songs and videos. They’re wonderfully creative and thoroughly whacked – and they do a fine job of getting close to the line without crossing it.

Enjoy:

1. Even if I don’t always answer. [↩]

This is just hilarious, and a brilliant idea at the same time: taking the Wasilla Town Meeting minutes (Sarah Palin presiding), and turning them into a one-man drama performance. Do yourself a favor and laugh as you learn about the extent of this woman’s experience, and worse yet, her leadership style.

Oh yes.

Thomas Friedman, author and saint of the edublogosphere¹ for his book, The World is Flat, now flattens shameless dimwit and aspiring 2012 Cheerleader-in-Chief Sarah Palin with this steamroller of an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times.

A taste:

Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel. But given the huge attention she is getting, you can’t just ignore what she has to say. And there was one thing she said in the debate with Joe Biden that really sticks in my craw. It was when she turned to Biden and declared: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”

What an awful statement. Palin defended the government’s $700 billion rescue plan. She defended the surge in Iraq, where her own son is now serving. She defended sending more troops to Afghanistan. And yet, at the same time, she declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic. [read on]

You have to wonder how Palin will react to this. She distorted the NYTimes non-smear piece on Obama and Ayres’ superficial connection, after all, to smear Obama to the degree that McCain/Palin crowds are yelling “treason,” “kill him,” “off with his head,” and hurling the N-word in right-wing racist hate-fests.

But now that the Times is openly smearing her, she’ll surely dismiss it as that gosh-darned mainstream media filter playing “gotcha journalism.”

Don’t miss Friedman’s comparison of Palin’s “energy expertise” with that of the King of Saudi Arabia at the end of the column. Priceless honesty.

1. though, because of Friedman’s “Hey Iraq: Suck. On. This.” stupidity – never mind that Iraq was not Al Qaeda – I’ll worship elsewhere, thanks [↩]

Nothing sadder than a sick joke that’s true. Adennack’s brilliant flowchart below is not an exaggeration of Palin’s approach when non-answering Gwen Ifill’s debate questions:¹

If you’re as disgusted as I am that the media is calling this insult to democracy and intelligence a “passed test” on Palin’s part (and Ifill miserably failed my test for quality debate questions), post it, spread it, make it viral.

No, wait. I changed my mind. I want a Vice President who blows kisses to world audiences at grave political moments like she did before the debate. I want sage political wisdom from the bleachers of the hockey rink.

I suspect living in Rome c. 425 must have felt like this. Uncanny.

1. here’s hoping Katie Couric, the only interviewer with the guts to ask a follow-up, moderates in 2012 [↩]

A little ice-breaker after my fear-frozen last post: CollegeHumor.com also found noteworthy Matt Damon’s comments about Palin leading the US government and military. But they had fun with it, bless ‘em. Enjoy (and h/t to Crooks and Liars).

(And on an educational note, if any of you have student films that so creatively comment on history or current affairs, feel free to drop a link to them in the comment thread. I’d love to see students given the freedom to make this kind of commentary in the classroom.)

[I can't write about Gilgamesh right now. The funeral needs time to recede into the past before things here are stable enough for that type of writing. What I want to write about now is the weirdness of being an American abroad - a "stupid foreigner" - for the last 12 years. Don't worry, it's not bitter. It's funny to me, and an interesting window into the hazards of cross-cultural living.]

Don DeLillo wrote in some novel or other about how world travelers are, by the very nature of being an outsider bumbling through strange daily transactions the natives find normal, largely forgiven by the locals for being “stupid foreigners.”  DeLillo’s term was different, and his paragraph about this reality was typically smart and droll, but I’ve forgotten his term and long since lost or sold the book.  Personal libraries tend to lose weight when you have to pay for their transport from country to country. And since most fiction is always available (and who am I kidding? I won’t re-read most novels anyway), novels are the first to be tossed.

Anyway, I adopted the “stupid foreigner” nickname a couple of years ago here in Korea because DeLillo kept coming to mind every hour or two as I bumbled through one faux pas or another. Like the morning I took the elevator down to the parking garage for my daily drive to work, and discovered someone had parked behind my car and blocked me in, making me late to work. I honked, called out, got increasingly angry at the insensitive jerk who would do such a thing. Discovering the car was in neutral ten minutes later didn’t cool my temper. I pushed the car back a few meters, got in my car, and as I backed out, expressed my disapproval not by kicking a dent in the car or breaking a window, both of which crossed my mind, embarrassingly enough, but they would have crossed yours too (we’ve all got an Id) – but by instead resorting to a civilized revenge, in my book, which would only inconvenience the offender in rough proportionality to his/her offense of me.

I spat on the car several times, aiming particularly for the driver’s window and windshield. You’ve never seen a grown man spit with such passion.

When I arrived late to work, I saw the (Korean) business manager of the school, told him the story of the shocking offender and how angry I was, and he said: “No, that’s the Korean way. We don’t have enough parking here, so we leave our cars in neutral so people can push them out of the way.”

I wish my school would have told me that during orientation week for new hires.  And if you’re Korean and drive a black four-door Sonata, I really am sorry. I try not to be an Ugly American, but it’s almost impossible to avoid being a Stupid Foreigner sometimes.

And I owe you a car wash.

End of stupid foreigner story one.

[In my Web Legacies Wrap-Up post, I said I'd decided against publishing the ninth and tenth "Culture Clip" pieces I wrote that summer in Spain a few years ago. I changed my mind.  I didn't like the Vet piece, but readers seemed to, more than they did the ones I preferred over it (to which replied one cricket): Shirky's "publish, then filter" principle in action.

I'm equally unhappy with the piece below, but not so much because of the idea as of the writing, which just seems to miss. But in the spirit of Shirky, and of "fluff and fun," here it is anyway. Since the readership on this space is international, I'd be curious to hear any multi-cultural testimonies to the travel habits of your own countries. Are they similarly "blind"?]

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Artifact: International Boarding Passes
Dates: 1998-present
Elements of Culture: Ethics; Traditions; Surface Cultures

Am I the only person who has noticed how easy, perhaps even normal, it is for us to travel or live in other countries—and never see them? Or worse yet, to confirm in our travels our stereotypes of the places we visit, because . . . those stereotypes were what we looked for in the surface culture in the first place?

We go to China, for example, and choose to experience it how? By lodging in Western hotels and taking tours designed for herds of Western tourists.

And am I crazy, or are the locals at the tourist shops strangely savvy at knowing what stereotypes we Westerners hold about them? In Mexico, for example, you can find, at any tourist market, shop upon shop in which the merchants, who look as if they’d never seen or worn a sombrero in their life, sell dolls and puppets of Mexicans wearing nothing but sombreros!

The more I think about it, the more absurd it is:

1. I go to Mexico to explore a different culture;
2. I want a souvenir to commemorate that exploration;
3. My stereotype defines what is most distinctive or essential about Mexico;
4. so I buy a puppet in a sombrero playing mariachi (and looking faintly drunk?); that

A Mexico of the Mind?

5. doesn’t represent a single Mexican I’ve seen in Mexico (outside of the tourist restaurants that hire depressed Mexican musicians to dress like Disney Mexicans from an American’s childhood memories); but
6. must have some truth in it because why else would the Mexicans themselves sell them? when really
7. they sell them because that’s what these crazy Americans always get off the plane/out of the tourist bus and ask for; so
8. back goes the American to America with his drunk, sombrero-wearing mariachi-playing puppet, where
9. s/he puts it on the shelf to collect dust; and
10. show it to the kids/grandkids/neighbors/etc who
11. years later go to Mexico and
12. remember that damn puppet and
13. return to 3), above.

(–ad infinitum and ad-freaking-nauseum. I’ll never shop again.)

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Photos: blind distortion by bashed; mexican puppets by abhijit

"Go, Tom, Go" (Clay, 2d from left, joins Redskin Cheerleaders to cheer Tom's latest post)

Look, I know I plug Tom a lot on this space, but it’s because he can make me laugh at the madness of public schooling like nobody else.  Ever since discovering Nietzsche 20 years ago, I’ve sided with laughter over solemnity, with gods that can and do dance over those that can’t or won’t.

Here’s Tom’s latest dance: “Do It the Right Way, not the Wong Way.” Send it to any first-year teacher who’s been force-fed Wong’s First Days of School.

It’s not unusual to be smart. It’s not unusual to be funny. But to be smart and funny? Not so easy. That’s why I like this guy.

–that, and that my heart goes out to any NY liberal transplanted to teach in a small Southern town in Virginia – Camp Joy territory in spirit, if not geography.  There should be a sitcom.

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Photo: littlerottenrobin