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Homework for Thursday Morning

Your homework for Thursday morning is as follows:

  1. Draft a paragraph on one of the three topics we chose this morning. Your paragraph should include a strong argument about some aspect of the topic. Type it, proofread it, and bring two copies to class.
  2. Download Sook Jung’s essay (which will be added to this post when I receive it), print it, and read it several times, taking notes. We will have an in-class critique workshop on Thursday morning, and everyone will be expected to talk about four things:
    1. What the essay is about, or what the essay is “doing.”
    2. What’s working well in the essay, and other strengths.
    3. What could be improved, what isn’t working well, and other weaknesses.
    4. Your one suggestion for improving the essay — what you would do if this essay were yours and you wanted to make it better.

See you Thursday! And remember: Sook Jung’s essay will be online by Wednesday morning. Also — remember that you will need to DISCUSS her essay in Thursday’s class. That means you need to have read it and prepared some comments before class. If I catch you reading the essay for the first time in class, it will have a detrimental effect on your final mark.

UPDATE: Here is Sook Jung’s essay, which you need to read and be ready to discuss  for Thursday’s Morning Crit Circle:

Sook Jung’s Essay (PDF)

See you then!

The Missing Page

Hi there!

I finally got the scanner to work! Long story…

Anyway, here’s the missing page from “The Lamp at Noon.”

The Lamp At Noon (PDF)

If the PDF is hard to read, try the (big!) JPG file below:

The Lamp At Noon (JPG)

Sorry it’s so late! This Tuesday, we’ll discuss this story some more, and we’ll also discuss your essays. Thursday, we’ll talk about “Corporal Colin Sterling…” and I’ll hand out some more reading this week so we have stuff to talk about for next week!

See you soon!

Scanner Messed Up

Hi there,

I’m fighting my scanner –  something bad happened to it, I think — and so I am still trying to scan those pages from the story for you. In the meantime, I promised I’d post about your essay homework, so here is the information:

Our class will not have a midterm exam. Instead, we will have a midterm essay. The midterm essay is due on the Tuesday of Week 9, which I believe is October 28th.

Your essay should discuss the depiction of some “minority,” “foreign,” or “immigrant” group in a film from your own culture (or language). That is, if you are Korean, you should look at a Korean film, and if you are Taiwanese, you should look at a Taiwanese film (or, if you can’t find one appropriate, then a Chinese-language film).

I discussed one example in class, which is the movie 괴물 (The Host). I talked about how we could discuss why there are so many Americans and some Southeast Asians in the movie, and why they are significant characters in the film, as well as what their specific actions, behaviour, and clothing tell us about the characters and about their social significance.

Other examples I mentioned were ê³ ì–‘ì?´ë¥¼ 부íƒ?í•´ (Take Care of My Cat) which has some Chinese-Koreans as major characters (and I think also has a brief appearance by Southeast Asian immigrants). Another example I mentioned was the Korean SF film Yesterday (the title is the same in Korean) which has some Chinese immigrant workers/criminals in it. Another great example is 삼거리극장 (The Midnight Ballad for the Ghost Theater)  — you can get a glance at the ghost in the background of that video, or in this trailer — which has several ghosts; one of them is the ghost of a Japanese soldier. I know two more examples: one is the film Welcome to Dongmakgol (the title, again, is the same in Korean) which features several American characters, and an old 1970s film called Woman Detective Mary (ì—¬ìž? 형사 마리) which depicts foreign men in some shocking ways, and also seems to depict Hong Kong drug smugglers in Seoul in 1975.

A few pointers:

Your essay should be

  1. in English,
  2. approximately 2000 words,
  3. formatted appropriately (ie. 12-point Courier New font, double-spaced, 1-inch (2.5 cm) margins, page numbers, your name and the title in the header

Two last notes:

DO NOT COME TO CLASS LATE. I know some of you won’t be ready to hand it in at the beginning of class. It’s better you put it in my mailbox at 8pm than for you to come to class late to hand in your essay. I will accept the essay anytime on October 28th, so don’t miss classtime to print it out.

And DO NOT PUT OFF THIS ESSAY! You won’t be able to do any writing during exam week, so you really should start on this essay now.

I’ll try find a good example essay on depiction for you to check out soon, and keep working on getting my scanner to work today.

Essay Topics

Here is the best essay topic pitched by each student. Some of them I can only accept if you come talk to me. Some of you will be able to choose out of two that I thought were equally good. I will markboth cases  clearly. If you have this marking, make sure you come and talk to me during my office hours. Otherwise, you are free to visit my office if you like, but are not required.

If I’ve missed you, please email me and I’ll make sure to post your topic soon!

Homework Update

Hi there,

As I announced  on Thursday, there will be no class on Tuesday, because I will be at a conference. We will next meet on Thursday, Sept. 25th.

Until then, your homework is to do two things:

  1. Write me a 500-word essay on the kinds of problems or tensions that we can expect to see in a suddenly multicultural society. Try to think from both a Central and a Peripheral perspective– that is, as a member of some kind of majority, and as a member of some kind of minority. (ie. consider the problem from both sides: people with more power, and people with less power.)
  2. Prepare to discuss “The Lamp at Noon” by Sinclair Ross.

In addition, please review this post. Some of you have sent me .doc and .hwp files. It seems you haven’t carefully reviewed the homework I assigned for Thursday. Please click this link and reread the post there carefully. You must email me an .srt file as soon as possible! There is a link to .srt making software there. The timing doesn’t need to be perfect, just close, but you do need to set up the timing. Work with your group to make the job easier.

Have a great week!

Characters and Scenes Homework, Plus Tongue Surgery Video

Folks,

I won’t be meeting with you on Monday,  because I’ll be at a conference, as I mentioned. We’ll have a make-up class sometime later on during the semester. However, I still expect you to meet and put together your ideas from the work you’ll do this weekend!

For this week, your homework is to  sketch out some ideas for the characters in this story. You also should make a list of scenes you want to include. Don’t try toarrange them into a plot yet, we can do that later. For now, think about what we talked about and make a list of scenes you want to include — something happening to a character, a character making this or that decision, and so on. For example, for The Matrix:

The scenes don’t need to be in order, we just need to know which scenes we want to work with. Next week, we’ll arrange them into a plotline, drop some scenes, add others, and then you can start working on a script!
Someone mentioned wanting to raise the issue of tongue-lengthening surgery. This video has a pretty vivid depiction of it. Please click through and watch it, because I cannot embed the video here. It also has a good look at English camps, which you might or might not want to discuss briefly in “Goose Dad.”

There are other videos about Tongue Surgery on Youtube, too:

Tongue surgery, by the way, is a legitimate operation, just not for the reasons it’s usually performed in Korea. The comments to the video above explain this well:

A lingual frenectomy is a form of frenectomy associated with the tongue.The removal of the lingual frenulum under the tongue can be accomplished with either frenectomy or frenuloplasty. This is used to treat a tongue tied patient. Immediately after this minor oral surgery, the tongue can often dramatically extend out of the mouth which it could not do before. This can help reduce breastfeeding complications, help improve speech and promote proper tooth arch development.

Frenectomy has become popular in South Korea in order to lengthen normal children’s tongues by about 1 mm so they can speak English better.[1] Critics regard the surgery as unnecessary, as Koreans born in the United States have no trouble distinguishing r and l.[2]

[edit] References 1. ^ Domenico Marceri, “English in France? Mais Oui!” Seoul Times, 2005.
2. ^ Demick, Barbara. “A snip of the tongue and English is yours!” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2002.

The following is a terrible video, but a pretty good explanation of why some babies need to have a tongue surgery (after the first minute or two where they joke about ancient religious tongue surgery). It’s mostly to do with development of their palate and their ability to breathe.

Moving on

Hi there. I’ll be adding a grid to this site soon, so that students can see how they’re doing on the tracking system for tasks in this course. Some of you have completed Task 1, some of you have not.

For students who didn’t leave before the end of class on Wednesday, and participated in the exercise of meeting your classmates, you must submit your written notes about who you met (and something interesting about them) on Wednesday.

We will not be having class on Monday, as I announced at class, because I will be at a conference. We’ll hold a make-up class sometime later.

Responding to Nora Ephron

Your homework for the week is a 500-word response to Nora Ephron. Well, not a “response” but an essay in the style she used, writing about a similar theme: the awkwardness of adolescence or puberty.

Your essay may be read by classmates, so consider this carefully when you choose your specific topic. Try to think about your audience, and consider both your sympathetic and unsympathetic audience.

The three formatting issues I mentioned as most important are these:

The other formatting issues you should consider are discussed here.
Finally, I mentioned two free wordprocessors with spell check and modern formatting capability: Abiword and OpenOffice.

This essay is due at the beginning of class on Thursday, Sept. 25th. We will not be meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 23rd. Have a nice weekend!

The Pitch

Alright, everyone, I promised an example of a pitch. Some people emailed with questions so I’ll try make it clear what you need to do:

Pitch three (3) essay topics to me in writing next Thursday (Sept. 18).

A pitch is really a proposal, specifically containing:

Here’s an example pitch for one essay:

Topic: Soybean Paste Girls

This essay will deal with a (somewhat) new idea in Korean society, the “Soybean Paste Girl.” The essay will not focus on women who are called this term, but instead will discuss this stereotype in comparison to other female (and male) stereotypes in Korean popular culture, past and present alike. I want readers to learn about how pop culture is affected by politics and consumer culture, and to teach readers to think carefully about why we use the insults we do. I think by exploring this idea — which I consider sexist and a response to changes in Korean consumer culture today — my readers can be more aware of the sexism that underlies the term. My angle will be to analyze the images (especially webcomics) used online to describe “Soybean Paste Girls” and explain why the insult is related to anxieties about new-styled younger female consumer culture.

That’s a bit heavy… well, it’s an essay I’m working on myself, in fact! But it should give you some idea of the kind of thing I’m looking for. You should have a pretty good idea about what kind of essay you want to write, once you’ve written your pitch.

Remember, you need to pitch three (3) articles to me this Thursday! Get cracking!

The Discussion Board You Should Join

Just in case you’ve forgotten, the Discussion Board for this class is located here. Go apply for a membership: I should get around to approving your application in a day or two!

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